Blog: The Negotiation Edge

Maybe you keep hearing grumblings about how a leader at the company is demoralizing their direct reports. Maybe you keep hearing about a manager who is quick to take credit for team successes—and even quicker to assign blame when things don’t work out well.

Whatever the case, there will be times when you need to deliver bad news to another leader at your organization. When this happens, there are almost no changes in the approach you’d take if you were delivering the same news to a direct report.

At Black Swan, we teach our clients all sorts of tactics they can employ to achieve better outcomes in their personal and professional lives.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to flip the script a bit and talk about tactics to avoid. Here are three common negotiating tactics that make it that much harder for you to get the results you want:

1. Cutting your price
2. Emulating the lizards
3. Not finding out

Let’s explore each of them so you can learn what to do to avoid stacking the odds against yourself.

You enter a negotiation. What if there’s a Black Swan-trained ninja on the other side?

In such a scenario, you’re most likely dealing with one of three tactics:

1. How am I supposed to do that?
2. A No-oriented question™ 
3. Some sort of Label™ (that’s giving you a bad feeling)

Accusation Audits™ and Labels™ (more specifically, Asking Labels™) are two expert concepts that have evolved significantly since Never Split the Difference was published. 

Read on to learn how we’re advising our best clients.

You have read Never Split the Difference™. You have thoroughly researched The Black Swan Group. You have subscribed to our newsletter. You have found out that many others took our online courses and benefited from that decision. 

So, you decided to give it a try. 

You may have attended Derek Gaunt's (author of Ego, Authority, Failure™) Negotiation Basics Course and probably subscribed to our Beyond the Book online training. Or perhaps you've taken Chris Voss’s MasterClass. 

Is It Enough?

This blog was originally published on 11/26/2018 and updated on 10/22/2020.

Seven seconds.

That’s all the time you have to make a first impression, and you need to make a good one.

But how?

Watch these short two-minute videos to find out what you need to do during those seven seconds. 

(Hint: It’s not confidence, and you don’t get there by asking yes-oriented questions. You also don’t get there by clubbing them with their first name over and over again.)

This blog was originally published on 5/28/2018 and updated on 9/10/2020.

When you’re responding to a counterproposal, you need to make sure you don’t get sucked into a game of sequential moves. When such a game is played between evenly matched players and you go second, you can only tie or lose. 

Are you interested in playing a more complicated game of tic-tac-toe?

In the following post, we’ll walk you through three things to keep in mind when you’re responding to a counterproposal:

You might be the best negotiator in the world. But if you don’t know how to deal with people and treat them with respect, you won’t get the results you’re aiming for.

That’s because, at the end of the day, nobody does a deal with you because they need to. They do deals with you because they want to. And, more often than not, the reason they want to do business with you is because they like you.

Becoming a better negotiator starts with strengthening your interpersonal communication skills. The sharper your skills are, the easier it will be to start using Tactical Empathy™.

How can you practice negotiation skills by yourself? 

Read on to learn how to build yourself into an elite negotiator using a technique great athletes use: visualization.

Everyone wants to get to the decision maker (the DM). They’re the person we need to persuade to get what we want, after all.

But the decision maker isn’t always at the table when we are. Here are three tips that will make you much more effective when you find yourself in that scenario.