Is "start high" just lying with better manners?

↓

"Ask for more than you expect to get." Almost everyone in business has been taught that.

Very few of us have stopped to ask what it says about us.

In 1983, Jeffrey Rubin, a social psychologist who spent his career studying negotiation, described the standard model in the journal American Behavioral Scientist: "Typically, each side begins by asking for more than it expects to get. And through a series of offers and counteroffers in a stepwise concession process, a mutually acceptable agreement is ultimately reached."

It's an accurate description of how most deals get done. I've watched that dance for 40 years, in courtrooms, conference rooms and mediations. You know the steps. The seller anchors high and the buyer anchors low. Both inch toward the middle, and both act as if the first numbers meant something.

Todd Caponi, a veteran B2B sales leader, quotes Rubin's description in his new book, Four Levers Negotiating. Then he puts it more bluntly than anyone I've read:

"In other words, at the most important point of the selling process, we intentionally start lying."

That's uncomfortable to read, and it's meant to be.

Most of us wouldn't call an opening anchor a lie. We'd call it strategy, or positioning, or leaving room to move. But Caponi's point is hard to argue with. If you quote a number you know isn't your real price, and you fully expect to come down from it, you've opened the most important conversation of the deal with something that isn't true.

The other side knows it, too. People can tell when they're being worked.

The buyer across the table has been through this dance just as often as you have. When you open high, they don't think that must be the real price. They think let's find out how far down this goes. When you sweeten the deal with "20% off if you sign today," you aren't building trust. You're showing them your number was never real.

Caponi is a seller, and he doesn't hide his frustration with how salespeople are trained. At worst, he writes, the negotiation tactics taught in most sales organizations are "simply advanced versions of my childhood experiences with baseball cards." At best, we borrow techniques from FBI hostage negotiators and diplomats, people who negotiate under very different pressures than someone renewing a software contract.

I'll push back on him a little there. Some of those hostage-room skills, like listening closely and asking good questions, work in any room. His central point still stands. The opening number is where trust is either built or spent, and most of us spend it without noticing.

So what's the alternative? Caponi doesn't tell you to give up negotiating. He builds a system around a different starting point: tell the buyer, truthfully, how you set your price, and let the negotiation start from there. How that works in practice is the heart of the book, and I won't give it away here.

The idea underneath it is a century old. In 1920, a sales writer named Norval Hawkins put it this way: "In a skillfully finished sale, there should be neither victor nor vanquished. The selling process is not a battle of minds."

So: next time you're about to name a number, ask yourself whether it's your price or your opening move. If the other side found out the difference, what would they think of everything else you told them?

Remember: negotiation is life.

– Gene

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST:

​​​​​

FIND US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:

​​​​​