Negotiating is a skill critical to every aspect of marketing. Be it
- Negotiating with C-suite and finance for higher budgets
- Negotiating with agencies, influencers, media partners for more exposure
- Negotiating with marketing team members on team roles or
- Negotiating with target audience to give your product or service a chance
It is particularly critical for vegan and plant-based brands because they face much higher resistance and skepticism than mainstream products.
The best resource I found to learn more about this game changing skill is the book
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on it By Chriss Voss and Tahl Raz
Chris is not only the co-author of the book but he is also ex-FBI hostage negotiator and also the Founder of The Black Swan Group. As an FBI hostage negotiator, he relied on his negotiating skills to literally save lives. What can be a better teacher than a do-or-die situation?
This book is not about marketing or business negotiations per se, yet I urge you to consider it essential reading to succeed in the plant-based space.
Sharing my favorite passages and excerpts from the book:
About psychological biases and effects:
- There’s the Framing Effect, which demonstrates that people respond differently to the same choice depending on how it is framed (people place greater value on moving from 90 percent to 100 percent—high probability to certainty—than from 45 percent to 55 percent, even though they’re both ten percentage points).
- Prospect Theory explains why we take unwarranted risks in the face of uncertain losses. And the most famous is Loss Aversion, which shows how people are statistically more likely to act to avert a loss than to achieve an equal gain.
- It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.
- Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to the calm and logical place where they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.
Tips on actual negotiations (could be adapted in video content and at the shop floor)
- There are essentially three voice tones available to negotiators: the late-night FM DJ voice, the positive/playful voice, and the direct or assertive voice.
- Most of the time, you should be using the positive/playful voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking. A smile, even while talking on the phone, has an impact tonally that the other person will pick up on.
- When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). It applies to the smile-er as much as to the smile-ee: a smile on your face, and in your voice, will increase your own mental agility.
- You can be very direct and to the point as long as you create safety by a tone of voice that says I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s figure things out.
- It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective.
- By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting.
- One group of waiters, using positive reinforcement, lavished praise and encouragement on patrons using words such as “great,” “no problem,” and “sure” in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.
Excerpt exceptionally suited for B2B marketing to interact with specific teams and people across the table
- Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”)
- The trick to spotting feelings is to pay close attention to changes people undergo when they respond to external events. Most often, those events are your words.
- Labels almost always begin with roughly the same words: “It seems like … It sounds like … It looks like …“
- Notice we said “It sounds like …” and not “I’m hearing that …” That’s because the word “I” gets people’s guard up. When you say “I,” it says you’re more interested in yourself than the other person. It makes you take personal responsibility for the words that follow—and the offense they might cause.
- Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.
A small case study on dealing with negativity
- When the day of the meeting arrived, Anna opened by acknowledging ABC’s biggest gripes. “We understand that we brought you on board with the shared goal of having you lead this work,” she said. “You may feel like we have treated you unfairly, and that we changed the deal significantly since then. We acknowledge that you believe you were promised this work.”
- “What else is there you feel is important to add to this?” By labeling the fears and asking for input, Anna was able to elicit an important fact about ABC’s fears, namely that ABC was expecting this to be a high-profit contract because it thought Anna’s firm was doing quite well from the deal.
- “It sounds like you think we are the big, bad prime contractor trying to push out the small business,” Anna said, heading off the accusation before it could be made. “No, no, we don’t think that,” Angela said, conditioned by the acknowledgment to look for common ground.
- ‘They acknowledge ABC’s situation while simultaneously shifting the onus of offering a solution to the smaller company. “It sounds like you have a great handle on how the government contract should work,” Anna said, labeling Angela’s expertise.
- “Yes—but I know that’s not how it always goes,” Angela answered, proud to have her experience acknowledged. Anna then asked Angela how she would amend the contract so that everyone made some money, which pushed Angela to admit that she saw no way to do so without cutting ABC’s worker count.
- The beauty of going right after negativity is that it brings us to a safe zone of empathy.
Hope these excerpts lead you to reading the entire book. Happy reading, dear friend!
Originally published in my marketing newsletter “Marketing Love Letters” (Part 1) and (Part 2)
