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- Never Split The Difference, Chris Voss
Never Split The Difference, Chris Voss
Never
Negotiation Tips you’ll learn today on The Sales Podcast…
Get your opponent off his game
Add warmth when they are trying to bulldoze you
Apologize
Use their first name
Asking open-ended questions is one of the FBI’s most potent negotiating tools
Allow them to talk to make them feel in control
Give them the chance/opportunity to solve YOUR problems
The fundamentals, i.e., the basics, i.e., the old school stuff still works…it might be the only thing that does work
Learn to say “no” without sounding like you’re saying no
Ask open-ended questions that make the prospect think they are being “dishonest and unfair”
To win in sales, you must know people, which means you must know how batshit crazy we all are
“Getting To Yes”
Separate the person—the emotion—from the problem
Don’t worry about what they’re asking for, focus on their interests to determine what they really want
Work together to create win-win options
Create mutually agreed-upon standards for evaluating those possible solutions
Feeling is a form of thinking.” ~Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
[I]t is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.” ~Daniel Kahneman
We suffer from up to 150 cognitive biases
Unconscious
Irrational
Distort how we see the world
System 1: our animal mind is fast, instinctive, and emotional
System 2: slow, deliberate, logical
System 1 steers System 2
Learn how to guide and affect System 1 in your prospect to get them to tell their System 2 how to answer to your benefit
We must address the animal in the room
Not quid pro quo rational bargaining
Not logical problem solving
Focus on emotions and emotional intelligence
Calm people down
Establish rapport
Gain their trust
Get them talking and describing their true needs
Prove your empathy
It must be easy to teach, learn, and apply
People want to be understood and accepted
Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there.”
Listening is not passive
Listening is the most active thing you can do
“Tactical Empathy” became his secret weapon
Life is negotiation
It’s two parties trying to get “I want”
It’s two distinct, vital life functions
Information gathering
Behavior influencing
Negotiation is communication with results
Conflict is inevitable
It’s crucial to know how to engage without damaging
Disarm, redirect, and dismantle in a positive way that builds the relationship
You get what you ask for, you just have to ask correctly.”
Connect better, influence them, achieve more
Negotiation is the heart of collaboration
Surprises are always possible, so use your skill to reveal them
Enter with an open mind, gather new information to refine your guesses
Seek to discover facts and the truth, i.e., The New ABCs of Selling include, Always Be Curious
Question assumptions
Test your hypotheses
Don’t go in with blind faith or arrogance, thinking you know it all
Listen to the overuse of personal pronouns—we/them or me/I. The more they downplay themselves, the more important they probable are, and vice versa.
Don’t get too close. Allow some distance between you and the worst-case scenario
Having a team listen in for clues is always recommended
To disarm your prospect and make them feel safe, focus on them and what they have to say. This is how you quite the schizophrenic in your mind, and in theirs!
You must identify what your prospect needs by truly listening. He calls it active listening.
Through active listening, the prospect will feel heard, their emotions will be validated, and they’ll trust you, which means you can then have a real conversation.
MSU is not the way to win at sales. You know, “Making Shit Up.” (It’s related to sin #1 of The 7 Deadly Sins of Selling.)
Be a people mover to excel at solving problems.
Being in a hurry makes prospects feel unheard.
It undermines trust.
Control yourself. Control your energy. Control your voice. Your actions influence the feelings and perceived intentions of the prospect.
This helps you connect at the instinctive, gut-level of your prospect.
Radiate warmth and acceptance
Stick with the positive/playful voice most of the time
Convey that you are easygoing and good-natured
Smile
When we get our prospects into a positive frame of mind, we all think faster, are more likely to collaborate to solve the problem at hand
Talk slowly, clearly, with a downward inflection to convey that you’re in control
Mirroring can help us copy each other to comfort one another
We fear what’s different and are drawn to what is similar
As a shortcut, just repeat the last three—or most critical three—words
Mirroring has been shown to beat positive reinforcement by up to 70% when used by waiters
Keep it simple
Get into the head and under the skin of your prospects with emotional control, dialogue, influence, and persuasion
Be flexible and willing to change your approach as new information presents itself
You must be able to get inside the head—and under the skin—of your “opponent”
Being right isn’t the key to negotiating. Having the right mindset is.”
How to Confront—and Get Your Way—Without Confrontation
It’s like a Jedi mind trick…to disagree without being disagreeable
You can’t always go head-to-head with the type A personalities
Follow these four steps
Calm, soothing late-night FM DJ voice
“I’m sorry…”
Mirror (i.e., help me understand)
Pause silently so the mirroring can work its magic
Repeat
The goal is to convey, “Please help me understand.”
Mirroring gets them to reword their request, whereas “What do you mean by that?” comes across as confrontational
You’ll feel weird at first. Do it anyway. It works and it’ll become second nature to you, once you experience the benefits.
Be conversational and build rapport. That’s the key to good negotiation.
Study Oprah
Smile to ease the tension
Convey empathy, thus security
Downward inflection of the voice
Ask the right questions, and avoid the wrong ones
Review
Prepare
Expect surprises
Seek to reveal their surprises
Avoid assumptions: question to test your hypotheses
Negotiation is not a battle. It’s a process of information discovery.
You will silence the negative voices in your head by focusing completely on the other person.
Go slow.
Smile.
Three voices:
Late-night FM DJ voice
Positive/playful voice should be your default
Direct/assertive
Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words.
Don’t Feel Their Pain, Label It
It’s hard to separate people from their problems when their emotions are the problem.
Emotions are one of the key reasons that communication breaks down.
Identify and influence their emotions.
Emotions become your tools, your means to a successful negotiation, not an obstacle.
Become a psychotherapist. Listen more. Talk less.
The more you know about your prospects, the more power you have.
Being empathetic means you understand their world, not that you agree with it.
“Tactical Empathy” (Sidebar: name your stuff so you seem smart and savvy.) is going beyond just understanding their world to the point that you hear and understand what is behind their feelings to increase your influence.
Neural resonance disappears when we communicate poorly.
Implement Sun Tzu’s concept of “the supreme art of war”…to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it.
“It looks like you don’t want to get ripped off.”
“It looks like you don’t want to look like you caved to your boss.”
“It seems like you don’t want a budget surprise to derail your project down the road.”
When we get our prospects to think logically and rationally to name a fear or a concern, it lessens the raw intensity
Notice their words, tone, and body language.
Notice how their demeanor changes in response to your questions.
Once you spot the emotion you want to highlight, label it verbally. (Avoid saying “I’m hearing” or “I’m detecting” or “I’ve noticed….” Keep the focus on them, i.e., “It looks like…” or “It seems like…” or “It sounds like….”
This will help you get more than a “yes” or “no” out of them, and you can always back away with, “I didn’t say that was happening, just that it seemed like it was.”
Then be quiet and listen.
Labeling is powerful because it invites the other person to reveal himself. (Sidebar: You can also throw out a simple mistake and have them correct you, but that’s for a later discussion.)
People are deeper than what they show.
Labeling a negative can diffuse it while labeling a positive can enhance it.
Anger is rarely productive.
We want to tease out the negative feelings.
We want to de-escalate angry confrontations.
Labeling helps the prospect acknowledge their feelings rather than continue to act them out.
Go directly at negative dynamics fearlessly, but deferentially.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Look, I’m an asshole.”
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Observe the negativity without reaction or judgment. Label it consciously and replace it with positive, compassionate, solution-based thoughts.
Empathy is a powerful mood enhancer.
Label the fears. Bring them to the light so you can address and minimize them to clear the air and make straight the path.
This may take time. There may be many layers of fear.
Labels help to uncover and identify the primary emotion driving almost all of our behaviors. Once we acknowledge that emotion, almost everything else is nearly miraculously solved.
Do not deny the negative, that only makes it worse.
“I hope you don’t think I’m an asshole…”
“I don’t want this to sound harsh…”
This is one reason I’ve succeeded in selling so much Keap and HubSpot. I’ve always replied to people who ask “How long will this take to implement?” with, “This will be the hardest 90 days of your business career, assuming you spend one to two hours per day for 90 days straight working on this.”
By labeling their fear and bringing it to light, they know what they are in for, they know I’m in it with them, and they can make an informed, confident decision to dive in.
Defense attorneys call this “taking the sting out.”
In sales, we call this “accentuating the negative.”
Voss calls it an “accusation audit.” List everything bad your opponent could say about you.
No communication is always a bad sign
“We acknowledge that you believe you were promised this work.”
“What else is there you feel is important to add to this?”
Focus on clearing the barriers to agreement first
“Yes” is often meaningless that hides deeper objections…and “maybe” is even worse
Pushing hard for ‘yes’ doesn’t get you any closer to a win; it just angers the other side. ~
Getting a “No” helps to clarify what you really want by eliminating what you don’t want
“No” is safe for the prospect. It maintains the status quo…temporarily
“No” starts the negotiation
There are complexities and subtleties in every conversation
Don’t take what people say literally