Gives and Gets

Heavier happenings in the world as of late have brought to mind a life skill with major applications in sales, job searching, and throughout life itself.

It’s the skill of negotiation.

For ages, the art of negotiation seemed like a mystery to me. What is it really? How does it work?

A lot of things became much clearer to me after my old podcast co-host, Lisa Plain, and I interviewed salary negotiation expert Josh Doody as part of The Career Builder’s Podcast.

(Apparently lots of people struggle with this: TCBP Episode #46 still ranks as the most downloaded episode we ever produced – out of 106!)

Now I think of negotiation, be that for a sales or employment contract (or even when sorting out some life things with my wife), as the optimization of an agreement so both parties receive maximum benefit.

It’s not some kind of win/lose scenario. As Josh taught us, it’s a collaborative process that gets people in position to move forward in the best way possible.

With each “deal” I encounter, I broadly see negotiating as a 3-step process:

1. Break down the deal into components
2. Prioritize the components
3. Exchange “gives” and “gets” until to finalize the deal

Let’s walk through this quickly:

Break Down

Let’s use the negotiation of a job offer as an example. In an offer, there will be several components that make up the role you could accept, such as:

1. Base salary
2. Commission pay
3. Equity compensation
4. Vacation allowance
5. Work setting (in-office, hybrid, remote)

(There are usually more than five components in a deal, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll hold it at this.)

If all the components of the offer fully align with your expectations, then it’s unlikely you’ll want to negotiate much, if at all. But this is rarely the case.

Prioritize

With the offer broken down, your next job is to decide which components are most important to you versus least important.

The components most important to you and most out of line with your expectations are the ones you’re going to counteroffer on the hardest.

You can still try and negotiate less important components of the deal, but ideally you want to tackle each component one at a time so you don’t overwhelm yourself and get lost in the deal.

In other words, if base salary, equity comp and work setting are your top three priority components, you would iron out salary first, equity second, and work setting third.

Exchange

This is where there can be a lot of nuance, more than I can reasonably share in a newsletter of this length.

But in short, the way you get to a final agreement is to:

• “Give” on components (ideally ones you care less about) to your counterparty, in exchange for
• “Gets” (ideally ones you care relatively more about) so that each side gets the best deal possible for them

For example, let’s say you’ve made base salary your top priority. And you also know that the company making you an offer really wants its workforce to be in-office.

You get an offer that’s below your desired base salary, but the offer includes the ability to work in a hybrid setting.

You might try and “give” on the setting, saying you’re open to going into the office 5 days a week. In return, you’ll “get” them to meet you fully at your base salary expectations.

Negotiating base salary can be tough and is often the last thing an employer wants to negotiate. If an employer can’t match your salary expectations, they may “give” you something else in return, like extra vacation days or a larger performance-based bonus.

Will your “gets” get the deal done? It depends on how you prioritized and valued these things when you analyzed the deal.

Josh gets into even more detail on this topic so I highly recommend giving him a listen.