How to negotiate with someone more powerful than you

From below $18 to $483 - shares of the company GameStop rocketed when WallStreetBets, the Reddit army of retail investors took on hedge funds – and won! One loser, Melvin Capital Management, a hedge fund, has lost 30% of $12.5bn under management on exposure to GME. A modern-day David-and-Goliath battle between regular people versus financial titans. How do you negotiate with someone more powerful than you? What do you do if the other side is richer or better connected? I mean, have you ever tried to work out a win-win solution with a guy who thinks he’s the messiah? As a negotiator, you’re going to run into guys who lie to your face and try to scare you into agreement. Dealing with aggressive jerks and serial fabricators is something you have to do. In the Chinese martial art of tai chi, the goal is to use your opponent’s aggressiveness against him. A repetitive series of “what” and “how” questions can help you overcome the aggressive tactics of a manipulative adversary. “Here are some great standbys that I use: “What about this is important for you?” “What is the biggest challenge you face?” “How am I supposed to do that?” Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why did you do that?” is an accusation, in any language. How you negotiate (and how you prepare to negotiate) can make an enormous difference, whatever the relative strengths of each party. Of course, no matter how skilled you are, there are limits to what you can get through negotiation. The best negotiator in the world will not be able to buy Buckingham Palace. How do you enhance your negotiating power? There is power in developing a good working relationship between the people negotiating. It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective mean to increasing your negotiation power. Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to become less defensive and more willing to listen to other points of view. This is listening as a martial art, to gain access to the mind of another person. Negotiation serves two distinct life functions – information gathering and behaviour influencing. Your career, your finances, your reputation, your love life, even the fate of your kids at some point all these things hinge on your ability to negotiate. Negotiation is nothing more than communication with results. In my Effective Negotiation training program, I draw on my more than two-decade career in sales to distill the principles and practices I deployed in the field into an exciting new approach designed to help you negotiate a lower car price, a bigger raise, and a child’s bedtime. You’ll learn to use your emotions, instincts and insights in any encounter to connect better with others, influence them and achieve more. It works for one simple reason: it was designed in and for the real world. It was not born in a classroom or a training hall, but built from years of experience that improved until it reached near perfection. I’ve always thought of myself as just a regular guy. Hardworking and willing to learn, yes, but not particularly talented. But with the skills I’ve learned, I’ve found myself doing extraordinary things and watching people I’ve taught achieve truly life-changing results. Your goal at the outset of a negotiation is to extract and observe as much information as possible. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often have trouble being negotiators – they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover. In my negotiation course, I tell my students to try to understand the feelings and mindset of another in the moment and to hearing what is behind those feelings. It’s emotional intelligence on steroids. Most of us enter verbal combat unlikely to persuade anyone of anything because we only know and care about our own goals. But the best sales people are tuned in to the other party – their audience. They know that if they empathize, they can mold their audience by how they approach and talk to them. Negotiate in their world. And so I’m going to leave you with one thought: Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Whether it’s in the office or around the family dinner table, ask them questions that open paths for your goals. It’s not about you. It will get you the best car price, the higher salary and the largest contract. It will also save your relationships, your friendship and your family.

Build a meaningful life by building relationships

Trading places. Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th US president. Trump was the first president not to attend his successor's inauguration since 1869. Meanwhile, Elon Musk edged past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to grab the title of world's richest person. Bill Gates is now a distant third at $132 billion. In the Entertainment world, after nearly a decade of borrowing $15 billion, Netflix said it would consider buying back shares for the first time since 2011. Disney, meanwhile, temporarily halted its dividend last year. Netflix was founded in 1997, while Disney has been around for nearly 100 years. But in the streaming video world, Netflix is the incumbent and Disney the upstart. The student has become the teacher. We are living during a very interesting period of history, a time of transition. Life is littered with great rivalries. As a sales leader, I don’t remember a time when I was not thinking about rivalry and competition. Sales was tailored for my personality because winning and losing is so clearly defined and measured so often. Ever since I was a boy, I’ve never wanted anyone to beat me. After a lifetime of “warfare” this now I know. Look in the mirror. That’s your competition. If you look closely at transition periods in history, one group of people emerge very strongly. They are leaders. They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn. But from the dark hours of history are born legends, heroes, champions, leaders and great teachers. Granted, some people exert more influence than others, but all of us exert some, and by our influence, people’s lives are touched. People hear what you say and they listen, and they are affected. People watch how you live, and they learn, and they are influenced. The emphasis in all dealings is on developing and nurturing long-term, constructive relationships. Think of every interaction as an opportunity to establish or further develop a long-term, positive relationship. You can only do this with a personal touch. How do you know if you have a great relationship? If you were to ask each person in the relationship who benefits more from the relationship, both would answer, “I do.” Each person contributes so much to the relationship that both feel enriched. Despite some of the best information available on how to accomplish any task, most people still tend to ask their friends, neighbours, coworkers and siblings for advice on key issues they may be facing. Too often, they ask the advice of others who have never triumphed over the specific hardship they are facing or who have never succeeded in their specific area of endeavour. I do my best to be a generous mentor. In the last quarter century of my life, many young people got a slice of my mentorship. I always felt that I’d gained so much from my mentors than I was able to repay them. I expect the people I mentored – the mentees – to become mentors of the next generation, and to keep the cycle going. If you’re going to climb a big, scary mountain that’s never been climbed before, your best hedge is making sure you have the right partners on the other end of the rope, people who can adapt to whatever you encounter on the mountain. Connection was how I got my job done. Who I knew translated very much into what I knew. The first third of my life, connections were essential to get from where I was, a young man with big dreams in the small town of Johor Bahru with no money, no influence, no connections. The second third of my life as an individual contributor, I was only as good as my contacts. I learned very quickly as a young sales person that everything was about connections; that’s how I got my leads and secure the contracts. It began with who your contacts were and how strong your connections are. I learned to keep in touch; to cultivate contacts, to strengthen connections. Now, I think about connection more in terms of life as much as work. My connections are much more about who I want to know, be friends with, spend time with and who enhances my life in some meaningful way, the pleasure of knowing people and through them, experiencing the power of sharing.

Sharpening your virtual selling skills

Twitter permanently bans President Donald Trump’s personal account after he incited mob that stormed Capitol, marking the most high-profile punishment the company has ever imposed. Facebook, too, has blocked Trump from using its service—including Instagram. Trump has more than 88 million followers on Twitter and 33 million on Facebook. For the past 100 years, letters and emails have been signed with – sincerely yours or some form of pleasant goodbye. Today, “virtually yours” has taken over. And, just like that, everything changed. During the pandemic period, virtual was the ONLY way to communicate and sell. In a heartbeat, we went from happy hours to virtual happy hours. From conferences to virtual conferences. Virtual selling will become the new normal, there is no turning back, and the only question is: are you ready? Can you do business over email or chat? Can you close a high-value, enterprise-level deal over the phone without ever meeting face-to-face? Of course you can. In sales, everything works some of the time. The most effective way to build relationships and trust, resolve conflict, brainstorm ideas, gain consensus, present ideas, negotiate and close deals is a physical face-to-face meeting. You know this and I know this, because we are human. When it comes to account management, there really isn’t anything like being there. With your top accounts, those face-to-face meetings are gold. They help you get high, wide and deep in your accounts, strengthen relationships, find opportunities to add more value, expand the relationship and lock out your competitors. When you are on face-to-face sales calls, you also have the luxury of reading their eyes, the micro-expressions on their face and the entirety of their body language. Though you can see the other person on a video call or hear their voice over the phone, it is not the same as being in person. Because face-to-face meetings require both parties to make a significant investment of time, it increases the probability that there will be meaningful outcomes. For my entire career, I’d sold face-to-face. I was damn good at it. When I started in the hotel industry, my prospects were spread out all across the globe. If I wanted to grow my business (and I did), my only choice was virtual selling. It required a massive mindset shift. Out of pure necessity, and many mistakes later, I eventually mastered virtual selling. To avoid confusion surrounding the term, let’s stop and define virtual selling. It is simply leveraging virtual communication channels in place of physical, face-to-face interactions. These channels include video calls, telephone calls, text messaging, email, social media. If you look closely that the list, you’ll notice that you are already using some, if not all, of these channels. Therefore, it is not about “revolutionizing” the way you sell. Rather, it’s a laser focus on applying virtual selling tools more effectively to engage and connect while boosting your sales productivity. I don’t want to discount just how challenging virtual selling can be. It requires constantly learning, adopting and adapting to new technology while applying interpersonal skills in new ways and getting out of your comfort zone. When I got my first start in sales, back in my early twenties, I worked in an assigned territory in Malaysia. Because the competition was insanely fierce, it was relationship that mattered most. Those face-to-face interactions mattered dearly, because it was there that I built trust, reduced risk, differentiated and locked my competitors out. I remember my sales manager telling me to “go get lost in my territory” and that he “didn’t want to see me in the office during the day.” If you can’t be there face-to-face, the next best thing is a video call. According to a Forbes Insight study, 62% of executives said that video improved communication versus the phone. Video is more personal than any other form of virtual communication. Yet, the number one challenge of sales professionals is “being uncomfortable on camera.” I get it, because I’ve been in those same shoes and experienced the same fear. Even though I could stand in front of 800 people and deliver a speech, I sounded like a blithering idiot when speaking to the camera. I hated video. There were some incredibly embarrassing moments like the time I did a webinar with over 300 people on the call. I was so nervous I didn’t notice that people could only see half my face. I looked like a Muppet. Over time, though, the more I did it, like everything else in life, the better I became. If you fear or uncomfortable with video, I promise that you can learn to master it. There is no easy button, though. The good news is, most of us have become comfortable interacting with family and friends via video. We’ll FaceTime Grandma on a whim. However, as you likely know, making a video call to your mum on FaceTime is far different than conducting a professional video sales call with prospects and customers. The stakes are higher. The trap salespeople fall into, though, is the false belief that good intentions are enough. They show up on video calls, forgetting the perceptions they are creating within their video frame. Think about it. Would you walk into a corporate boardroom to deliver an important presentation to wearing a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops? Rule number one is that you must dress at the same level you would if you were going into a face-to-face meeting with your stakeholders. In most cases, this means conservative business casual. It takes effort to get it right. You need to care about the details and your audience. Some elements of a highly effective call are: • Your internet connection has a great deal of impact. No internet connection, no video sales call. Poor internet connection, poor video sales call. • Do not run video calls in rooms where irritating and random background noise is an issue. Alarms, traffic, doorbells, pets and random loud noises affect your audience’s experience and your ability to maintain attention control. • Few things are more irritating than audio that is echoing off the walls. You will sound like you are in a cave. • Good lighting makes you look natural and accessible. It also illuminates your facial expressions, making you appear more human and trustworthy. When the light is behind you, your face becomes a dark blob. I call this look “witness protection.” On the other hand, if it is too bright, it can be distracting and wash you out. • How you are positioned within the video frame has a massive impact on you looking professional and confident. Looking down into the camera is the most common framing mistake. This “skydiver look” is typically caused by your laptop being lower than your face. In extreme cases, you can even see the skydiver’s ceiling. If you are too close to the camera, your head will fill the entire frame. In extreme cases, parts of your hard are cut off. If there is too much space between the top of your head and the top of the video frame, your head appears teeny tiny at the bottom of the frame like “Mini-Me.” • Your backdrop represents your personal brand. When I use background replacement on calls, I like to place my customer’s logo in the background image. • Sadly, eye contact is the most challenging aspect of video sales calls. So much so that Apple is working to perfect software that creates the illusion of eye contact on video calls. One of the big reasons why maintaining eye contact on video calls is so difficult is that we tend to look at ourselves. A study indicated that most people spend between 30% and 70% of the time on video calls looking at their own face. Looking at the camera instead of the screen takes effort, though. When people were not looking at themselves on screen, they were looking at the other people on their screen. Thus, breaking eye contact. When you look into the camera, the stakeholder feels that you are making eye contact. Yet, paradoxically, when you are looking into the camera, you cannot see them. When you cannot see them, it does not feel to you that you are making eye contact. This causes you to feel uncomfortable and disconnected. In this state, you look down at their image on your screen to make eye contact, which causes the other person to feel that you are not making eye contact. Since you are the salesperson, it is your responsibility to connect with them, not their responsibility to connect with you. To build that connection, you must make eye contact. So despite what your rain is telling you, when you are unable to see their eyes, you must have faith that when you are making eye contact with the camera, you are making contact with the stakeholders – and they will like you more, become more engaged and feel more comfortable. I trust that this provides you a roadmap for engaging remote buyers and closing deals. I welcome opinions, debates, enquiries from any sales leader or salesperson looking to gain a competitive advantage in the mind, the wallet and the loyalty of your customer.