Blog: The Negotiation Edge

When you’re hired as a police officer in the public sector, you get paid the same whether you are a man or a woman. Compensation is largely based on experience.

Every top-performing sales team is focused on the same thing: getting consistently better results over time. 

If we’ve learned one thing during COVID-19, it’s that it’s not that hard to maintain already-established relationships virtually. But what about establishing brand-new relationships in virtual environments? In short, it’s a much bigger challenge.

To at least some extent, we all work for money. Even if you’re incredibly enthusiastic about your job, you still have bills to pay and a financial future to secure. 

Yet when it comes time to negotiate salary, many of us go quiet. 

• Just 39 percent of workers negotiated a salary increase during their last job offer.
• But 85 percent of those who did negotiate their salaries ended up with better offers

To increase the chances that your salary negotiations will lead to more desirable outcomes, keep these five tips in mind before you sit down at the table.

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?

What happens when you trigger “That’s right” several times in a salary negotiation? How about getting a salary offer 41% higher than you expected? Here's how to use communication at work to get a "that's right" moment and increase your salary offer... without ever naming an amount. 

1. “Attack where he is unprepared.”
2. “Subdue the enemy without fighting”.

One of the my MBA students used this strategy to get her job and take an incredible step forward with her new employer – leapfrogging all of the others hired at the same time as her.  She effectively got an unfair head start.

“How can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects critical to the company’s future?”

Ask this in every job and salary negotiation. Every time. Particularly as the first verbal response to the dreaded “How much did you make at your last position?” and “What are your salary requirements?”

“I’ll be happy to answer that, but first….. how can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects critical to the company’s future?”

1. Be pleasantly persistent on non-salary terms
2. Salary terms without success terms is Russian roulette
3. Spark their interest in your success to recruit them as un-official mentors
4. They are assessing you for how you will be their ambassador

Every MBA class I lecture to, I tell them my first objective is to single-handedly raise the ranking of their school. One of the critical factors in business school rankings is how well their graduates are compensated. I want graduates where I teach to be ridiculously well compensated and worth every dime. Here are 4 tips for negotiating a better salary.