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

SPARK THEIR INTEREST IN YOUR SUCCESS AND
GAIN AN UNOFFICIAL MENTOR
Remember the idea of figuring what the other side is really
buying? Well, when you are selling yourself to a manager,
sell yourself as more than a body for a job; sell yourself, and
your success, as a way they can validate their own
intelligence and broadcast it to the rest of the company.
Make sure they know you’ll act as a flesh-and-blood
argument for their importance. Once you’ve bent their
reality to include you as their ambassador, they’ll have a
stake in your success.
Ask: “What does it take to be successful here?”
Please notice that this question is similar to questions that
are suggested by many MBA career counseling centers, yet
n o t exactly the same. And it’s the exact wording of this
question that’s critical.
Students from my MBA courses who have asked this
question in job interviews have actually had interviewers
lean forward and say, “No one ever asked us that before.”
The interviewer then gave a great and detailed answer.
The key issue here is if someone gives you guidance,
they will watch to see if you follow their advice. They will
have a personal stake in seeing you succeed. You’ve just
recruited your first unofficial mentor.

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To show how this can be done to near perfection, I can
think of no better example than my former MBA student
Angel Prado.
While Angel was finishing up his MBA, he went to his
boss and began to lay the groundwork for his work post-
MBA (which the company was paying). During his last
semester, he set a nonspecific anchor—a kind of range—by
suggesting to his boss that once he graduated and the
company was done investing in his MBA (around $31,000
per year), that money should go to him as salary.
His boss made no commitment, but Angel was
pleasantly persistent about it, which set the idea as an
anchor in his boss’s mind.
Upon graduation, Angel and his boss had their big sit-
down. In an assertive and calm manner, Angel broached a
nonfinancial issue to move the focus away from “How
much?”: he asked for a new title.
Angel’s boss readily agreed that a new role was a no-
brainer after Angel’s new degree.
At that point, Angel and his manager defined what his
roles and responsibilities would be in his new role, thereby
setting success metrics. Then Angel took a breath and
paused so that his boss would be the first to throw out a
number. At last, he did. Curiously enough, the number
showed that Angel’s earlier efforts at anchoring had worked:
he proposed to add $31,000 to Angel’s base salary, almost a
50 percent raise.
But Angel was no rookie negotiator, not after taking my

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class. So instead of countering and getting stuck in “How
much?” he kept talking, labeling the boss’s emotions and
empathizing with his situation (at the time the company was
going through difficult negotiations with its investors).
And then Angel courteously asked for a moment to step
away and print up the agreed-upon job description. This
pause created a dynamic of pre-deadline urgency in his
boss, which Angel exploited when he returned with the
printout. On the bottom, he’d added his desired
compensation: “$134.5k—$143k.”
In that one little move, Angel weaved together a bunch
of the lessons from this chapter. The odd numbers gave
them the weight of thoughtful calculation. The numbers
were high too, which exploited his boss’s natural tendency
to go directly to his price limit when faced by an extreme
anchor. And they were a range, which made Angel seem
less aggressive and the lower end more reasonable in
comparison.
From his boss’s body language—raised eyebrows—it
was clear that he was surprised by the compensation
request. But it had the desired effect: after some comments
about the description, he countered with $120,000.
Angel didn’t say “No” or “Yes,” but kept talking and
creating empathy. Then, in the middle of a sentence,
seemingly out of the blue, his boss threw out $127,000.
With his boss obviously negotiating with himself, Angel
kept him going. Finally his boss said he agreed with the
$134,500 and would pay that salary starting in three

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months, contingent on the board of directors’ approval.
As the icing on the cake, Angel worked in a positive use
of the word “Fair” (“That’s fair,” he said), and then sold the
raise to his boss as a marriage in which his boss would be
the mentor. “I’m asking you, not the board, for the
promotion, and all I need is for you to agree with it,” he
said.
And how did Angel’s boss reply to his new ambassador?
“I’ll fight to get you this salary.”
So follow Angel’s lead and make it rain!