In a negotiation, the order in which things arrive is a tactic too. The biggest term rarely comes first.
We tend to judge a deal by what's in it: the price, the rights, the conditions. We don't pay enough attention to when each piece reached us. A skilled counterpart builds the sequence carefully. The attractive part comes early, and the costly part comes late, once there's momentum behind it and backing out feels like a loss.
I call this the puppy first technique.
When my daughter Sarah, who now produces the podcast, was little, we'd sometimes wander into a pet store just to look at the puppies. We love dogs, but we're both allergic, so we were never taking one home. The salesperson didn't care. Why don't you hold him? Walk him around a little. One of them offered us a weekend trial: take the puppy home, and if you love him, come back and we'll talk.
The puppy first, and the price after. That order was the whole strategy.
Car dealers use the same sequence with the test drive. So did Colonel Tom Parker, the famously shrewd manager who guided Elvis Presley's career, when he went after a song by a 28-year-old Dolly Parton.
A couple of weeks ago, we lost Dolly, the country music legend who rose from crushing poverty in East Tennessee to stardom in Nashville and Hollywood, at age 80. Martha Ackmann's biography, Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton, tells the story.
In 1974 Dolly had just left The Porter Wagoner Show, the TV variety program run by her first mentor in Nashville, to start a solo career. She wrote "I Will Always Love You" as a goodbye to him, and it went to number one on the country charts.
Then Elvis heard it and wanted to record it.
For Dolly, this was huge. She had idolized Elvis since childhood, and back home hardly anyone even owned a television. The producer called and invited her to meet Elvis at Studio B in Nashville the next day. By her own account, she went out of her mind.
Step one was done. Now look at when step two came.
On the afternoon before the session, the phone rang again. It was Colonel Parker. We don't record anything, he said, unless we have the publishing, or at least half the publishing.
He didn't say it on the first call, when she could have weighed it calmly. He waited until the meeting was set and she'd started imagining telling everyone back home, and then he called less than a day out. And the term wasn't small. The publishing rights meant ownership of the song itself, which would pay out every time anyone recorded it again.
Dolly told him that wasn't possible, because it was her most important copyright. Parker said that without the publishing, there was no deal.
She cried all night. Then she said no anyway.
Eighteen years later, Whitney Houston recorded the song for The Bodyguard. It spent a then-record 14 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of the best-selling singles of all time. Estimates put Dolly's royalties at $10 million or more.
And every dollar of that depended on a phone call offer she turned down when she was 28.
When a major term shows up late, the timing is part of the ask.
A late term is designed to be judged against the deal you think you already have, not on its own merits. That's why it feels so much smaller than it is. You aren't asking whether to give up half your publishing. You're asking whether to throw away tomorrow's meeting with Elvis.
You'll see this pattern everywhere once you look.
Examples include the buyer who agrees on a price and then brings in indemnity language in the final documents, the employer who makes the offer and mentions the non-compete afterward, and the partner who waits until the celebration dinner to say just one more thing. Until the ink is dry, you don't have a deal. You have a sequence that hasn't finished yet.
How do you defend against this? Make a rule: every late addition gets evaluated as if it had arrived on day one. Picture it on the first call, before anything was set. Would you have said yes then?
Dolly never met Elvis. She said something always kept her away.
So what's the last thing someone added to your current deal, and why did it come last?
Remember: negotiation is life.
– Gene
