Take It Or Leave It: The Only Guide to Negotiating You Will Ever Need

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That night, she called me and said she couldn't work anywhere else. I started getting very high-end salespeople to work for me after that and, within about a year, converted my company into a multimillion-dollar label. That wouldn't have happened if I hadn't closed the deal with my first high-end salesperson. Today, she's still my top seller.

Deal With a Bully

Mark Comiso
President, Maus Haus
San Francisco

This was back in '96 or '97. Maus Haus was still a very small entity at the time, and we had just "won" a competitive bidding process to develop a website for a very big company. The company selected us as the winning vendor, but then we had to "negotiate" with the purchasing department for the "privilege" to work with them. They wanted us to do an across-the-board 20% reduction just because they were a major corporation and should thus get "preferred" client status. We stuck to our guns because we had already incorporated a 20% discount in our initial bid. But the negotiations were tense and they definitely pulled the "everyone wants to work with us" and "you have to do better if you want to do work for us."

In the end we did give a bit on the scope (i.e., we ended up including a few more things), but we held the line on the price. When they said, "This is just the beginning, so give us a great deal on this one and then we'll pay full price on the future stuff," I retorted with, "Boy, multiple opportunities sounds wonderful, and we'd be very excited about that -- so excited, that if you pay full price for the first one, I'll give you increasing discounts on the following projects." This actually worked in that it forced them to say, "Well, how about we just figure out what a fair deal is for every project."

Get Blood From a Vendor

Mark Vadon
CEO, Blue Nile
Seattle

We recently made a decision to reduce the price of our diamond earrings to deliver a better value to our customers. One of the things I love hearing from vendors, when we ask them to reduce their price, is, "We are already making no money selling to you." I say, "Well then, look, maybe we should stop doing business with you. It doesn't make any sense for us to push you to the point that you're going out of business." Our business, selling jewelry over the Internet, runs at much lower margins than most jewelry businesses. Their response was, "We'll sharpen the pencil and see what we can do, but there's not much room here."

They came back to us with price concessions that were pretty modest. We went back and said, "Look, any concessions you give us, we'll give back to our customers." That was a new situation for them because most companies would turn that back into gross margins. We gave them the parameters on how elastic we thought the categories were and the price we paid came down by almost 11% from where we started. We did pass it all on to consumers and the business grew 70%. We are thrilled because our revenue just went up and on top of it the vendor is thrilled with the results. They have so many units selling that they are making more money at the end of the day.

Sidebar: The Ultimate Test: Can A Negotiating Coach Coach Me?

Although Jim Camp has written about negotiation, he seems like the sort of person who doesn't believe you can become a better negotiator just by reading a few hundred pages. In fact, his whole approach is based on effecting a massive behavioral change in the individual who seeks to negotiate better. What I wanted to know is how much difference Camp could effect in a single, bad negotiator: me. When I called to make an appointment, an associate in Camp's camp promised that a face-to-face meeting with the master would "rock" my world.

Eager to learn, I met Camp, 56, at his home in Vero Beach, Fla. With a handful of employees scattered around the country and no central office, his "virtual" company, Coach 2100, is presently advising and coaching clients in about 130 ongoing negotiations. The former Air Force pilot is a burly, friendly guy, who looks as if he gets plenty of sun. As affably as he comes across, he also has some provocative things to say about the negotiation game as it's typically played in American business. He argues that most negotiators are overly willing to compromise, and he blames this on the way that some win-win adherents prize "relationships" over getting the best possible deal -- a style of negotiating that others, especially non-U.S. negotiators, go out of their way to exploit. "It's really killing corporate America," he says.