Secrets of Power Negotiating summary

Asking for a better deal than you expect to receive is crucial to negotiating a favorable outcome in a sales transaction – but the applications of the gambit go well beyond that. 

Besides using the gambit in negotiating any deal that involves money, such as a raise, you can also use it for other, nonmonetary aspects of a deal. For instance, if you’re buying a piece of real estate, you might request an unrealistically large number of revisions to the paperwork, under the expectation that only a fraction of them will be accepted by the seller. 

As you’ve probably gathered, power negotiating involves a fair amount of bluffing. You don’t really expect to buy that $10,000 second-hand boat for $5,000; you’re just using that offer as a way of widening your negotiating range and bracketing your target price of $7,500. Moreover, the owner isn’t actually reluctant to sell his boat; he’s just putting on an act so you’ll make a better offer. 

The same is true of another beginning gambit: flinching. To continue with the same example, when the boat owner proposes his initial sale price of $10,000, you should act visibly shocked that he would propose such a number – even if it’s entirely reasonable! If you’re a good enough performer (and the owner is a bad enough negotiator), he might respond by immediately lowering his asking price. Even if you don’t get that lucky, you’re still communicating that the price is unacceptable to you in a way that’s much more convincing than words alone. 

We’re now going to look at one last beginning gambit – but it’s certainly not the least important. Indeed, it represents one of the cardinal rules of power negotiating: never accept the other side’s initial offer. 

If you’re buying or selling something and the other person is the first party to propose a price, the rationale here is obvious: you could get a better price by making a counteroffer and negotiating further. But what if you’re the one receiving an initial counteroffer? And what if it seems like a great deal? Your inclination might be to pounce on it. 

We now come to the middle phase of negotiation. At this point, you’ll have used your beginning gambits to establish a negotiating range that’s favorable to you. Now it’s time for you and your counterpart to start moving closer to each other, to try to converge on a deal. 

If it’s a price you’re trying to agree upon in a sales transaction, the buyer will attempt to get the seller to come down, and the seller will attempt to get the buyer to come up. One party has already made an initial offer, the other has made an initial counteroffer, and now the two of you start making further counteroffers back and forth. 

As we’ve seen, the middle phase of a negotiation is all about making shrewd concessions. You’re giving up ground to the other party, but you’re being careful not to give up too much too quickly. You’re also insisting that they give up an equal, if not greater, amount of ground in response. 

This brings us to one of the keys to success in the middle-phase of negotiation: the trade-off gambit. It boils down to a rule: never make a concession without asking for one in return. For example, imagine you’re selling a house, and the buyer asks if she can move some furniture into the garage before taking ownership of the property. Now, even if the garage is empty and you couldn’t care less about it, you don’t want to give away this concession without requesting a trade-off. 

Imagine you’re a salesperson for a midsize paper company, and you’re working out a deal with a client. In the middle of the negotiation, she asks you to make a significant concession: adding expedited shipping to her large order of paper supplies. Knowing about the trade-off gambit, you ask her what she can give you in return. But then comes her cold, hard response: “nothing.” 

It seems like you’ve reached a dead end. What do you do? 

Let’s say you’re in the middle of a sales negotiation, and you’ve pulled out all the stops. You’ve flinched, bracketed, invoked a higher authority – you name it; you’ve tried it, but nothing is working. Your client is still insisting on free expedited delivery for her order of office paper. Now it seems like the negotiation has truly hit a wall. How do you break through it?  

If you’re really stuck, one option is to bring in a third party to provide a fresh perspective and propose a new solution. This could be a neutral third party, like a professional mediator or arbitrator. But it could also just be someone who can play the role of intermediary – even if he’s technically on your side. For example, as a salesperson, you might call in your manager. 

There’s no shame in calling in an arbitrator or walking away from a stalled-out negotiation. If it has to happen, it has to happen. But before you take one of these more drastic measures, there are a couple of less dramatic tactics you should try out.

The first is to shake things up. There are many ways to do this, depending on the situation. You could change the setting of the negotiation by suggesting you continue the conversation over dinner. You could lighten the mood by talking about your hobbies or some juicy industry gossip. You could bring in some fresh energy by switching up the members of your negotiating team. Whatever you do, the point is simply to thaw the ice and keep the flame of the negotiation alive. 

The more time and energy we invest into an enterprise, the less we want it to go to waste. The more we think of something as being ours, the less we want to let go of it. And the more we feel ourselves nearing the finish line, the less we want to stumble in the final stretch. 

In the end phase of negotiation, the set-aside gambit takes advantage of these psychological foibles – using them to pressure the other side into making a concession they might not otherwise make. This is the same for the next gambit we’re going to look at: nibbling. 

Just like nibbling, the next end-phase gambit we’re going to look at also takes advantage of the fact that people don’t like to lose things they’ve already come to think of as being theirs. It’s a risky but powerful way to bring the end phase of a negotiation to a close when the other side is being stubborn and trying to push their luck too far. 

If you find yourself in such a situation, you can try withdrawing an offer. To understand how it works, imagine you’re a salesperson in the end phase of a negotiation over an order of widgets. Your initial offer was $2.00 per widget; the buyer’s initial counteroffer was $1.50. After a lot of back and forth, you come down to $1.75, and it seems like the buyer is ready to settle on this price. But then he gets a little greedy. After all, he figures, if you were willing to come down by $0.25, surely he can squeeze one more cent out of you. So he starts insisting on $1.74. 

From asking for more than you expect to receive to withdrawing an offer under made-up pretenses, there’s a fair amount of trickery involved in many of the negotiating gambits we’ve been exploring. If this has left a sour taste in your mouth, you’re in luck: the last gambit we’re going to look at allows you to end a negotiation on a sweeter note. 

Let’s start with the general scenario in which you’d use it. Imagine you’ve been using all of the gambits you’ve learned in these blinks, and you’ve been doing really well in your negotiation – in fact, you’ve been doing a little too well. You’ve gotten the other side to make so many concessions that he’s feeling pretty beat at this point. He’s almost ready to reach an agreement with you, but there’s one last thing standing in the way: his pride. He just doesn’t want to admit defeat, and needs a way to save face.