Ignite Psychology: How to Win High-Stakes Negotiations and Close Better Deals with Alex Adamo |Ep292

What is the single most expensive word in any negotiation?

So it's yes, because it's always said too early and to the detriment of no. Whereas no is where a negotiation begins, and it's perfectly normal to say so. If you say it in the right way, you do not harm relationships. In fact, you gain respect in commercial relationships when you're able to say no in an understandable manner. So it is something that people should own more, and they're afraid of the no because they're afraid of the consequences that amygdala activates, and they say yes too much and too fast.

Everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today we are delighted to have Alex Adamo on the mic. He negotiates for a living and not the kind you do over a used car. He's the chief negotiator behind The Commercializer, a London-based firm that gets parachuted into Fortune 500 companies to handle multiple billion-dollar deals. Thanks for coming on, Alex.

Thank you for having me, Brian. Very happy to be here.

Well, I'd love to start with your origin story. What's your background?

So it depends what sort of how long you would like the story to be, because sometimes it can be several minutes long. So I'm trying— I'm going to try and keep it at an executive summary length if I can. But tell me if I'm going too long.

Give us the 3-minute version.

Yeah, 3 minutes. So thank you for giving me the time because, you know, I do my workshops that sometimes they last for 4 days, 16 hours a day. So I could talk on and on without figuring out. And sometimes I script my introductions to be 15 minutes and they last an hour and a half. And my team hates me because then we are out of schedule and, you know, we just need to run behind the right schedule and everything else. So please. Given the pointers in terms of time. So in terms of the 3-minute version, let me try and summarize everything. But I've always been passionate about human behavior. Since I was 12 years old, I was studying books about human behavior and body language. And I was using that with my friends at school or to try to impress girls, trying to get a date with other girls. And ever since, I was hooked in terms of the power of understanding human behavior. So then for some reason, and I didn't know this because my family doesn't come from any commercial background, and, you know, my mom is a housewife and my dad works— worked as a civil servant. I just had this vision to be the guy that at some point in the future would be the person closing the biggest corporate deals and would also help cease wars or do like peace agreements or war negotiations, these kinds of things. And I just then jumped fully into my passion and fast forward a few years, and now I'm that guy. I'm just doing the corporate side and the private side in terms of negotiations. So I only do big deals. I'm still not on the war zone side. I did support diplomatic negotiations, but commercially as a business, we've always decided to work in private deals and large deals with large enterprises because that's how you build a business. But, you know, maybe someday if I can use negotiations to help world peace, then I would really love that because I think the world needs it.

When did you When did you first know you wanted to study human behavior in the way that you do?

So again, when a friend of my dad who's a psychologist gave me a book on psychology and I was just studying it and I went almost cover to cover in one night and then I read the rest of the book the day after and, you know, I was learning about how the brain works and why people say the things they do. I was obsessed. And then, so I just knew that that's what I wanted to do.

Do you remember what book it was?

No, no, it was like a generic book on psychology. I do remember, however, that I read immediately after that, which was, I think it's from someone called Anna and John Barbera, something like that in terms of names. And it's called The Manual on Body Language, or I can put it in the comments. Maybe we can put it when we find it. Let me see.

I'll put it in the show notes. Yeah.

Yeah. Let me Google it. It was called, I think, yes, The Definitive Book of Body Language from Allan and Barbara Pease. And that was a very older version, like 20 years ago or so, many, no, more than that. And that's what they made a wonderful introduction about body language. And now, you know, with all my specialism in evolutionary anthropology and microfacial expressions and neuroscience as well, it pretty much, they say that body language, and it's just again, a small piece of human behavior, it helps you, you know, just when you wake up in the middle of the night that you need to go get a glass of water in the kitchen, for example, and you can just see just about With your eyes to avoid the furniture in front of you, or not to slam your face onto the wall or the door, for example. You can just see a little bit. Well, this is the same when you can read human behavior and body language. You won't see everything clearly as you see during daylight, but you will see things as if you're in the middle of the night and you can at least recognize what things are and you can avoid stumbling upon yourself or upon things in front of you. And people that do not study human behavior, or body language, they're a bit blind on these things and they do not get the same advantage, neither in personal life nor in business.

So tell me about the business that you actually do. So you run workshops, obviously, but you also get called in to big accounts, big Fortune 500 companies. They're like, hey, we're negotiating a huge deal and we want you working on it. Tell us about what you do.

We used to have 2 business units. Now we have 3 with AI. So the first one is what we call Negotiation Asset Management. Where we currently manage or advise on $6.5 billion of negotiations. Then the second business unit is trainings, live trainings to executives where we share everything that we learn on the field, or when we support those executives on their large negotiations between $50 million and $500 million in size. Then everything we learn there, we share during our workshops, which can be half a day, 2 days, 4 days long. And they're highly experiential and they're a lot of fun. For me at least, for people that, you know, it puts them a lot out of their comfort zone. Obviously we get great reviews, but for me and the team, they're a lot of fun because, you know, you teach a lot to people and I've trained tens of thousands of people now in my career, but I also learned a lot from them. And it gives me massive, massive like personal satisfaction in terms of seeing how you can benefit someone's life and obviously their own commercial results, which goes beyond the EBIT that you can produce for your business or the businesses that you support when you advise on large deals. So the first part is negotiation asset management, then negotiation trainings. And the third one that we just introduced is AI-powered tools. So with the advance of cloud capabilities and AI capabilities at the end of 2025, we finally, finally, this company has started to become a little bit more scalable because we were able to partially clone myself via a system we call iDamo. And then also to create negotiation capability systems, which allow people to do regular role plays, understand their capabilities. They help the company understand how they behave during negotiations. With the same level and skill that I would, that we get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for to assess people live during negotiations. We get the AI to do so and to give people a score, which large enterprises are finding highly valuable. So in a sentence, quite shortly, these are the 3 business units that we spearhead.

That's really fascinating. So you can actually use AI now and take all of those learnings from all the workshops and negotiations that you've done professionally and kind of distill it into an AI model, an AI experience that scores and teaches people negotiation.

That's right. That's right. Both advises it. So we have the advisor Adamo, which you can speak with, and you can ask questions about what would a chief negotiator based on Alex Adamo's experience do during negotiations, how you should prepare for a negotiation, how you should deal with stress, how you can calm down when things are stressful, what should your next proposal be, how do you make a threat, how do you change the power balance, how do you use the dominance gauge, how do you create and understand the ZOPA breakdown, how do you do conditional trading, you know, all these matters that negotiations experts, of course, know about, but with our twist in terms of our IP on how we do things, because it is a download of my brain. I'm interested on that also from a personal and transcendence perspective. You know, if I die tomorrow or in 2 weeks, my daughter at least can see something that resembles dad. So I love that in terms of leaving a small legacy with the technology based on what the technology allows us to do. Instead, then we have the other system that allows companies to score their sales force of 50, 100, or 200, 300 people so that then everyone gets an objective assessment of where they are. And then they get what we call the negotiation gym. where they can keep exercising themselves, which again, it's a lot more scalable for us, a lot more accessible for the companies that we work with, because it's a lot less expensive than the premium negotiation workshops that we run in person instead. So we're very excited about it. Because for the first time, I feel I'm not only a chief negotiator, I'm also CEO of a business that it's growing. So it's exciting.

Yeah, instead of just selling your time and doing one-off negotiations or classes, workshops, trainings. You can actually build a platform that can be scalable and help a lot of people all at once. And that's the power of software. And AI is now eating negotiation as well, it sounds like. What's fascinating here, I think, if you put yourself 5 or 10 years into the future, do you feel like AI will be the first stop in arbitration negotiation and we'll be living in a world where AI is sitting there on our shoulders and it's super intelligent, but it's super intelligent in the way that you're super intelligent on this one area, negotiation, right? And so you can make this AI sit on my shoulder and really guide me through a really tough negotiation. It's like I have Alex sitting there just on my shoulder, right over my shoulder, helping me.

Yeah, I think that's even less than 10 years from now. And it is something that we're developing in our laboratory in terms of we've got tools that we call awareness, where we want people to understand and live basis, their behaviors, and in terms of the emotions that they're displaying and reading the emotions of the counterparty. Of course, based on what you can capture, based if it's a video call, or whether you're wearing glasses with, with, with video capabilities, but then you go into a lot of— at the moment, you go into a lot of legal implications of whether that's appropriate to do or whether that's allowable to do for large corporations. But that's where we're naturally going ourselves, someone that guides your negotiation live, But if you ask me 10 years from now, I would see a lot of humans— there is 2 competing theories there, but I would see a lot of humans to be replaced. Because negotiation is like AI is not necessarily a lot smarter than me now. But it will be if you keep this improvement of maximal learning with the speed that is happening and with the predictions that we see, you know, when you read the prediction and the development of AI. I think companies will be replacing negotiators, and they will only keep the decision makers behind the scenes on whether they should accept or not accept a deal. A vision I have is potentially to have robo-negotiators just negotiating with each other. And then only if they don't achieve a deal, then perhaps it would escalate to humans. But I can see a lot of negotiations being replaced by artificial intelligence and robotics together.

I'd love for you to take a crack at trying to define what negotiation is. How would you define negotiation?

That's a great point. Let me think creatively, like, instead of giving you the textbook definition, right? So we can talk about something more interesting today. So I think negotiation, well, from a commercial perspective, let me go into the normal standard definition, and then we can go more philosophical. From a commercial perspective is when you have 2 entities or 2 people or 2 parties that want to make a deal. And then the 2 parties need to agree on the terms of that deal, on how you achieve a deal. So negotiation happens when both the, for example, the buyer and the seller are ready to make the transaction. This is when you're negotiating. Instead, a common misconception that you'll see, Bryan, in the market is, and a lot of founders here listening, they will see this if there is a lot of founders from companies and startups listening. Yeah. If you don't have, if you're not a professional negotiator, and very few people are, you will tend to confuse the word negotiation with the word sale or buying, right? So people think it's all one thing. The convincing, the arguments that you need to make, how do you make the counterparty interested in your product or service? This is selling. That is persuasion. And it's very different. There are very different rules. for selling than there are for negotiating. So the first thing that one needs to understand is the difference between persuading, buying or selling, and negotiating. Negotiating is when 2 parties need to make a deal and they need to figure out how that deal is going to work together. So that alone, if one learns to understand what the difference is, then you already added a lot of skill to all the founders viewing here.

And so yeah, this very much is a startup and VC podcast. So what do you think most VCs and startup founders get wrong about negotiation?

A lot of them, they don't prepare enough, obviously, because, you know, if you're a founder, especially on the founder side and entrepreneur side, they prepare the deal, but they don't necessarily prepare the negotiation. They just try and go in. And secondly, which is a subset of that, a lot of people, whether they're founders or C-level executives of large enterprises, They mistake experience, accrued experience in business, with negotiation capability, which is also a very different thing that you don't want to focus— you don't want to give for granted that because you have 15 years of commercial experience, then you're going to be a good negotiator, although people will think they are, which is a massive error. And it's— that alone leaves money on the table. And then the third point that I see founders and C-level executives do, or national account managers or category managers or chief procurement officers is, and this is the biggest one, people do not focus necessarily, especially when the deal is incredibly important to them. As you can imagine, to be a raise, for example, or to be an acquisition, they don't focus on maximizing the deal. They focus on closing the deal. And the negotiator comes on board to maximize the deal, not to close the deal. Closing the deal is the worst case scenario for us as negotiators. It's my breakpoint. What I care about is maximizing the deal. Otherwise, I'm useless for the company that is calling us on board. So if they focus on this—

And yeah, what does that mean to maximize a deal?

So let's say that you work with a— you're a SaaS founder, and you're working with— you're selling your software. You're finally starting to work with a large enterprise, let's say Amazon on the other side, right? And you meet the procurement team. And in fact, You're already working with them, let's say. You've already been working with them for a couple of years, but this year costs have been piling up and have been increasing. So you know that your breakpoint is 5% in terms of price increase and you focus on achieving— but you could, you do some research and when you do some research, you see that you can probably achieve 7%, 8%, or 9% in terms of price increase. A lot of them, a lot of the companies would focus on just achieving the bare minimum 5%. There is a lot of companies that have even ruined their P&Ls. And I'm not talking about startups. I'm talking about very large enterprises that have ruined their P&Ls in order not to even push a price increase because they were afraid of it. And they were afraid of the no that the counterparty would give them. So they've ruined their margins because they didn't have the courage or the strength from a negotiation perspective, not power, in terms of being prepared and wanting to maximize, to be able to do, to put forward a negotiation. So someone who is a— there are 2 kinds of personalities in negotiation. One is a satisficer and the other one is a maximizer. A satisficer wants to get whatever allows them to get by, whatever allows them to make sure that the status quo is acceptable. The maximizer will not relent until they get the very best they can. And founders, they are generally maximizers, but they don't necessarily apply it in a negotiation because they feel the fear, they feel the pain. They see the risk. So sometimes they justify from a commercial perspective, oh, better 3.5. We'll lose 1.5, but we'll keep the client. But they say that from how the first meeting went. Instead, we as professional negotiators, we know that these meetings can take 5 to 12 weeks or 6 months even to close these kind of deals. So it's perfectly fine for the customer to say no and for you to be waiting there and then doing your next move so that you can maximize your deal. Did that answer your question, Bryan?

Yeah. And I guess one of the questions that came up as we talked about maximizing the deal is how do you balance kind of the short-term deal, like getting that 9% or whatever it is versus kind of the long-term relationship where some negotiations are like a single turn, right? The deal's done and we walk away and we never talk again, right? Like selling a house is a lot like that versus like a multi-turn. Like I'm talking to Amazon and I have to keep talking to their procurement team over and over again for For years and years. How do you kind of balance the long-term with the short-term?

Well, that is more of a matter of a— there is a couple of areas there. That is more of a matter of your commercial strategy. So when you decide 9 versus 5, are you becoming unsustainable for the client? Are you positioning yourself, you know, are you pricing yourself out of the market? So these are commercial decisions which must be done right, right? And this is how you decide to run your business. But then you have the negotiator there that if you decide that the market can absorb 9%, then you must achieve 9%. Then whether you keep the long-term or instead of 5%, which is what merely keeps you afloat, let's say. So if the market can take 9%, then you tell your negotiators in the team and you tell yourself, we achieved 9%. That is the minimum. This is how we work with this company. Then the second part of that is, how you achieve the negotiation and how you pursue that process. If you pursue that process on a yearly basis, and we, by the way, just to clarify, we only tend to work with these companies that work on a yearly basis together when they're forced to achieve an agreement. Imagine large beverage providers with massive retailers on billion-dollar negotiations. They must keep working together the year after and the year after. So the point in terms of how you defend the relationship is how you behave at the negotiation table. Are you going to use threats? Are you going to retaliate? Or are you going to try and approach it in a more partnership-led manner? Are you going to try and be a bit more transparent, for example? So based on your behavior, then you decide whether you protect the relationship or not. But then there is the other scenario, Ryan, which is the one I actually work in, where people must protect the relationship and they still threaten each other daily, even at a personal perspective. They do. They do. They see each other every single year. They've been knowing each other for 15 years. And every year they need to go to war. I mean, sometimes obviously the people in the teams change and you have new people and we inject new people on purpose sometimes. Sometimes we decide at the level of the corporate, at the procurement side and the sales side, we decide based on who we are supporting, we decide that our side will try not to build a relationship with the counterparty. Because if you retain distance with the counterparty, It is easier to structure a win-lose environment, which might be more conducive of the result that we want to achieve. So they decide not to discuss personal matters. They decide to just talk very formally to each other, for example. They decide to wear a tie all the time. So we play with those things because sometimes the relationship, as long as the company works commercially and they work well together, sometimes the relationship at the negotiator's level, it's not the most important thing. Sadly so, because I would have thought before starting this career that it would have been the opposite.

Really fascinating. So the whole canon in getting to yes is, you know, a BATNA, a win-win. Where do you think kind of the textbook is wrong and where it actually just costs people more money?

So I think that's a great question. It's a fantastic question. And so win-win is how you want business to be, how you want capitalism to be about. You want someone to find opportunities low cost to me, high value to you, and you want them to find something that is low cost to them and high value to me. And we want to be open. We want to build trust with each other. We want to be transparent. I'm going to use the same words as Yuri on the Getting to Yes. You want to be tough on the issues, but warm on the people, and you want to build trust to get to that deal that's maximizing for both parties. I give you as much as I can give you of the low cost stuff. And you give me as much as you can give me of the high-value stuff for you, high-value stuff for me and low cost to you. So this is what business should be about. However, it's a misrepresentation of reality in many, many occasions because sometimes there isn't a win-win deal to be made. There aren't variables that can magically be found that create value. Sometimes I'm on deals, Bryan, where they're negotiating a billion dollars of goods and there's only one variable in it. Which is price, inflation. You know, how much inflation are they going to give? How much inflation are they going to get? That's it. There's nothing else. And then beyond that, if things go wrong, then there is retaliation where the retailer starts removing all the products of the supplier, for example. So now you can have all the elements of a win-win relationship, which is long-term relationship, reciprocal trust that should be there between the parties, A high complexity in the deal. But if you only have one variable, you're going to go and negotiate into a win-lose context where you have 2 people that are against each other, 2 companies that are against each other. One wants to advocate a 9% price increase and the counterparty wants a -5% deflation. Now that, Brian, I find that to be a lot, you know, a very sophisticated game because for the founders, it's a lot more about win-win. You want to find deals that work for your employees. And this is how I deal as a founder myself. You want to find deals that work for your employees, that work for your suppliers, that work for your client. You want to apply creativity. You want to maximize the deal. And that should be good for everyone, even at the cost of sometimes leaving a little bit of money on the table because that's money you're investing towards a more fruitful relationship in future. So this is how it is usually when you create partnerships. But when you're embedded in a large corporate negotiation, and you only got that one variable that you need to play with, you're in an adversarial win-lose context. Now, what comes then into this particular negotiation, which is what we get paid to do, because they're the hardest negotiations, if you think about it, is how do you read the counterparty's breakpoint? So what is their actual minimum? When they say -5%, how do I read their behavior that their actual minimum might be 5, a good 10 points? difference on the billion-dollar deal, which is $100 million difference, my job is to read that. What is the minimum? 5, maybe even 11, maybe even more than my opening position, maybe the ad budget. Why? Because last year there was example, let's say one of the raw materials that went up over the last few years, cocoa and coffee, right? If cocoa goes up 40%, 50%, 100%, 300% in terms of price, it went from $2,000 You know that buyers will be in a position where they need to spend the money. They'll tell you mind deflation and they'll tell you 0% or 2%. You know that if they still want to work with you, they've created a budget for them to spend the money to accept your proposal or to work within your proposal. Some of them, they don't even prepare themselves. They anchor themselves to the first opening proposal that we put on the table if you're the more negotiated, the more sophisticated counterparty. So you go into a place where reading the counterparty's breakpoint matters, where doing things like power shift really matters, as in how are you perceived? Because there is a lot of market leaders that are perceived as followers at the negotiation table. They do not bring the power of their brand. And I wrote an article as well about David and Goliath at the table. You know, when smaller companies, startups, they work with larger enterprises. That is a matter of power shift to bring this to the audience as well. So how do you carry yourself when you're at the table? Are you carrying the executive authority, the gravitas that it requires when you go and deal with a chief procurement officer or with the head buyer or with the GM of this large S&P 500 company that might mean the future for your business? Or are you carrying yourself with the creativity and excitement that you typically are as a founder? Both are important. You need to decide when you're the founder, you know, that makes the jokes, makes things happen, gets the team excited, and when you are Alex the negotiator who is there to maximize the deal. And large corporates will recognize those behaviors. So it's very important that, again, you look at the breakpoint of the counterparties, you use things as in how you're perceived in terms of power, and you do power shifts if necessary. So you must decide in your planning How do you want to be perceived? You want to be perceived as more dominant, as neutral, as submissive? And when we have large teams that we follow, we create a corporate message, just like you would do for public relations crisis management. We do it for our teams that we follow. So everyone must speak in a certain way, must write emails in a certain way, which if necessary, give you more or less assertiveness. And I'm not saying you always need to be more dominant, not at all. Some negotiations, the strategy is to be submissive because that's what we want. Sometimes that's what we decide, as long as you decide it. So power shift, again, in those negotiations is incredibly important. I'm writing a book on this, by the way, on all the negotiation strategies called The Negotiation Strategy Playbook. Then the other key thing is how do you make threats? Threats are so important in these negotiations. We see Donald Trump making them all the time. He makes them so often that people don't believe him very much anymore because he makes them and then calls them off, right? So he's built now a reputation for that. He uses a lot of textbook commercial negotiation moves in those things. So you want to know, how do you make threats and how do you receive threats? People must think, when I receive a threat, what do I do? Do I just say, thank you, I'll let you know? Or do you counter threat immediately? Or do you tell them that they can't talk to you that way and they're unable, that a threat to your company will mean operational disruption for everybody, which will cost you the good part of $125 million if we do not follow through a process which is constructive and that works for both parties. So we prepare those things in advance. So how do you make threats? How do you receive those threats? And how do you carry the different steps of your negotiation? Also, if it's a long-term negotiation, or if it's a negotiation that happens in a few meetings, how do you structure your tactical flow in terms of how do you embed, how do you know when you make your first proposal, which you already know is going to be rejected, When are you going to make your concessions? When are you going to make your threats? When are you going to actually retaliate in terms of removing budget? When are you going to, after you make the threat, very important, how are you going to activate it at the table? So I'm making you a threat about I'm going to remove $25 million of budgets from this and that promotion. Yeah, it's a threat until it's a threat. But then sometimes the companies that we support, sometimes we decide to go and have a fight with one of the key clients because they need to be reeducated. So these clients, this particular client, they get the threat that actually gets executed because then they remember and then the following year they'll follow through. They'll jump when we say jump, for example. So lots of things that must be planned and prepared during these negotiations.

Yeah.

And also, how do you leave? How do you give at the end of the negotiation? How do you start preconditioning and positioning the following negotiation when you'll start it again?

One of the fascinating things about learning about negotiation are the cognitive biases that humans have. What are some of your favorite biases to talk about?

It's actually an exercise we do in our trainings, in our workshops. So we give them the top 24 biases and we ask people, where have you seen them? How did they happen in your life and in your personal and professional life, for example? One of the biggest biases that is textbook negotiation and people don't even know about it is anchoring. which is typically in a negotiation. In fact, I'm going to ask you, Bryan, if you're in a negotiation, what do you think is best? Is it best that you put your proposal on the table first, or you would ask the counterparty to put their proposal on the table first? Let's say you're in a price increase negotiation, you're representing a SaaS company, and you need to announce your price increase. What would you do? You would put yours, or you would ask the counterparty, what do they think is best to do this year?

I think it probably depends on the power between the two parties, how big the price increase is. You know, if you can have a big anchoring bias, right, where it is a big price increase, let's say it's a 10% price increase. Yeah, you might want to anchor at 20 and then concede to 10 or something like that. But yeah, I mean, you're the master, you tell us.

Just to, you know, to get the audience thinking as well. So they're gonna ask themselves the same question, right? So the question is, regardless, what you said now is very open, right? So you open at 20 to then land at 10, for example. But the point is, do we want to Anchor with our number or ask the counterparty to anchor themselves. So what we recommend is when you know the market and you know what the numbers are, it is worth that you put your number on the table first because that will anchor your counterparty to that number. Just this morning, actually, in a real estate negotiation for a large enterprise where they acquire stores for their retail shops, and they received A few weeks back or a few months back, no, I think it was just a few weeks back, they told me they received a significant message from one of the owners of one of their retail stores that said, this year, we're going to have to significantly increase your rent. Right? So now the entire company was scrambling to find how do we increase the rent, where do we find the budgets and everything else. So that is the power of anchoring expectations. And that's what we do instead. Once we actually support the company, because the company called us because they didn't have a plan in place. And what I told them is, well, you should have anchored them before they anchored you and told them this year prices are going to decrease and we're going to have challenges. If you come to us with price increases, you're going to have a problem. So now the people that were going to increase their prices, they were going to come with instead of say 10% to just make a number, they might have gone with 5% because they were, well, you know, they already told us. that they're going to struggle with a price increase. Let's go with 5. Let's end with 3. And interestingly, these large corporates, they're going to maybe then put their budgets on people that did not wound them equally. So they're going to ask someone else 15 to make up for your shortfall with you of 5. So our job sometimes is also to contend those things. And one big heuristic bias is anchoring. So who starts speaking first? How do you anchor your numbers, which then they become the leading of your narrative in those negotiations. Another big one is—

Yeah, so lead with your number, try to anchor the other party basically, if you can. Are there any other biases that are your favorites?

Yes, there is another one, which is the context bias, which is how do you manipulate the context that you're in? And sometimes unfortunately, in win-lose negotiation, it's used in an uncomfortable manner. So it's about how people dress. It's about creating a distance, like someone looking more formal, than the counterparty. Or sometimes they use aircon to make that room very cold, for example, or they put the sun in people's eyes to make them uncomfortable during that negotiation. They use buildings as well and furniture so that then it can give a certain message to the person that is walking in about who's in charge. So all these things is context creation. People create a context so that then people respond to that. And you see that, you know, for example, in financial services, you see this massive building, there's massive banks. It happened to me when I was selling in Europe, I was selling to French banks and you go to this massive area called La Défense and you get into these banks that are like massive high floors, you know, like I had to actually get on the steps to get to the CEO's desk. So you feel like you're meeting a head of state really. And I was only a salesperson at the time, merely selling strategy consulting. So the moment you actually walk into these places, they're already anchoring your perception of the importance of that deal or your counterparty, which is something that you can use in your favor if you want to structure it. And you must decide, if you want to control your brain, you must decide how to make sure it does not anchor you.

Tell me about a negotiation you got badly wrong.

So they always ask me about these ones. There is one where I look back and I can't pinpoint one where it went like completely wrong because when I'm an advisor, I tend to be quite clear with the companies that we support. But I'm like, look, there is this thing, there is this $500 million deal. If you push, there is a 40% chance that we're gonna make $5 more million. If you don't push, there is a 100% chance that we're not gonna make them. If we go somewhere in between, there is a 30% chance that we could make somewhere in between $1 and $3 million, right? And also there is a stake that we're gonna lose X, Y, and Z. So for me, when I give this advice and I give people the options to choose from, you know, CEO, commercial directors, national account managers, then ultimately it's their commercial decision in terms of taking the risk because I can quite read the different percentages and options. So I can't tell myself I got it wrong because I never go with, I mean, sometimes I do and I tend to get it right when I'm like, look, this is a 95% chance confidence. Go for it. Otherwise, you're leaving money on the table. But there is one negotiation that I should have read my client better. Where we were supporting a large family-owned business, and it's about a $400 million company. And I was directly supporting the CEO, who is now a very good friend of mine. And we were recommending them to go to war with their most important client. In fact, it was their founding client. And I've given them all the script on how to do so. I've given them the tactics. I've given them the tactical flow, I've given them the 4 or 5 different strategies on how to make that happen. And that would have required a lot of very tense and frightful and uncomfortable meetings with the counterparty CEO. So he had to behave that way. And he did. And he started doing so in the first few weeks of the negotiation. But then things got really tense, as I was expecting. And we were starting to get retaliation back. And we were starting to actually risk the business, which was a Totally normal within my plan. And then what I did, Brian, is all of a sudden, because he didn't have the confidence of the board to go as hard as I would've wanted them to, then he started making massive concessions in the midst of the tension that we had created. So now there's nothing worse than you creating fear and tension and commercial pressure, and then all of a sudden you capitulate. Because now You capitulate when you start getting some threats from the counterparty, because now you're teaching the counterparty that every time they will raise their voice, or every time they'll threaten you, you'll do what they tell you to do, especially after you created all this mess. So unfortunately, the CEO had to capitulate because the board didn't follow him on that. He was like, also he was like 60% in, 40% out. He didn't really want to do it. So then that actually didn't lead to a good result. So I should have read the board better. I should have read that the CEO did not have the full decision-making power. Because we led them onto a path that they did not have the risk appetite to get through. And that cost them money. They kept the client, but it cost them in reputation and it cost them in the money that they needed to concede. And I think we left money on the table. I think we had, if we pursued that strategy, we would've had the cards to actually make a significant reeducation of that client. But that didn't work. And I should have read it better at the beginning and not recommend such an approach.

Let's wrap up with some rapid-fire questions, which I've prepared and are negotiation-related. So they'll be fun. You ready?

Yes, I'm ready.

What is the single most expensive word in any negotiation?

Let me think, because I rarely think in absolutisms or, you know, always and always this, always that. Let me think. I think yes. So it's yes, because it's always said too early and to the detriment of no. Whereas no is where a negotiation begins. And it's perfectly normal to say so. If you say it in the right way, you do not harm relationships. In fact, you gain respect in commercial relationships when you're able to say no in an understandable manner. So it is something that people should own more. And they're afraid of the no because they're afraid of the consequences that amygdala activates. And they say yes too much and too fast and too first, you know, so they should use it a lot less.

What's a tell, physical or verbal, that means the other side is about to fold?

Massive one. Is you know when you see people nodding a little bit? Like, can you see this light nod in my my head as as I'm nodding slightly, almost imperceptibly?

Hmm. That's that's a light nod.

So you're mentioning a figure. You're mentioning a concession. Let's say you were on nine percent and you mentioned seven, right? And then you see out of the three four negotiators on the other side someone starts nodding slightly. So on these negotiations I stop. I told my team. I said we stop. We do not make any more concessions. And we had, we had another $20 million to concede. We were like, nope, we don't move. Now we go hard and we wait because I know that some of these people, they consider this deal acceptable with a 70% confidence. But when you see it in one person, then you hear the nod vocally on the phone. You know that people are starting to consider that deal. Could you hear? Like that. You know they're listening to you. When you instead making unacceptable proposals, people reject it immediately or they stay in silence or you can see they get angry. angry on their microfacial expressions. Instead, when people start finding it acceptable, you know you're into your zone, or at least you can bet you're on your zone of potential agreement. So that gives you a lot of behavioral evidence for me to tell my team to stop making concessions and save a lot of money.

What is the most overrated tactic taught in every negotiation seminar?

Win-win. Win-win negotiation.

Win-win. Oh, okay. Gotcha.

Yeah. We've talked about it. I was saying it's win-win because people come out of a lot of negotiation workshops thinking they can do win-win all the time. It's important to know, it's important to own it, but it's also important to understand when it's not a win-win. There's no win-win, then you just don't do win-win. You just go with lose.

So you read microexpressions for a living. So the last person who lied to your face in a deal, did you call it in the room or did you bank it?

No, you never call it. You don't want people to know you know. It's like if you're playing poker, right? And I understand you got nothing. I'm not going to tell you, I know you got nothing unless you want to rattle the counterparty, but that's poker, right? I want people to experience the freedom of being right without knowing they're being right. That is a lot more sophisticated. If you call it— like some negotiators, Brian, they're in and they're like, I know you're wrong. I know you don't have the cards to do the deal. I know we are more powerful than you. Never do that in a negotiation. Never. Because what you're going to do in that case is you're going to put an animal, a wounded animal against the corner. And in evolutionary biology, whenever you put— there's nothing more deadly and threatening than a wounded animal in a corner. You're going to make people lose face when you do that. And they're going to give you everything they got in order for them to protect themselves or their reputation or for them not to lose face. So you always get to give people a golden bridge. It's called the negotiation for them to go back on their steps. Instead, if you blame people, if you finger point people and you're like, I know you're lying. I know, I know. I know you don't have the cards. People will, you know, I've seen people even deciding to self-destruct their company rather than conceding because now you're hurting the reputation and you don't want to hurt, you don't want to insult people. You want them to even feel at the end of a negotiation that they won. But the best thing you do once you get information, you keep it in your head, you write it down and you use that to inform your next negotiation steps.

Love that. Fill in the blanks. Founders chronically over-negotiate blank and under-negotiate blank.

Salaries and supply chains.

Highest leverage sentence to say when you have zero leverage?

It's very specific. So I wouldn't, I can't recommend a specific sentence that you do that or that you use. It's not that simple. But one approach that you can do is to use sentences that make you look bigger than you are. So it's called the, what's that fish called? The bullfish strategy? You know, when you like—

Pufferfish, you puff yourself up.

Pufferfish, yeah. You puff yourself up. It's called the pufferfish. So you create, it's actually a thing. So you create a narrative around, that's the power shift around trying to look bigger, but it's never a sentence, you know, it's a narrative across different people in your team, across news releases and public relations communication. So you got to use the media, everything else, so it makes you look bigger than you actually are. And that gives you a shred of leverage. Another thing that you can do on the opposite is to admit you've got no leverage whatsoever. So, you know, to just look like, you know, you got nothing and hope on the counterparties than mercy or willingness to do a deal with you. It's not a great strategy to go with, but sometimes that's what wins when you actually— if you actually technically have zero leverage, it is used by biology that you just look dead on the floor, and then hopefully people won't kill you then. They will let you live, hoping that you will reciprocate in future for their kindness.

Is there a country or a culture that out-negotiates everyone else?

When I supported Middle East negotiators, they're quite good. They're quite naturally good at negotiations. They've got it embedded in them, the concessions, proposals. They want that even. It's not culturally frowned upon as it might be in the US or in Europe where you're like, negotiate? That is a cultural trait that you're expected to do. So I've seen them, they're at a level where it's less hard to impart in them the software of negotiation in their brain than it is with culture that considers that it's wrong to make proposals and concessions and say no and so on and so forth. Because now you're dealing in the West and in the US and Europe with preconceived notions that I'm not supposed to make concessions or say no to people.

Yeah, that is a kind of a Western European American kind of thing where there's a sense of like justice maybe. where you just give me your highest and best offer and I'll give you my highest and best offer, you know, and we'll just meet in the middle and like call it a day. It's not in our culture to sort of haggle back and forth. It's almost like rude in a way.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And, you know, I can see how that is the case, Brian, for, again, you must understand the context you're in. Are you in a binary supplier-client negotiation where things must be negotiated? Or are you, you know, at a founder event where you're you know, you need to show your status. Sometimes negotiating too much in certain situations can actually lower your status. But to those listening, don't use this as an excuse not to negotiate. You know, people must negotiate for their most important deals. And if you can negotiate well in terms of haggling and in a win-lose context, then you can have the respect that is required when you must make complex deals. You've got to be in a position where you're able to flawlessly and elegantly and respectfully say no to people. And people that say no for a living, like negotiators, they are able to say to someone without offending them, we can't do this. What we can do is this, without conflict. Instead, those that cannot do it because they're bound to the social society standards, society norms and rules, they will feel stressed when they do it. They will activate their amygdala. That stress, that nervous system activation of sympathetic reaction will then give, you know, will be contagious to the counterparty. The counterparty will have their amygdala activated. And it'll be a train crash and it'll be painful and weird to watch. So that's why as an experienced negotiator, that allows you to do the very best, most sophisticated win-win deal because you own the no, you own the structure of the deal, and you can do it with your very best intention when you're able to say that.

Put a real number on the most value you've personally created in a single negotiation.

Probably about $20, $22 million.

And that's the power of negotiation is creating— You can create tens of millions of dollars of value in one go. Yeah.

I mean, it took 6 months to make it happen, and it was a billion-dollar deal. So it was a small percentage on a large deal. But you know what? That's what I tell the CEOs and the companies that we work with, because we take a percentage on those savings as well, depending on the deal that we have. Is that a fixed fee or a mix of fixed plus performance on the savings that we make or the EBIT that we generate? And I tell CEOs when I said, look, when I walk into your building, when I walk into your company, I don't want you to see an expensive boutique consultancy. I want you to see millions of EBIT generated for you. I want you to look at Alex and say, this guy is a person that walks in and he's worth $5 million of EBIT for my business. And yes, you must give us a percentage of that and we're going to take it, otherwise we're not going to do the work, but you got to see the EBIT. And it's very lucky, Brian, to work in my line of business if you enjoy this line of business and if you're good at it and if you're competent. Yeah. Because like you said, it's easy to demonstrate the value you give when you work in marketing. And I mean, marketing, you can do the value, you know, you create, you know, lead gen or so when you work in sales as well. But there is a lot of other professions like leadership or, you know, soft skills or many other things that it's a lot harder to show your ROI. It's a lot harder.

Really enjoyed the conversation, Alex. We've been wanting to do the podcast for a while, so I appreciate you taking the time on an evening and In Europe. Where can folks find you online?

So they can find us at thecommercializer.com with an S for the American friends and alexadamo.com if you want to talk directly to me and you can, you just put the box there and then the team or I will reach out. We got an Instagram handle as well, Alex_Adamo_. And they can find my book as well if they're interested, which we just wrote on. I personally, we didn't talk about this, Brian, but as you know, I in the past personally developed panic attacks and anxiety due to not being a negotiator, but being an entrepreneur with a company that was growing and growing. I didn't have the tools to deal with growing demands and growing stress. So I developed anxiety, panic attacks, and I went into this journey about discovering what is the nervous system? How does our brain work under stress and under pressure? And I've put together the pillars of the negotiator's mindset to help people that, you know, they have less resources than me than traveling around the world, going on to all the big gurus and understand, you know, what's meditation, what's exercise, the importance of sleep, the importance of cold therapy. I met Wim Hof and I went to all these other ones there. So it's, it's an interesting book that can allow you to maximize performance under pressure. And we now made it the pillar as well of our, of our approach because we believe that, you know, you can know all the methodology in the world and the execution and you can be really good at these things, but if your hands are shaking at the table and you cannot stay calm, Then you can't maximize the deal. You must be able to actually deactivate your amygdala, activate your prefrontal cortex at will. And this is what excites me nowadays, the biology of the brain and then connecting it to tech things to then make it very scalable. And I forgot to say the name of the book, The Negotiator's Mindset from myself, Alex Adamo. But Brian, thank you so much for having me today. It was an absolute pleasure to talk to each other. It's so good.

Likewise. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Bye-bye.