Blog: The Negotiation Edge

This blog was originally published on 10/29/2018 and updated on 8/20/2020.

Most people have mixed feelings about email. 

On one hand, email allows us to instantly communicate with people around the world much more efficiently than sending a carrier pigeon. On the other, email can be incredibly overwhelming. One recent study, for example, found that the average U.S. worker spends nearly six hours each day checking their email.

Six hours!

(To be fair, that breaks down to 209 minutes on work email and 143 minutes on personal email. It turns out we’re not always focused on our responsibilities when we’re in the office. Who knew?)

The fact that email is a text-based form of communication is both its biggest asset and its greatest drawback. Unlike having a face-to-face conversation with an in-person human being, email is a blank slate. Though we can get our words across, it’s harder to convey our tone of voice and the nonverbal cues that are a critical component of constructive communication.

This makes email a very efficient communications tool—but also one that leaves a minefield of potential miscommunications.

In business, most emails are a form of negotiation. We ask someone to read our message and respond in a certain way or take a certain action within a specific time frame. 

To help you get better results, here are six tips that can help you be more persuasive over email.

People often ask me if I have any tricks for negotiating over email.

Here’s my first tip: Stop doing it. 

Every email exchange should be an attempt to bring the other side to the table in person—or at least get them on the phone.

But in this time of global interactions, email negotiation is sometimes unavoidable. Even if you’d prefer to hash it out over the phone, you might have no choice but to negotiate over email—particularly when it’s the preferred method of your counterpart.

Whenever you interact with someone—whether it’s over email, on the phone, or face to face—they tend to remember two things about your encounter:

1. The most intense moment of the conversation
2. The last moment of the conversation

That said, different mediums of communication lend themselves better to different negotiation tactics. By letting those two ideas guide your negotiations and coupling them with medium-specific negotiation tools, you can become a more persuasive negotiator in any scenario.

You’ve landed a new job or been offered a promotion. Awesome.

How do you get paid more? Use the following subject line and then follow The Black Swan Group’s email negotiation guidelines to write your next salary negotiation email.

How can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the strategic future of the company?

The business world runs on email. In fact, studies have found that the average professional receives 121 emails every day.

Winning with email starts with having the right approach. 

Use these four rules to guide your email efforts, and increase the chances your counterpart responds to each message you send as you hope they will:

The first two keys to effective emails are simple:

If you’ve never had someone go dark on you over email, don’t bother reading this blog article.