For a long time, negotiation meant one thing to me: you offer something, and they answer “yes” or “no.” I knew how to offer. I simply didn’t see the other two halves: how to persuade my own people so that they hear the right idea, and how to say “no” where saying it is awkward.
I paid for this not with nerves but with money and nerves.
This part is about negotiation in the broad sense: not only what to say to a client, but also how to be persuasive inside the company and how to hold your boundaries.
Insight №49. Win-win without paper is just a mood
The idea of “win-win” sounds so good that it feels awkward to argue with it. If the goal is for everyone to feel good, the fastest thing to reach is a “yes,” and a “yes” at any price is almost always paid for by the one who was in a hurry.
Here is how it looked for us. We were using a partner’s platform to manage marketing and were ready to pay him a commission. He refused: the cooperation already seemed mutually beneficial. We brought him one client, then a second, a third, a fourth — and then he contacted them directly and explained that we had been misleading them all along by using someone else’s work. The clients believed him, not us: people tend to believe whoever speaks loudly and convincingly. I estimated the damage at roughly 30 million.
Today I see two signals in this story that I missed back then. A person who refuses money for his part most likely doesn’t want obligations. And everything rested on the word “mutually beneficial,” which protects nothing. Until it is written down who gets what, what is forbidden and what happens in case of a breach, mutual benefit is a mood, not a condition.
Hence the rule I took away: never run 100% of your budget and clients through a single partner. Fisher and Ury in “Getting to Yes” (1981) called this BATNA — the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Without it, the word “no” is worth nothing: you can only say it for real to someone you can do without.
Insight №50. Need loses before you sit down at the table
In a negotiation you must not need this deal. As soon as need appears, you lose control and start making bad decisions, and any experienced opponent can sense it.
Need looks different in different people, most often like talkativeness. When I need approval, I start explaining, justifying and piling up arguments nobody asked for. Jim Camp, in “Start with No,” gives the example of an insurance agent who could not speak and communicated with clients using a marker on a whiteboard. He wrote not speeches but questions, and was one of the most effective agents Camp had ever seen. It is hard to show need when you are slowly writing a question on a board.
On the whole, I have worked out a formula for myself: speak 20% less than everyone else, listen as if the other person were alone in the room, and pause before answering. Where exactly 20% comes from, I don’t know, but the mechanics are right: whoever has nothing to prove speaks less.
PS: right now I am looking for a job, and these are ideal conditions for need: every recruiter’s reply feels like salvation. One thing helps — keeping several conversations going in parallel, so that none of them is the only one.
Insight №51. Don’t rescue your opponent, or your business partner
A client we had worked with for quite a long time without a single problem asked for an installment plan. We agreed. It turned out that his management had changed, and we had to plug the hole with the company’s money: a cash gap of about 8 million appeared. It was not the only cause of that crisis, but it was the one that turned a nuisance into a chain: after it, business lines began to fall and employees began to quit.
I was rescuing my opponent. By agreeing to take a long-standing client’s situation into account, I started to be partly responsible for his decisions, and when something goes wrong, the one who rescued gets the blame. I thought I was protecting the relationship. In business, what is needed is respect and effectiveness, not friendship, and friendship grows out of long, good work, not the other way round.
This is about the US Senate hearing of June 18, 2024: Senator Josh Hawley reminded Boeing’s chief Dave Calhoun that over the previous year he had received 32.8 million dollars, 45% more than the year before. Calhoun replied: “That’s a big number.” The author of the analysis believes the senator spoke too softly and abstractly, with “I hope,” “I would like” and “maybe,” and an experienced executive recognizes that at once. I won’t judge how fair this is to the senator, but the scheme is a good one. A tough conversation, in the author’s view, looks different: name the exact sum and the exact date, name by what percentage you will raise employees’ salaries, and say what exactly you will do if it doesn’t happen.
From this scheme and from my story came three questions for any installment plan, deferral and “we’ll pay next week”: how much, when exactly, and what happens if not. The third question is the most unpleasant and the most important: the consequence must be something I am truly ready to do, not a threat for the sake of atmosphere. An installment plan without these three answers is not an agreement but a gift.
Insight №52. Three rules for a fight — and why they are not for the long game
One of my notes holds three rules from Donald Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal”: “The world is a mess, attack, attack and attack,” “There is no truth, deny everything, say what you consider to be the truth and present exactly that,” “Claim victory, even if you lost.” In open sources they are attributed to the lawyer Roy Cohn, who taught them to the young Donald Trump, and that is exactly how they were shown in the film “The Apprentice” (2024).
Do they work? In a one-on-one fight in front of a loud audience — yes. Remember the story with the partner: he spoke first, loudly and confidently, and the clients believed him. But that is exactly why arguing with such a person on his own field is pointless: to justify yourself is to accept his frame, to explode is to play by his script. A calm counter-question and terms fixed on paper in advance work better.
In the long game, where you have clients, a team and partners, these three rules destroy the one asset that cannot be bought: the trust with which people are ready to listen to you.
Insight №53. Truth without persuasiveness is not heard
If I say that I knew quite a few capable specialists who said the right things, but the team didn’t listen to them and made wrong decisions, I would not be entirely honest. It is more accurate to say: thinking only about the collective result, I often lose arguments to loud people, even though I am telling the truth. The point is not that the team is stupid: it is not enough to have the right idea, you have to be able to get it across.
Numbers instead of judgments. Not “this ad works well,” but conversion, CPL, CR1, CR2, ROMI and by what percentage it beats the average. You can’t argue with numbers, but you can argue with a subjective judgment, and smart people don’t trust such judgments.
Logical argumentation. The most important point: by my observation, this is where about 80% of people get cut off. If your proposal seems illogical in any respect, the chances of it being accepted fall almost to zero. If there are inconsistencies in your words, people automatically lose trust, and sometimes start attacking the statement itself. Don’t take the first argument that comes to mind: think it through and check the chain before you speak.
References to history. If a similar situation has already happened, a relevant example from the past can become a solid argument. It also shows the team that you know the project in detail and are prepared, and such people are trusted more.
Insight №54. Weight is built over years and lost in a day
Persuasiveness is not only how you speak, but also how much your word is believed in advance. This weight is not issued together with a job title, and in my notes it comes down to four things, each of them boring:
— you must deliver high results, and for that you need to work hard and keep learning, both in your own field and in adjacent ones;
— in the company there are people who really make decisions, or whose voice carries a lot of weight in decisions: with them you need to do joint projects and invest incredibly in the result, because if you screw up, there may be no second chance;
— the skill of professional persuasiveness is needed no less than the skill of solving the task correctly, because the team has to hear your voice;
— weight is created by a series of successful projects, seasoned with good PR, and destroyed in a single moment.
Lie less and don’t manipulate facts. If you are caught a couple of times, it will zero out your weight. And if a decision is weak, don’t try to strengthen it with a nice presentation: numbers, logic and history exist so that strong decisions get heard, not so that weak ones get pushed through.
Trust has a formula in David Maister’s work: credibility, reliability and intimacy in the numerator, self-orientation in the denominator.