Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

part of the problem when it comes to high gas
prices?
MR. SMITH: Yes, President Obama is a bad person
FUND-RAISER: Do you think we need change in
November?
MR. SMITH: Yes, I do.
FUND-RAISER: Can you give me your credit card
number so you can be a part of that change?
In theory at least, the “Yes” answers built up a reservoir
of positivity that exploded into donations when requested at
the end of the script. The problem, in reality, was that the
“Yes pattern” scripts had been giving poor rates of return
for years. All the steps were “Yes,” but the final answer was
invariably “No.”
Then Ben read Jim Camp’s book Start with NO in my
class and began to wonder if “No” could be a tool to boost
donations. Ben knew that giving the potential donors a no-
hard-feelings way to get off the call was going to be a tough
sell to his grassroots fund-raisers, because it goes against
everything they had been trained to do. But Ben’s a smart
guy, so instead of totally swapping scripts he had a small

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group of his grassroots guys test-market a “No”-oriented
script.
FUND-RAISER: Hello, can I speak with Mr. Smith?
MR. SMITH: Yes, this is he.
FUND-RAISER: I’m calling from the XYZ Committee,
and I wanted to ask you a few important questions
about your views on our economy today. Do you
feel that if things stay the way they are, America’s
best days are ahead of it?
MR. SMITH: No, things will only get worse.
FUND-RAISER: Are you going to sit and watch
President Obama take the White House in November
without putting up a fight?
MR. SMITH: No, I’m going to do anything I can to
make sure that doesn’t happen.
FUND-RAISER: If you want do something today to
make sure that doesn’t happen, you can give to XYZ
Committee, which is working hard to fight for you.
See how clearly that swaps “Yes” for “No” and offers to
take a donation if Mr. Smith wants? It puts Mr. Smith in the
driver’s seat; he’s in charge. And it works! In a truly
remarkable turnaround, the “No”-oriented script got a 23
percent better rate of return.
The only sad part of Ben’s tale is that despite the huge
improvement in results, he couldn’t roll out the script to all
his fund-raisers. It went against fund-raising orthodoxy, and
longtime fund-raisers like the fake comfort of the “Yes.”

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Genius is often missed the first time around, right?
One negotiating genius who’s impossible to miss is Mark
Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks. I
always quote to my students one of his best lines on
negotiation: “Every ‘No’ gets me closer to a ‘Yes.’” But
then I remind them that extracting those “No’s” on the road
to “Yes” isn’t always easy.
There is a big difference between making your
counterpart feel that they can say “No” and actually getting
them to say it. Sometimes, if you’re talking to somebody
who is just not listening, the only way you can crack their
cranium is to antagonize them into “No.”
One great way to do this is to mislabel one of the other