#113: Welcome To Your FIRST Day At Harvard! Join My Class & Learn How To Get The BEST Deal Every Time with Chris Voss

Sales is trying to get the words I want or I need into somebody's head. And the minute you got it there, now you're in a negotiation. Time is a commodity. Most people think they're only in a negotiation if money becomes involved. By then, you've been in the negotiation for a while. You didn't even know it. We had SWAT teams way before we had hostage negotiators. We did this whole projection bias thing. We don't want to die, therefore they don't want to die. So all we got to do is show up, surround the house, and threaten to kill them. And they'll come out because we don't want to die, therefore they don't want to die. And people were getting killed right and left. Why? Because in a business world, people would die to preserve their autonomy. And in the hostage negotiation world, we found that out to be literally be true.

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I'm so excited you're here today.

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A lot of people have asked me.

About teaching at Harvard, and today I'm going to take you into one of our classes. This is actually a class that we just had. And I'm super excited because not only do you get to see or hear what it's like being in class at.

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But you also get to hear from one of my absolute favorite guests, dear friend, amazing human being, and just complete all star. I'm so excited to let you know that we've got Chris Voss yet again live and coming at you live from Harvard. He is the best, and you are going to love it. Get ready. You're coming behind the scenes with me right now.

So everyone, I mean, this man needs no introduction, by the way. Chris is known as the master negotiator, a title earned throughout his time serving as the lead crisis negotiator for the New York City division of the FBI, and then as the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI, where he helped develop the skills still used today across FBI hostage negotiators. He proceeded to teach business negotiation at USC, Georgetown, and Harvard Business School. In 2008, Chris founded the Black Swan Group, which specializes in teaching you how to never leave money on the table and by using hostage negotiation techniques. In May 2016, he published the national bestseller, this book is Bomb. If you haven't read it yet you have to never split the difference negotiation as if your life depended on it. To teach people everywhere how to apply these life changing hostage negotiation techniques in their daily lives. He is proficient in negotiating with real terrorists, giving him plenty of context to help in the corporate world where, where companies seem to get legally taken hostage all the time. Chris, thank you so, so much. We are so appreciative that you're here today.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Just did a presentation last week, sort of top 10 negotiation lines and what's behind them. So I'll go into that in a second. But you know, the question always comes up, what's the difference between negotiation and sales? And I realized it had been staring me in the face for a long time because we would contend, I would contend that anytime the words I want or I need or in brain are coming across your lips, you're in a negotiation. I want a cup of coffee, I need directions. I want a better seat in a restaurant. I want a free upgrade to the suite in the hotel. And if there's any doubt, I don't know if you've seen me talk about this before, whether or not you're in a negotiation when you order a cup of coffee. I met a guy several years ago who started this global phenomenon he referred to as secrets, which was send me your secrets anonymously, I'll share them with the world. Somebody struggling with the same thing you're struggling with. Other people need to know that. And he said he received a brand new in the wrapper coffee cup from Starbucks with a note that said, I give decaf to people who are mean to me. And I told that story enough times. And I had people then who've been waiters or waitresses in restaurants say, yeah, you know, we had a customer at night who was a real jerk and they ordered decaf. After dinner, we brought them regular coffee. So implementation is where the negotiation is. Right? So then sales to negotiation. Sales is trying to get the words I want or I need into somebody's head in a minute. You got it there. Now you're in a negotiation. So there's a big difference there. Maybe not a lot of big moments. And that would also apply to marketing. Marketing is one to many. Sales is one to one. But once I want or I need or in somebody's head, you're in a negotiation. And I'll fire this question out to the group. What's the commodity that's at stake in every negotiation? Time Exactly. Time. If you're trying to get somebody to take an action, to do something, to even think something, it requires that time. So time is a commodity. Most people think that you're only in a negotiation if money becomes involved. By then you've been in the negotiation for a while. You didn't even know it. All right, so top 10 lines. First one is now a bad time to talk. And that's a no oriented question. The whole evolution of the no oriented questions started with Jim Camp, folks. Start with no. I remember reading that about 2002, and camp's whole contention not that you got people to say no, but that letting them know up front that it was okay to say no, it preserved their autonomy. That was the first time that I was 1000% convinced that hostage negotiation applied to business negotiation. Because here Camp wrote this real successful business book back in 2002, which crushed it. It was world changing. Stop trying to get people to say yes. Stop trying to get them it's okay if they say yes, but tell them right up front, okay if they say no. He said that preserves their autonomy. And he says people will die over their autonomy. Die for it. And I thought, yeah, exactly. That's why we got hostage negotiators. We had SWAT teams way before we had hostage negotiators. You know, we did this whole projection bias thing. We don't want to die, therefore they don't want to die. So all we got to do is show up, surround the house, and threaten to kill them. And they'll come out because we don't want to die, therefore they don't want to die. And people were getting killed right and left. Why? Because as Camp would say, in a business world, people would die to preserve their autonomy. And in the hostage negotiation world, we found that out to be literally be true. So I thought, wow, this dude's onto something. But he was just. Just let him know it's okay to say no and then try to get him to agree. He called it preserving the right to veto. I mean, Jim sort of wrote stuff as he thought, and he'd been an Air Force pilot and a football player and a football coach and a salesman. So, you know, his book was a mishmash of all that kind of thinking. And once he thought of something when he was fishing, and so he called it a strip line because he was bone fishing, and you had to put a knife on the. On the line and strip stuff off of it. So, you know Kurt Doom while he was fishing. So it was a strip line. So thinking it was a mess, but it was really good stuff overall. So then, you know, we started talking about it internally. And I remember talking with Marty Evelsizer, who was female hostage, FBI hostage, in charge of the Pittsburgh division of the FBI's negotiation team. And Marty was. Let me tell you something. I did, and I sound similar. I want to know if it's what you're talking about. So Marty was so well loved by the Pittsburgh Police Department in Pittsburgh that they invited her to come in and sit on their selection board for hostage negotiators in a police department. Now, this is unheard of, one of the few things that the media tends to get right about law enforcement. And the FBI is pretty much. The FBI doesn't get along with local law enforcement. We have a tendency to just not get along. Some of it's our fault, some of it's their fault. There's no shortage of fault on any side of an issue. But that's really true. So for the Pittsburgh Police Department to openly ask Marty come in and sit on their selection board is monstrous. I mean, it's almost unprecedented community collaboration. And it made her look really good, and it made Pittsburgh FBI look really good. And it embarrassed her supervisor because he was a bureaucratic pencil neck jerk. And instead of upping his game, he just wanted to diminish her. So she finds out that she's got a meeting schedule with her immediate supervisor. And she checks with the secretary and says, why am I meeting with Joe Schmuck? And the secretary says, because he's gonna relieve you of your duties from the negotiation team. He's planning on firing you from the team. The team is an extra, quote, extracurricular activity. It's an additional duty. She has a day job, if you will, as an investigator. He's got the authority to do this at will. He can just say, you know, she belongs to me. She's not paying attention to her regular duties in the story. Nobody can say anything. And so she walks into his office knowing that her head's on a chopping block in terms of the negotiation team. And she says to him a no oriented question that I would never, ever have had the courage to ask. And most people are really scared of these until they understand how powerful they are. She says to him, do you want the FBI to be embarrassed? Now that sounds like the biggest setup question possible. Like, I can't. I imagine her supervisor bursting into flames and screaming at her over this. Because that's what our amygdala does to us. It imagines new stuff, scares the Hell out of us. But it's an oriented question. So it doesn't. It always works. Always. And he, and he just sits back and goes, no. And he steeples like this, which John, I hope you don't do this, because this is what somebody does when they feel large and in charge. Like when somebody does this, they really feeling really good about themselves in the moment. Really good. And he sits back and he steeples and he goes, no. And she follows it up with the perfect question, which is deference. There's great power in deference. Using negotiations about power, you are leaving money on the table. She says, what do you want me to do? And he says, you know, just don't let this stuff interfere in your investigations. Now get out of my office. Which means she kept her job. So she tells me this story and she says, is that what I did? Did I do the start with no thing? I go, no, you did something a lot better. I don't know what the hell it is, but we're going to figure it out. And we started experimenting with this no oriented stuff. And by then, now I'm teaching at Georgetown. I start working into the teaching and people are, are dropping it in right and left and using it and just game changing. And so we go with, it's now a bad time to talk. Instead of now, have you got a few minutes to talk? Which is yes oriented. And if you haven't intentionally gotten out of asking yes questions, you're probably yes addict. And yes is always used to trap people. And every one of you have been trapped by yes at some point in time and you haven't forgotten it. And so you instantly, every person on the planet, having been trapped by this yes momentum crap, or this yes nonsense, or mere agreement as it's sometimes known. And it's something even Robert Cialdini, and he and I both spoke at the same event last week. And I know Cialdini, Cialdini even thinks this stuff is okay, but somebody tricked you with it. Like, my son still has a memory when somebody talked him out of his 1 favorite baseball cards at age 8 using this yes crap nonsense. Everybody's been stung by it. So even though you might not be trying to trap people with yes, somebody else has trapped them. Somebody else has trapped you. So when a voice on the other end of the phone calls and says, have you got a few minutes to talk? Your first instinct is like, my God, how long is it? A few minutes. What do you want to talk about? About how do I get out of this? What if I want to talk to you, but I don't want to talk about what you want to talk about. I mean, it goes on and on and on and on. And, you know, I could go on for the next hour about how bad this is, but you got to start looking at it yourself. So the complete opposite. Is now a bad time to talk? You'd be shocked. There's only one or two answers you get from, is now a bad time to talk? They'll hesitate and they'll go, no, no, no. It's never a bad time to talk to you. What do you got? And you've got their complete and undivided attention for about 7 to 10 seconds, which doesn't relieve you of the other obligations. But you just. Instead of them saying to themselves, oh, my God, how long is a few minutes? How do I get off the phone? All this stuff. You get their attention instantly. The other reaction is they go, yeah, it is. As a matter of fact, it is a bad time, but I could talk tomorrow at too which now they, you just got a scheduled appointment for their undivided attention, which is what you want in the first place. And I've seen some chatter on LinkedIn that just. If. If I thought. If you thought about what you wrote. You have to be astonished. On LinkedIn, there's this once I saw this ongoing conversation criticizing, is now a bad time to talk? And somebody wrote in, what if they say yes? You don't want them to say. You don't want to give them the chance to say yes to that. And I thought, if they said yes to that, do you really want to be talking to them? I mean, it's really, really hard for people to say yes because of this whole yes momentum nonsense. Sometimes I can get you to say no when you should say yes because it would be in your best interest to say yes, but you're so worried about it, you won't do it. Sometimes I've seen negotiations where one person said, did you take the Stuttgart analysis into account in your pricing? I just made that up. And they should not deny that. If they'd have said yes to that, they'd been in a better position. But they said no when the person asking them knew that they didn't. And if they would have said yes, they could have said yes. We took it into account, and it completely justifies our price, and it completely justifies how we got there.

But.

But since it's so hard to say yes, even what's in someone's best interest to say yes, like if I don't like you. I'm going to start asking you questions you should say yes to just so I can torture you because I know you're going to go like. I mean, I do that on purpose sometimes when somebody really annoys me. That's how hard it is. That's what people go through just to say yes to stuff. So it's now a bad time to talk. You should. First of all, it's good practice. Secondly, you got nothing at stake and it's a way for you to start road testing no warranted questions to see if it's any good. And then followed up on, we go with have you given up on X? And is it a ridiculous idea? Because I never say, is this a good idea? I say, is it a ridiculous idea? And have you given up on when we really started to expand oriented questions, one of my students at Georgetown was doing, he was with the Republican fundraising committee in the second Obama election and where he worked for them, they were dialing for dollars at night, calling potential donors, ask them three questions, ask for the commitment, which is the yes momentum. Ask for three yeses in a row and they got to say yes to your final ask because otherwise they're violating their own personal consistency. And that's why it works. That's what the crap is behind that theory. The vast majority of sales teams do it. Vast majority of fundraising teams do it. Everybody does it. Because it's called the yes momentum. And it sounds really good to you and it's just really bad for the other side. But since it sounds good to you, you want to do it? Yeah, I want momentum. I want each yes to be a micro agreement that acts as a tie down where they have to give me the money at the end. They have to. Otherwise it's a violation of what Cialdini calls consistency. And they can't do it. They'll just say yes because Cialdini said they would. So he goes to their fundraising committee that night and changes all the yes questions to no questions. And the first yes question was, would you like to see the Republicans back in the White House in November? And he changed it to have you given up on taking the White House back in November? And he ran the yes script alongside the no script side by side. And the no script got a 23% higher donation rate that night. And so the bosses and the managers came in the morning and he proudly showed the results of his experiment that showed that no oriented questions got more money. And they looked at him and said that was a fluke. That's not how we do things. Don't ever do that again or we'll fire you. How stupid is that? Right? But that's what happened, and that's why have you given up on Is the number one way to restart a conversation where someone is ghosting you. And I guarantee you they will respond within three to five minutes. And so there's two things to remember. It's context driven, which means if you haven't been in the conversation with them for a while, they can't have given up on it because they never got started. And I see a lot of people, somebody tries to use my skills on me, I don't mind unless they're trying to cheat me. And if the opening line to me is have you given up on? When it's their opening line, I immediately don't trust them. And just to screw with them, I answer, yes, make their head explode. Teach them a lesson. Now, the other thing to know about that, again, context. People start stop communicating with you for only one reason. And that reason has two contributing factors. And the reason is communicating with you is doing them no good, because if it was doing them some good, they'd still be communicating with you. So they go dark on you or they ghost you because talking to you is useless. Now, it'd be useless for one of two reasons. And the first reason is you're not listening. And if you're not listening, why should they talk to you? You deserve to be ghosted. So there's a really good chance that if you restart the conversation with have you given up on? And you go back to the communication that you had with them before. There's a saying the system you were employing is perfectly designed to give you the outcome that you achieved. Well, if they stopped talking to you, you probably brought it on yourself. And if you go back to that, then you deserve to be ghosted. So you have to review your communication. Up to that point, you were probably pitching. You're probably making an argument, you're probably making your case. You're probably explaining. And Reagan said, if you're explaining, you're losing. And they probably had been indicating to you for a while that you weren't listening and you didn't pay attention to that either. So I promise you that to have you given up on actually, it doesn't literally work every time. It literally misfires about one time in a thousand, and that's a higher batting average than you will get anywhere else with anything else you try. Nothing is guaranteed. But I was advising a woman a couple years ago that was pitching an investment product to one of the assistant coaches for the Raiders when they were in Oakland. She had a lot of professional football connections and I said, send him a text. She said, he's not getting back to me. I said, send him a text. Have you given up on making the investment in my company? I promise you he's going to respond in three to five minutes. And he did. And then she went back to the same pitch that turned him off in the first place and that was the last time she ever heard from the guy. I said there were two reasons. The other reason talking to you isn't doing them any good is on their side of the table. They've lost the ability to get anything done and they're embarrassed. And most people would rather die than be embarrassed. I mean, literally, that's why the phrase I die of embarrassment comes from. So they're not going to tell you that because it's embarrassing. That's why they're not getting back to you. The one time we used this, we were coaching a company that was in the middle of a negotiation. They'd actually not in the middle of a negotiation, they'd finished it. They were providing a health product to Coca Cola and the only thing that remained was getting the documents signed and that my client says we got to get this signed by the end of the calendar year. Otherwise they're in a new calendar year and the deal falls off the table and it's going to really hurt this guy and I need to know, I think he was got in touch with us in November.

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Are coming up, I need to know if we can get this signed. So I go, awesome. Send the guy a text that says, have you given up on getting a contract signed by the end of the calendar year? I guarantee he's going to respond within three to five minutes. Sends a text and nothing, Nothing. No response. And he gets back to me. He says it didn't work. I go, actually it did work. The answer is yes. And he's embarrassed to tell you. And he goes, oh, okay. So we got it. He said, but this is, you know, he's got to sign his contract. We talked it through. It's gonna hurt him if he doesn't sign it. And I said, well I can tell you what's Going on on the other side, he's got problems inside and he's probably fighting for his professional career. And so his choice is if he doesn't sign your deal, his hand gets cut off. If he does sign it, he gets shot in the head and it kills him. So just the fact that it's going to hurt him ain't enough because the dude is fighting for his life. So now you know that you're smarter than you were before. You don't always get the answer you want, but when you go from uncertainty to certainty, you're always smarter. So send this guy another email and say, look, you know, with all this nonsense going on this year, says, let's just let the year finish out. After the first of the year, let's get together, I'm going to buy you a steak and a beer. Come on out of Coca Cola headquarters, we'll go out to a restaurant. I promise I won't talk business. We'll just have a steak and a beer and we'll have a few laughs. I said, if you get this guy to agree to this, get him to come outside, he'll tell you what the problem is as long as you don't ask. If you sit down and relax with him over dinner, break bread, he'll lay it all out for you. So he gets the appointment for the meeting and the guy says, yeah, I've lost my position. I'm worried about losing my job. I should have told you who has the contract. Now I will make an introduction to you and connect you with this guy and you can restart the process and you can probably get the contract back underway. But it's not going to happen until the coming year. And he made all the connections and they made the deal the following year and he ended up landing Coca Cola. So in any given negotiation technique, nothing ever fails on the black swan stuff, you just might not like what you learned. And you've got to look at negotiation as an information gathering process and understand what the response is actually telling you. And so if the response would start this conversation to begin with is they're not talking to you, they've ghosted you, they've gone dark. Whatever phrase you want, you've got to analyze how you got there in the first place. They're communicating with you by going silent, and you've got to be informed by that information. The other thing about the no oriented question is all human beings suffer from the same affliction, which is known as decision fatigue. You're only capable of making so many decisions in A given day and you start to run out of gas for a variety of reasons. Sometime after about one o' clock in the afternoon could be based on how much sleep you got the night before, your natural circadian rhythm, what you're eating, all that stuff goes into it, but you begin to run out of gas. What we have found consistently is no matter how fatigued people are, they can always answer a no oriented question, plus come up with four or five more implementation points, no matter what. And we first found this out was when I asked Jack Welch to come speak at the class I was teaching at usc. It was a book signing. Book signings, they hustle you through. I was at a book signing at a conference a couple years ago. We had about 200 people in line. The guys handling the signings said, nobody will spend more than 30 seconds with you or we're never going to get through this line. So from the moment they walk up to you to the moment the next person walks up, we're going to do 30 seconds. And the way that we're going to do this is we're going to get their names and write it on a piece of paper before they walk up. So you don't got to talk to them. They're going to hand you the book, you're going to look them, you're going to say, hi, Heather, nice to see you. Dear Heather, have a wonderful life. Chris. Boom. Move on. 30 seconds. That's what they're doing to this Jack Welch thing. I ain't got time to pitch Jack Welch. I know I'm on the clock. I know he doesn't want to talk to me either, because then the other people walk up and go, hey, Jack, you want to come to the house tonight? It's my kid's birthday, whatever. Any kind of conversation, no talking allowed, is the rule. So I walk up understanding this is a dynamic, and I look him in the eye and I say, is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and speak at the negotiation class I teach at usc? And he stares at me and he starts to scowl and then he looks up and to the left and he gets this hideous expression on his face. I mean, hideous. He looks furious and he's glaring and his face is frozen and he doesn't move. Now, Jack Walter, since deceased. But you know, this was a couple years ago and when Jack died, he's not, you know, he's not a young dude. Jack was an old dude. He's been around for a long time and he gets this scowl on his face and he looks like he had a stroke. And I think to myself, I just killed Jack Welch. He had a stroke and he died. That's why he hasn't moved. And he's gonna fall over dead and they're gonna lock me up for killing Jack Welch because they're gonna blame me that he died. And so initially when he doesn't fall over dead, I'm relieved. But he still doesn't unfreeze and he looks furious. And I think he's going to start screaming for security to drag me out of there because I've insulted him or something. I don't know what's going on. Finally he looks back at me and he says, this is my personal assistant's name. This is her special Twitter account we have set up to communicate with her. I will call her and tell her who you are and what you want. I think we're going to be in Los Angeles in the fall. If we are, we'll come in and speak at your class. Think of everything that he thought through when he said no. And I still don't know the neuroscience behind this. I just know it happens every time. So to sort of wrap this no oriented stuff up, a couple of years ago I meet Robert Herjavec. I get introduced to him through a mutual friend. And Robert Herjavec is just this great generous guy. He invites me to lunch and it was my favorite lunch. I don't know how Robert knew it was going to be my favorite lunch, but it was free, he paid. And that's always my favorite kind of lunch when somebody else buys it could be celery, I don't care, I'll eat it. And it's at a steakhouse, and I love steakhouses. It's on the ground floor of the building he's in in LA, which just happens to be about a 10 minute walk from where I'm living. Walk down, he's buying. Everybody knows him. 90 minutes with the guy. So I'm thinking, cool, we got a training coming up in New York in a couple of weeks. I offer him a free ticket. Now I don't think he's going to come. I think he's going to send one of his guys, which is all I want. I don't want him to come. And he looks at me and he says, how many can we buy? I'm like, wow, one more indicator what a great generous guy he is. Because a lot of people like only one free. What about five free or something nonsense like that. So I'm going back and forth with my son who's in a D.C. area on the east coast. And he's angry that I'm giving anything away because we charge a lot for this training and we always sell out. And he's like, I don't care if it's Robert Herjavec, I care about his money. And I said, but he's going to buy some. Well, how many he's going to buy? We're going back and forth, we can't get a number out of him or his people. And my son calls me about 4 o' clock in the afternoon one day, 4 o' clock in LA, which is 7pm on East Coast. And he goes, you find out from Herjavec tonight how many they're going to buy or I'm going to sell his tickets because we're going to be sold out by tomorrow morning. And he doesn't even get the free one. He doesn't get any. So again, remember, decision fatigue. I sent him an email at 5:03. First line was, have you given up on committing to three tickets now? The second line was, is it a ridiculous idea for you to pay for them before the business day starts tomorrow? Because we're three hours behind in la. And so by the time the business day starts in la, it's lunchtime in New York and it's too late. So I send the two no oriented questions to him at 5:03. I get an email response at 5:04. No, we've got no problem committing to three tickets now. No, it's not a problem. I'll get my assistant in touch with you. We'll pay for them within the hour. And I've got all the tickets paid for at 5:23. You're killing yourself if you don't at least switch over to that. It's just, it's stupid. You will astonish yourself the difference you can make. And it's only the tip of the iceberg. It's only the tip of the iceberg. Astonish yourself with the difference you can make just with no oriented questions. All right, Heather, I've riffed enough.

That was amazing. Of course. Thank you so much. And we have so many questions, so guys, go ahead. Yes. First and foremost, Chris, thank you for joining our class. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, my pleasure.

Yes. So here's the question. Comment. First, you say that negotiation is not an act of battle, but it's a process of discovery. So when you're looking for your customer and you want to know what's their budget? I want to know if he or she who speaks first, do they lose? Or how do you address that in that form of negotiation?

Well, it's an information gathering process to start with. So basically if you speak first, it's only to get them talking. Now, the whole budget price term, there's no shortage of discussion about whether or not you should name price first. And I will tell you that by and large, the literature says anchor and the literature is principally academic. And I'll tell you what the shortcomings of that are in a minute. I will tell you that by and large there's still some top A plus, world class players that want to anchor first. 90% of them believes he or she names price first, loses. I believe that anchoring high in terms, and this is one of the big differences in a problem with the literature and the studies, no study takes into account the number of deals that you drive from the table by anchoring first with a number. And the practitioners across the board believe they want to make every deal and they think that driving a deal from the table by going first with a high anchor is stupid. And I'm seeing it pretty much across the board now. I do something to set your expectations emotionally, I will do an emotional anchor, but I won't throw a high anchor number first. Any emotional anchor that I do that everybody on my team does, like if you call us and us look, how much, how much is your training? Or somebody says how much for an hour, your consulting time? And I say more than you have, higher than you've ever thought of, more than you ever thought of spending. And then I shut up. Because your emotional architecture in your brain, whether it's a limbic system or not, I know that you're going to imagine a ridiculously high number and I know that you're going to ask me to go on, but I have to wait for you to ask me to go on. And I'm sit there silently until you say okay, whatever it is. And then when I drop my number, it's going to seem like a relief. And I will tell you that the start of the third quarter last year, we tripled our coaching fees based on that question because our head of sales, business development, you know, another term for sales, Davy Johnson, young lady that we hired just a year and a half ago, she kept, we taught her to say more than you have, more than you ever thought of spending a high enough number to give you a heart attack. And never had anybody ever pushed back when we quoted our fee. And so then she thought, I wonder what they were Thinking. So she would say, just out of curiosity, what number were you thinking? And so many times they came back with a number that was astronomically higher than what our number was, which if they continued, means that there was at least tacit agreement that they would pay that then we tripled our price and saw no fall off in our business. So we never name price first. I will feel you out. If you're pushing me really hard for a price and you just determined, determined, determined to get a price out of me, you're probably using me to be a competing bid. You know, I'm probably the fool in the game, then I'm not going to give you that data because you're using me anyway. If I'm certain that you really want to do business with me, and we've gone back and forth and back and forth and I've done everything that I could gently do because I want to know your comfort level and I want to make it price. I want the price term to be at your comfort level. I'll throw a number because if it gets. If the entire process is held up over me dropping a number, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna have my ego so invested that I can't name a price first that I'm gonna let everything derail over. Drop the number. I'm gonna drop the number as a last move, not as a first move. Because then how you react after that is also gonna give me a lot of information that I don't otherwise haven't. I want the information. Does that answer your question?

It does. Thank you.

You're welcome. Hi, Chris. How do you design the emotional experience of the other person within a negotiation? Do you want to make them all excited first and then bring them down to reality again, then build them up again? When do you want to use humor? Can you say something about that? Yeah. So it's interesting where you're coming from on that. I don't know that we design the emotional experience per se. There's a fair amount of discussion I've read in the past, you know, above the line, below the line, all that, all that kind of nonsense. You know, we try to get people excited because they need to be excited about the deal, then it requires. That's a high maintenance operation and we're not into high maintenance. If you need them to be excited and you got them excited, then you got to be with them a lot, keep them excited. You always get implementation issues. Ton a ton of issues. And we know that most people exist in default mental state. Is Largely negative survival mode, which is what everybody's in default, is largely negative. Success mode is not negative. Success is not natural. I'm reading an interesting book recently called Dopamine, the Molecule of More talking about how the brain sort of calculates the future and your survival mechanisms and your survival mechanisms are principally the only thing they think about the future is they want to be there when it happens. Which is why when you're hungry, eat, even though it might not be good for you long term. But our survival mechanisms were built into us when food was scarce and we had to forage and we might go for days or weeks without eating and we weren't sure what else was going to kill us. So our desire to reproduce doesn't really look at the future because it's about me or my genes being here when the future comes. Not necessarily whether or not I'm going to thrive, but just that I'm going to survive. So back to your question. I know people are largely negative. We want to start deactivating negatives right off the bat. We don't try to get people excited because again, that becomes it's a maintenance issue. Trust based influence is low maintenance. People trust you if you've done what's necessary to build their trust. You don't have to talk to them as much. If you got to talk to them a lot, either you're bad for them or they're bad for you. So we look to build trust mechanisms, if you will, into the encounters and then of course we back stuff up. So once we've earned people's trust, we're going to hang onto it because we deliver. Now the one thing I will tell you though, and there's a lot, a lot of discussion about this also, which if you look at the discussion, it's kind of funny if you really look at it, what's more important, a first impression or a last impression? And if you Google it, reality is the last impression is a lasting impression. Period. Period. Now, people don't remember things the way that they happen. And I got this from some Gallup poll data from Every bit of 12 years ago, people remember the most intense moment and how it ended. Now we're all taught about the importance of a first impression. You can get away with a mediocre first impression, you can't get away with a mediocre last impression. Tremendous amount of emphasis placed on first impressions. The thing that's really important about a first impression is that it not be bad. Because if it's bad, then of course your first impression is your last impression at the same time. But if you look at all the data and every survey that's out there, everybody that tries to defend the importance of the first impression being the most important, they'll compare it to what goes on in the middle and ignore what happens at the end. So how do you do that? If you're going to, quote, emotionally design the experience. Whatever genuine, positive thing you could say has to be said at the end. Most of the time, if you're a genuine person, I'm going to assume that you all are. You want to say something genuine and positive at the beginning because you've been programmed that the first impression is really important. And then you will finish the email with something that's either mediocre or bad and wonder why they don't get back to you. Well, the last impression is the lasting impression. So take, at least take whatever you said first and cut and paste it and duplicate it at the end. Now, you do not need it at the beginning, but you will die if you don't put it at the end.

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Great question.

Thank you.

Okay, I mentioned Chris that you have a couple of super fans on this call. I am handing this off to one of your super fans.

Thank you.

Heather.

Yeah Chris, I mean I cite you in my essays for university so you can imagine how excited I was when Heather told us. I have two questions for you the first one is when I was reading your book, I was questioning, can you share with us the three type of voices that you use in a negotiation? I'm super curious to hear how it sounds. And my second question is to give us so many tools, how do you choose? Which one are you going to use? It's like an automatic thing. Or do you follow any type of trick when you are where you are talking with the other person?

All right, go with the first one. All right, so the voice is basically the assertive voices, is just direct and honest. Look, this is what I want. This is why I want it direct and honest. I'm going to use Donald Trump as an example, and just because he's a poster child of the assertive. I mean, I'm a natural born assertive. And I can remember once reading that his daughter Ivanka said, you know, my father's just direct and honest. That's all he is. You know, people who call him blunt or harsh, he's just direct and honest. And I thought, that's perfect example, because direct and honest feels like getting hit in the face with a brick. And I once had a colleague of mine say that to me. Another hostage negotiator said, like, sometimes dealing with you, Chris, is like getting hit in the face with a brick. And I remember thinking to myself, but I'm the nicest guy I know. I mean, how could that be? I love me. Why don't you love me, too? But that's direct and honest. It's just blunt. It's just, this is what I want and this is why I want it, and you're going to give it to me. It's direct and honest. Then the analyst voice is more the late night fmdj, the downward inflecting voice that actually triggers neurochemicals in your head and they actually slow your brain down. And that's the way it works. So. And we used to say it hit your mirror neurons. And there's a guy that I like to listen to, a neuroscientist out of Stanford called Andrew Huberman. And you gotta love these scientists because they like to argue about the most ridiculous stuff. Now, Huberman is a brilliant guy and he starts a podcast going like, you know, I got news for you, there's no such thing as mirror neurons. All you people out there, all you neuroscientists that are talking about mirror neurons, humans do not have mirror neurons. And I remember thinking like, ah, great. You know, I've been talking about mirror neurons for years. He says, but there is Something called emotional resonance circuitry. And we're not sure exactly what it is. And yeah, their emotions have contagions and people have a tendency to react. And I remember thinking, like, all right, so who cares what it is? The reaction is still the same. I don't care if they're mirror neurons. I don't care if they're monkey cucumbers. I don't know what you want to call it.

I don't care.

All I know is that it works. So whatever the voice hits in your brain, it's a neurochemical response, it's involuntary, which means I can start it, you can fight it once it got started, but you can't stop me from starting actually starting. A chemical change in your brain and the late night FM DJ voice actually slows people's brains down. It has a tendency to tamp down the emotions. And I will use it on myself to intentionally tamp down my own emotions because I hear my voice too. And if I'm angry or if I'm extremely sad, literally on the verge of tears, if I trigger the late night FM DJ voice, it triggers. It tamps both emotions down for me successfully, equally. So it works. And then there's this smiling voice of regard with somebody who just really likes you and they smile and you can feel their smile. And Sean Acker, Harvard psychologist, which I realize are really lousy credentials, but John may know Sean, I don't know. He did this great TED talk called the Happiness Advantage. And this is my source of data on this. He says you're 31% smarter in a positive frame of mind. So if I smile, I'll trigger your neurons and there will be a chemical change that'll happen in your brain that makes you and me smarter. And it's ridiculously effective. I mean, like, it's successful. You want to trigger people into giving you things spontaneously put them in a good mood. I remember really interesting comment. I read the book U2 on U2. I'm a big U2 fan. Fan of those guys as a band, also fan of them as individual human beings. And Bono and his one foundation, around the turn of the century, the most last century, he negotiated the literal forgiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars of African debt. First world and second world countries, Russia being quote, second world, just wiping the debt off their books, just forgiving it. And he went around the world and said, look, they're not going to pay anyway. You're crippling them. You're not going to get your money. Forgive the debt. Give them a chance to get back on their feet. And he wrote that regardless of the leader, if he could get them to laugh with him early in the first conversation, there was a really good chance he was going to be successful at getting the deal. Mirror neurons, smiling, positive frame of mind. And he said that he'd been viciously criticized globally for smiling and laughing with Vladimir Putin and people saying, how dare you? This guy's a murderer and an oppressor of millions. How dare you smile and laugh with him? Bono's trying to get oppression taken off of people. He's happy to smile with whoever he has to in order to relieve the debts of millions. And I thought that was a great example of the strategic advantage of getting to someone to laugh with you early. Early in a deal, to try to get a deal. So that's on the three voices. What was your other question?

Yeah, I have. It's just how to know which technique used and when. But I think we are short on time. So maybe other of my high percentage.

Shot is go with the label or mirror first and then feel your way through it after that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chris, for coming. I really appreciate it. So, you know, there are different methods of negotiation. What works in one situation may not work in another. Right?

So in your when I disagree, just let me know when I could jump back in.

In your experience, what is the most challenging negotiation situation you were in and how did you address it?

Okay, so black swan method, I would call emotional intelligence based negotiation. And nothing works all the time. But emotional intelligence gives you your best chance of success. People ask us about guarantees in the past, and what we were comfortable in guaranteeing is we will always give you your best chance of success. You might not get the deal, you might not like the deal that you got, but we guarantee you it was better than what anything else could possibly produce. And since it's based on human nature, it's only limitation as human beings and of course, your ability to adapt into the moment, because you got to adapt into the moment. There are cultural overlays, but laid over our culture, laid over our gender, laid over everything else is that we're human. So the negotiation is based on the human wiring that is in your brain, which you possess, regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, diet. It even works on vegans. If it works on vegans, then it works. Right? So it's the most universal. And every hostage negotiation team in the world uses the same basic skills, same eight skills. Whether they're in Bogota or Cape Town or Tokyo, it doesn't matter. So it's human based stuff. So there's sometimes when the other side's not really negotiating, you know, there's there. They never intended to make a deal. They're using you for something purpose. And we actually I started catching on to this when I was working kidnappings against Al Qaeda. And in point of fact it's a real big problem in the business world. A lot of people that want to use you for due diligence, free consulting or a competing bid and they never wanted to make a deal with you. And that's. We use the tools to figure that out early on and then go back to the last impression as a lasting impression and in the communication as quickly as possible but as politely as possible. Because if you're going to leave a residue, you want to leave good vibes behind and not negative vibes. So that's kind of a roundabout, I think answer to both questions you asked me.

Yeah, you did. Thank you, Chris. How can everybody get ahold of you or keep up with you on social? Where can they find you?

I'm on instagram @the FBineGotiator if you like Instagram. I'm doing a lot of stuff on Clubhouse, but not as frequently. If you want more free information, if you were a federal employee you would say if it's free, I'll take three. That's what my colleagues used to like say in the FBI. We got a free newsletter. Better than free. It's concise and actionable. I get the daily 10 point briefing from the Wall Street Journal and I don't even read it because it just wears me out just reading it of thing. You know, our newsletter has one concise, actionable article and it's the best way to keep up with all of our stuff. New products. We get stuff now specifically designed for women. We got a female coach now and she's got something called the Woman's Power Hour and Negotiation for Women. And there are a couple of subtleties. For example, a late night FM DJ voice. Women have to be cautious if that's not misinterpreted as seductive. And I actually wish in my case it would be misinterpreted as seductive. Because I'm a single man, I need all the help I can get. I'm not particularly attractive, but you know, it never occurred to me. And that's one of the things that Sandy or one of our woman coaches can talk candidly with other women about. And so there's announcements about stuff like that in our newsletter. So you can go to our website and sign up on the blog section on the upper right hand corner of the website, blackswanltd.com we got a bunch of free stuff on the website. Take everything free that we have. You're gonna get a long, long way with the instruction you're getting in this class and the book and the free stuff that we put out. If you want more after that, we're gonna want you to be up to speed on the free stuff anyway, before we start charging you, you know, a year's salary for one of our classes or the mortgage on your house. Got a mortgage. Your house to pay us. But take the free stuff.

Kris, you are amazing. John, I have to hand this call back to you because I know you have something to say.

Well, mostly I just want to say thank you. Your masterclass was masterful.

Thank you.

And no, I'm a huge fan. So thank you for spending this time with us. I think this personal connection with all of us is going to accelerate our learning from you, I believe because of, you know, being able to, you know, this touch we're getting and will send a lot of us back to a lot of the wisdom you've shared in your books and whatnot. I want to say, when I read your book and it came up and you said, is now a bad time? I've been saying that since 1982, when everybody thought it was freaking dumb. But no, you were the man who in the book explained why it was effective, and you also pointed out that it gave the other person security and safety and that led to the trust.

So go for that man.

Yeah. Well, hey, I'm a giant fan and thank you so much for sharing your.

He is a huge fan. I can say that as his child, one of his children, on behalf of my brothers, my mom, he's been talking about you for a long time now. I'm like, obsessed, too. So now everyone's gonna be hearing from me else's. So thank you so much. And again, class, thanks for letting me join.

That's cool. And Heather, thank you for connecting me with this group. I'm a big fan. I'm on the Heather Monahan fan club. I'm in a cheering section.

Me too.

I think she's wonderful.

I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.