I have more than 40 books on negotiating, so I wasn’t expecting to learn too much when I picked up a copy of Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It, by Chris Voss. I was wrong. Never Split is one of the best negotiating books I’ve read in a long time.
Why? Because it covers the emotional, non-rational side of negotiating more deeply and more realistically than any of the others, and Voss provides eminently practical ideas and techniques that ring true. As a former hostage negotiator with the FBI, Voss brings a different background and skillset to the table than the usual academic, businessman or sports agent.
By their very nature, hostage negotiations are probably going to contain more intense emotions than the typical business deal, but that doesn’t change the fact that the personal element is always a huge factor lurking under the surface. Even the most sophisticated and jaded business negotiator has feelings and fears and ego and personal desires which get in the way of strictly commercial considerations.
There is a great line in the book which every negotiator should remember: feeling is a form of thinking. A negotiator who enters a negotiation armed only with reason and pure intellect is like a fighter with one hand tied behind their back. For example, your rigorous economic analysis may help you prove your offer is fair, but your “irrational” counterpart may still find it insulting and throw it back in your face.
Voss exposes the biases and quirks that lie just under the surface, and recommends practical and sometimes surprising techniques to take advantage of them. Everyone will find their own which resonate with them, but let me share two of my favorite here. (There are others, but I’ll keep them to myself in case a potential future client is reading this.)
Use calibrated questions. Calibrated questions are open-ended questions that are calibrated for a specific effect. For example, when your counterpart makes an unreasonable demand, don’t argue; simply ask, “How am I supposed to do that?” It forces them to think from your point of view.
Master the art of “no”. A lot of sales approaches tout the value of getting your prospect to say yes, but that makes people suspicious and defensive. Even when you get a yes at the end, it’s not likely to stick as a lasting agreement. In my last post, I wrote about reactance, which activates our inner two-year-old when we feel like were being pushed. Allowing people to say no—actually inviting them to say no—helps people feel in control and lowers their defenses. Voss shares a simple technique to use this tendency to get people who have been ignoring you to reply to your email. I tried it yesterday and got a response within minutes, so I guess the book more than paid for itself already!
There is much more that is valuable in this book than just these two ideas. The best part is that you don’t have to do any formal negotiating to benefit from Voss’ lessons. Daily life is full of opportunities to reconcile conflicting needs with people in your life, and these approaches will help you achieve the seemingly incompatible aims of getting your own way more often while at the same time improving your relationships.
I said earlier that you will get into trouble if you enter a negotiation ignoring feelings and relying too much on your rational positions. But it’s important to remember that the opposite applies. Voss is a little too dismissive of the Harvard rational approach for my taste. Especially in complex B2B sales negotiations, where you may be sitting across the table from professional buyers with reams of data at their disposal, preparation and positioning will still go a long way… but that’s a topic for another post.
So, I’m not throwing out the rest of my negotiating books yet, but Never Split the Difference is one of the few that I will continue to read more than once. And I highly recommend that you do, too—even if we may potentially face off across a negotiating table some day!
When you try to open a drawer and it gets stuck, what’s your first reflex? You yank it again, a little harder the second time, and you may repeat this several times until you finally realize brute force won’t work—and you might even break something. So you finally get smart about it: you stick your hand in and feel around to find out what’s blocking the opening, move it out of the way, and the drawer slides open easily. How much lost time and potential damage might you have avoided if you had removed the obstacle first thing?
The same thing may happen when you try to change someone’s mind. You try to sell them an idea, and they shut you down. So you try again, maybe a little bit more forcefully, or you polish your arguments and come at it a different way. But that doesn’t always work, work, because there are factors which block people from changing their minds even in the face of the strongest rational arguments. In these cases, you need to first remove or work around these impediments.
That’s where Jonah Berger’s book, The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind, comes in. The key point is that when you set out to change something or someone, don’t start by asking “What can I say to try to convince them?” Start by asking yourself, “Why haven’t they changed already?”
Berger identifies five factors which prevent people from changing (or resisting persuasion), conveniently arranged in the acronym REDUCE.
Reactance is our inner 2-year-old which causes us to resist being told what to do. If we feel our freedom to act threatened, we tend to resist, even when we know it’s good for us. (Probably the single biggest reason so many people are refusing to wear masks in a pandemic). The way to get around reactance is to give the other person at least the perception of having the freedom to decide. You can do this by giving people a menu of choices, asking questions to get them to reach the intended conclusion, especially by highlighting a gap between status quo and ideal.
Endowment effect and loss aversion simply mean that we place a greater value on things we have than those we don’t. So, change is hard unless we see a much greater benefit—at least two to one, according to research. The antidote to endowment is to surface the cost of inaction, and that’s best done through asking them questions to arrive at the conclusion you want them to accept. (In case you haven’t figured out how important it is to ask questions, here’s a reminder).
Distance means that people have can have a range of different attitudes regarding the topic being discussed, from strongly in favor to strongly opposed to somewhere in between. For each topic they care about, they have a “zone of acceptance” and a “zone of rejection”. If your message falls into the former, it can move their attitude towards you; if the latter, the message can actually move them further away from agreement. This means you need to know where they are starting from, and most likely ask for less to start. This may require strategic patience on your part, but it beats getting shot down for good.
Uncertainty about potential outcomes makes people nervous. When people are asked to make choices between a sure thing and potentially more valuable gamble, risk aversion biases them toward the sure thing. As Berger puts it, anything new carries an “uncertainty tax”. To get over this hump, you’ve got to make it easy for people to try things out conveniently and at little risk to themselves.
Corroborating Evidence, Berger’s fifth factor, is a little out of place because it’s not technically a factor that impedes change; it’s a requirement. When people hold a strong attitude about the thing being changed, you may need reinforcements in the form of extensive and varied social proof. The theme of this chapter I “Don’t take my word for it.”
The Catalyst is a highly readable and useful book about removing barriers to persuasion. However, I don’t feel it lives up to its subtitle, ”How to Change Anyone’s Mind”, because it’s incomplete. While it’s important to remove roadblocks to change, you also need to make a positive case for the direction in which to move or the destination to aim for. Maybe that will be the theme of a sequel, in which case I look forward to reading it.
True consultative selling is about selling with your customers, not to them. In other words, you work closely together in partnership to co-create value by eliciting the best thinking on both sides to create better ideas, stronger buy-in, and unshakeable relationships.
It’s a beautiful thing when it happens, but it’s also not common because it takes a rare mixture of relevant knowledge, interpersonal skills, and an outside-in mindset to make it work. I’ve written about that in my book, Bottom-Line Selling.
But there is more to the story than the quantitative and logical approach I advocate, and there is more value possible in co-creation than can be captured in a spreadsheet. That’s where Chip Bell’s new book, Inside Your Customer’s Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions, comes in.
Knowledge, skill and outside-in thinking may not be enough unless you can also get inside your customer’s imagination. The customer’s mind contains a potential treasure trove of ideas for working together to generate incredible value, much of which they may not even be aware of. The trick is to harness that imagination. Have you ever had a customer meeting that just sparkled with enthusiasm and produced ideas almost faster than you could write them down? This book will show you how to make that the norm rather than the exception.
The book is divided into five tactics for creating and sustaining a co-creation partnership, each with three techniques to apply them effectively. Bell calls them “secrets”, but I prefer to see them as plain common sense, creatively applied. They are:
Curiosity: The first step to selling with someone is to be curious about them. Chip says “curiosity is fundamentally an optimistic treasure hunt”, and it springs from a genuine desire to know as much as you can about them.
Grounding: Grounding is about establishing a shared purpose with your customer. It starts with defining the customer’s core need or aspiration.
Discovery: Curiosity and grounding are important to get started, but at some point you have to start generating ideas. Discovery is about creating a climate to make innovation possible—maybe even inevitable.
Trust: All innovation contains risk for both parties, so trust is essential. Both parties must trust each other enough to open up fully and generate ideas, and they must also trust each other enough to share the risks of implementing them.
Passion: Just like a marriage, a co-creation partnership needs to be nurtured with passion to avoid complacency and indifference. Passion ensures that both sides consistently bring their best.
This short synopsis does not do justice to the book. Chip uses excellent analogies and tons of compelling stories to illustrate and support his points, which makes for excellent reading. If you’ve ever had the chance to see Chip in person, you’ll see that he writes like he speaks, with a dynamic combination of entertainment and insight.
I had an intriguing email this morning from a podcast listener who asked me for examples of good questions to drive immediate personal connection. I replied that I don’t know any specifically, but fortunately I have some friends I can ask.
Google is one of those friends. Whenever I need a quick and superficial answer to a question, I can always count on it to help, or at least point me in the right direction. But if I want to dig deeper into an idea, I usually need more help than it can easily provide. The second problem with Google is that it only answers the questions I ask, and sometimes I don’t know exactly what I’m asking for.
When that happens, I’m fortunate to have an incredible network of friends I can turn to for deeper and better answers—friends who challenge my thinking, or remind me of something that I already know, or pose questions of their own. Sometimes they refer me to another friend who might have additional information.
My interests range pretty widely, beyond just my professional interest in sales and communications, and I pride myself on being a foxy hedgehog. Because of that, my network of friends reflects that diversity. Whether it’s psychology, philosophy, history, politics, economics, science, I have dozens if not hundreds of friends who are experts in each. Some I’ve known for a long time, some became my friends just this week. They come from all corners of the globe; they all give me their best thinking; and even those that I haven’t connected with for many years never hesitate to cheerfully try to answer my questions no matter what time or what day it is.
They’re always accessible because they actually live in my house, on the bookshelves that line every wall but one in my office. My friends are the authors whose books I’ve collected through the years. I don’t have an exact count, but I roughly estimate that I’ve got at least 2,000 friends with something interesting to say—closer to 3,000 if you count the ones that live in my Kindle.
I’ve written before that books are tools; but that doesn’t do them complete justice. I have many books that I consult regularly, on questions such as: What did Kahneman have to say about anchoring? Which of my sales friends has good examples of value propositions? What do Charlie Green or Robin Dreeke have to say about using questions to generate trust? What can Epictetus tell me today to help me deal with these crazy times?
They’re certainly not as quick as Google, but they can be orders of magnitude more helpful. And even if they don’t answer my question specifically, they almost always remind me why I’ve kept them around for so long. I can always get by with a little help from my friends.
