Best Negotiation Techniques for Executives (Complete Guide) - Session 7

Session 8: Negotiation Techniques. Landing the deal you deserve involves knowing how to control the conversation from start to finish. This session dives into powerful strategies for mastering negotiation at the executive level. You'll learn how to ask strategic questions to uncover what really matters, navigate compensation talks with ease, and turn any objection into an opportunity. All right. I told you it was meaty. We're crushing through this. So I'm proud of you. I don't see that many eyes glazed over. I want to talk a little bit about strategic questioning and one specifically that I think builds your leverage more than any others, because I know everyone's looking for more actionable takeaways in negotiation, but it's the thought. I like to say it's understanding your, your competitive advantage here. And driving a wedge with between you and your competitors so that you can differentiate yourself. So this line of questioning is something like, have you thought about, have you thought about hiring somebody more junior? Have you thought about promoting internally? Have you thought about going to your network? Have you thought about hiring a, you know, someone with more industry experience? Have you thought about hiring an agency? Like we're exploring all of the alternatives that they have, and they have to tell us their reasoning for why or why not they're doing that. And so a lot of folks, they'll go through an interview process, they'll lose the job, they'll find out who won the job and say, son of a gun, like they went to college together, right? Or somebody was in their network, or it was, they went to the same company. Like that was a shoe and I never had a chance. Well, I'd rather you find out on the phone than later after you lost the job. And this is how we can get to that. Like, have you thought about hiring someone like this and hiring someone like that? And my favorite is the, have you thought about hiring someone less expensive? Right? Is there a cheaper way to solve your problems? Because again, we're focused on solving the problem as efficiently as possible. And when you say something like, have you thought about a less expensive option to solve this problem? What have they been? And they say, no, we need an executive with autonomy that can do this and they can do this. And they talk to them. They give you every point that you need to pitch. What you're psychologically doing is saying you're valuable and they're going to need to expect to pay you more money. And so through questioning, you can drive your value forward. You're also starting to probe their priorities, right? Oh, we can't hire someone junior that hasn't worked out for us before. I need someone that can just take this off my plate and run with it so I can focus on X, Y, and Z. And then when they say, so I could focus on X, Y, and Z, you have the opportunity to say, I also have interest in that. I'd be happy to support you there too. Right? So not only am I solving this problem, but now I'm helping you with these problems and you're starting to become more and more valuable through your strategic questioning. But unless you ask what their alternatives are, you'll never know. You can make assumptions based off your experience. I imagine you won't work with an agency because XYZ reason, or I imagine you've gone through this hiring process and it's starting to get frustrating. So you can make assumptions. But it's better to hear it directly from them by setting them up to tell you what all their alternatives are. And then the sexy close here is when they talk through all their alternatives, then you say, ah, now I understand why you're talking to me, because it sounds like I fit that box perfectly. And so I want to give you another example because this is how we turned another deal from a $650,000 range into a million-dollar-plus range. Because as we were running our strategic questionings, This wasn't a Fortune 500 big tech company, for what it's worth. So context-wise, the, the company launched a whole new division and they're staffing it up right now. And the president, who is the hiring manager for my client, mentioned that they're going to bring in 4 senior director roles, right? And my client was previously a VP, very good in the space, doesn't particularly want a senior director role. But was doing the job of what two of those roles were already. And so through the conversation, we actually combined the roles, reduced the headcount, elevated the compensation for my client, and then won over— hey, the difficult for me, like perception-wise, it won't look good with me going from VP to senior director. Can we have a public role that's different? So publicly they have a global head of position. Instead of a senior director of whatever, whatever. So we worked together to create a title that would be more impactful in that role too. And they were open to it because we broke the boundaries of what they were expecting, combined roles, and actually made the reporting structure and equity structures easier for them. So talk about creating a win-win situation. You have less direct reports, less paperwork, you have more impact. Like the compensation came up, but it was still saving money for the team. We got to overcome the title issue. And that's part of the back and forth that happened there. But we only got that way by understanding, like, what are the other people you're hiring for this role? What does it look like? Actually understanding the full scope. And that's where that information came in so handy for there. All right, I want to hit on this again. Because the The money question is the one that trips a lot of folks up, and I'm not sure I answered it well enough last time for folks to feel confident. Uh, and that is to defer the early discussions on compensation. And I also am very contrarian of where I don't want people to use ranges. Like, I just don't want you to anchor yourself at all. And it can be an uncomfortable back and forth, but I wrote down a couple of shorter answers. So when someone says, How much money do you want to make? And you say, yeah, I'm not in a position to have that conversation right now, but I have no reservations about the team making a competitive offer. Right. So at this stage, I know we're going to get there. If we find out that I'm the right fit and we're all aligned, we can move forward. Right. Another one I like is I've learned not to talk about compensation until there's a written offer in front of me. Is that going to be a problem? Now that's a, that is a much more assertive tone. Right. Or you could say, is that unreasonable? So I have one example. I want to talk a little bit about milestone payments in this because this is something that breaks ranges all the time that I don't think a lot of people consider. And so we got a $700,000 a year deal to $3.5 million a year with triggers. And it's not being afraid to connect your performance to different types of triggers. So as an example, we knew this, the CEO we were negotiating with and their investors, it was a private equity firm. We knew that their focus was on turning this company into a unicorn and they wanted to like 4x their valuation and get an exit in 3 years. What's interesting about private equity plays is 9 out of 10 need to work versus a VC play where 1 out of 20 need to work. And so we knew that this is where that strategic information comes in and the probing of questions. They wanted to increase the valuation. And so given that this position was a chief revenue officer position, highly responsible for this, we attached triggers that when we hit this valuation, I'll get X amount in more stock or X amount in more cash incentives. And we hit the ultimate trigger, we get X. And what's interesting in this particular negotiation The co— the success of that company was relatively inevitable. Like it was going to happen anyway. We just were able to attach some milestones to it because we were so confident in its playbook. And so look, what you can't negotiate today, you can negotiate tomorrow. Right? So when we get to that state, you're going to feel a lot happier paying me. I learned a lot of these tips from like Hollywood contracts and sports contracts. Like Tom Brady made an extra like $2 million when he won the Super Bowl and he made an extra million when he won the game before that and so on and so on. You get performance triggers if you win more than 10 games a season in Hollywood. If you're the solo writer or you get credit with the credit, whatever the company is, it gives you writer's credit, you get a $50,000 bonus or a $500,000 bonus. There's all these contingency trigger clauses based off of the performance. And that's because you can't predict your performance ultimately upfront every time. But you can confidently say that when we get here, it will be worth X amount. And so this is a way not a lot of people think about milestone triggers. And it's not like you go into a conversation and say, let's talk about milestone triggers, because that's not how it's going to happen. You say something like, look, we have a great deal here and I'm ready to get started. Are you open to us making it better for both of us? Who's going to say no to that? Like, how can this deal be any better for both of us? Right. And it's like, look, let's get incentivized and aligned on when we hit this major goal. This happens for both of us and this happens and this happens and so on. So I want to talk about handling objections and turning them into opportunities, right? When somebody is essentially saying no to you, it's not necessarily a rejection. It's your ability to understand where they're where their hard lines are. So a common objection is we can't raise your base salary anymore because it's public and everyone can see that and there's precedent, right? So maybe that objection is, okay, so we're not going to push there anymore, but what are the other levers that they have to play with to make it interesting? And this is where in that one of those stories I was sharing earlier, the $600,000 to $1,000,000, when we were getting that $800,000 signing bonus, that signing bonus started at $250,000. They could really come up front on the cash, but the actual base salary only came up $30,000 a year. So objections can mean that, that you've reached the limit on that lever. There are other levers that you can consider, and I'm sharing this in a very low-risk way. I'm not, I'm not suggesting you make ultimatums or talk about other, other levers. Very matter-of-factly. It's that very low risk is, hey, I understand you have a lot of different levers to play with. Can you help me understand how we can make this deal come together? And when I shared earlier, I said, like, don't talk about ranges. I am comfortable with you sharing ways that you like to get paid. So as an example, you might say, I know all companies have different levers that they can pull and each one is unique. I'm usually compensated with a strong base and bonus percentage equity, but I've also seen retention bonuses or sign-on bonuses or milestones or XYZ thing. And that can start to open the playing field a little bit. Like, oh, we could, like, we can start to go into a signing bonus territory. And it's a 30-second ask that could make you $100 grand, right? Right there. In this last case, it made us $800 grand, right? So that's some life-changing numbers kind of thing. And so handling objections and pushbacks is really important, especially while like staying calm to do that, reframing it positively as a win-win for everyone, and proposing solutions such as, have you thought about different levers here? Here's what I'm used to. Let me help you through this process. I mean, it works at McDonald's, like, in, in some ways. Like, you could push for 10% raises there, you know, like little stuff. You're not going to get milestone payments on how many customers you push through, but like, it works at, um, even things like going to a hotel lobby and getting an upgrade. Like, my favorite thing, like, the favorite advice is, what's the chance? Like, it's such an innocuous way of saying something. What's the chance one of those What's the chance there's an upgrade available, right? Like, what's the chance that, you know, there's a discount today? Or what's the chance I missed something in the flyer or whatever? I mean, you can practice in little low-risk ways just to get accustomed to pushing back, and you'd be surprised at the things that can happen. Like somebody— the dealership took my BMW the other day and like had to do a performance update on it or something. And they said they were going to fill the gas tank and detail it, and they returned it and it was on empty and didn't detail it. So when they asked me how it went, I just said, hey, I don't want to be a pain in the ass, but they said they were going to do this. Like, what's the chance I give them a hard time for it? And they just responded and sent me a $200 gift card, and they said, we'll detail your car and fill it full of gas as soon as you come down to the, the place again. So it was like a little, like, obviously not really a big stressful thing, but it was, what's the chance Right. I give them a hard time, like jokingly. And they were just like, yeah, let's just make it right. So it was just a very simple way to approach that. And I want to give one, one example here, because this was a half a million dollar mistake that we picked up with a, with a client in late stage negotiations for a chief revenue officer position. And the The problem was when we negotiated severance, we had 6 months of severance on target earnings. That was what it was worded. When we got the legal paperwork back, it was 6 months of severance on salary. That's a big difference because the on-target earnings is twice as much as, as the base salary. And so my client called me saying, oh man, we just lost— it was actually, it was $350,000. So he's like, we just lost $350,000. And I'm suggesting going back to the CEO and just splitting the difference and going right in the middle, like $187,500 or whatever it is. And I said, why don't instead you just ask him what happened? Because you communicated that for a reason. And that's where that number came from. And when we went back, he's like, oh, I don't know about this. Like, it seems risky. We should just split the difference. I want it. I want this deal regardless. I said, just, just just ask and see what happens, right? So he goes back and says, look, like, I noticed in the paperwork it came back like this, and what I intended was OTE. And the CEO said, oh, must have been a mistake, let's just go correct that right now. So the client was just voluntarily going to negotiate against themselves and lose $187,000 in protection. And instead, just by shifting the framework, which is really what I want the takeaway to be here for people, is It's not going to happen. Let me compromise to how can I make it happen? What's the right way of saying it? If that's the takeaway you have, this is a successful workshop today. And in that case, it could mean big-time money for executives. Okay, so want to talk about bidding wars, right? I don't know how many folks here have been in a bidding war or hope to be in a bidding war or falsely bluff their way into a bidding war. Uh, I've seen that happen too. Um, but this is really where we can make some big money in short time. And, um, this is really about creating opportunities outside of the one you have, like creating your alternatives, right? So if X company doesn't work out, I have Y company and Z company. And the more of those you can stack up, obviously a little more chaotic your interview schedule is and all of the work that you're doing to try to win those deals. But the more leverage you start to develop and you strategically start to drip information with each other. And as we want to, if we want to speed a deal up, we might say, I'm expecting an offer next Thursday, right? And I expect to make a decision in the next 2 or 3 weeks. I want to be respectful of your hiring process, but I need to be transparent. I have a couple other companies that are interested in me., and I want to basically navigate and get as much information as possible here. And, you know, looking at some of the chats here coming in, um, this can also happen for those that have a job that are about to quit. You're about to quit a job and you should ideally have another offer ready because that gives you leverage with your current job and it doesn't necessarily burn that bridge. If you say things correctly. And I have an example about this. I had a client call me, had a competing offer. This is also a Fortune 500 tech company, two of them competing for this gal's talent. So she had a competing offer. She said, "Jacob, I'm going into the office today and I'm gonna quit." And I said, "Call me instead." And 'cause quitting, she was frustrated, didn't wanna stay at the company regardless of what they came back with. But I said, this is when you have the most leverage. This is when we can find out how much money you are leaving on the table by not standing up for yourself. So you owe it to yourself to understand what they would do to keep you. Because there's a couple of ways they can throw some money at you, or they could say, good riddance, we didn't like you, right? And then you're going to know you made the right decision either way, right? So rather than just quitting, we came and said, look, I have another offer. We were transparent, said it's with so-and-so. And I'd like to stay, but I don't see a path where we can. And her hiring, her boss said, you know, give me until the end of the day. And in the next 3 or 4 hours later, the CEO of the company called and offered her $500,000 more a year in cash to stay. Like per year, like increase of base salary. We need you. Like we, they, they just did a CEO transition. They were bleeding talent. Like they needed to keep. Leverage in this case was so much in her favor that she knew, like, there was money on the table. They offered to fly her around the country and be a public speaker with the CEO, and she still chose to turn the job down. Right. So this probably sounds a little scary, but that is ultimately when you have some of your best leverage. I have another client going through this right now where the answer is, I've accepted the job, but I want to quit this one no matter what. And I said, don't be so sure, right? I fully support somebody that wants to quit and is going to quit for any reason. But just understand, what were you leaving on the table? Because if you announce your resignation, say, I just don't see a path to stay, can you help me? I'm open to it, but I don't know how. If they choose to not go to work for you, they didn't like you and you deserve to quit. Or they go to work for you and you see how much money you're leaving on the table and you can still choose to quit. But regardless, what I'm trying to do is give you as much information as possible so you can make the smartest decision for your career. That's a very difficult topic. What if I don't have a competing offer? Right? And I want to share that the ability to say no ultimately gives you unlimited power. Right? So if you have created the opportunity to walk away from a deal, You'll have unlimited power, just the ability to say no. And I think a lot of folks, especially when they're out of work, and maybe there's a lot of folks like this on the call, you don't feel like you have the ability to say no, right? You need something. And again, my challenge for you is ask yourself why you're in this position and look back at some mistakes that were made, some of which were your fault and some of which were not. Right? Not predicting the layoff, the market conditions, some of which could be that you chose to work in a struggling industry or the function, and it's been hard to transition out, or you didn't know how to. There's some gap somewhere that made it so at this moment in time you have urgency, you've lost your leverage, and you can't say no. If you are fortunate enough to be in a position to say no because you either have the confidence that you can create more opportunities for yourself there are other suitors interested in your services or really just, just having the ability to say no because of your confidence, knowing that you'll find something else if this doesn't fit or that you're one step closer, then ultimately your leverage is significantly higher. And one story that I share that is, it's definitely obnoxious. Some of you have probably heard it, but I call it the G-Wagon story. And it's where I had a CEO client of mine who had two CEO offers competing on paper. They were roughly the same, and she was ready to walk away from both of them because she had the privilege to do so. She had done well for herself in the past, right? So she has power to walk away and she's asking me for help. And we really exhausted all potential creativity. It's also— I think I wasn't as creative as I am now in this instance. And I said, they're going to ask you what it's going to take to close the deal and what are you going to say? And she's like, I don't know. And I jokingly said, like, what kind of car do you like? And she said, well, I like Mercedes. I'm like, well, then say that, like jokingly. Like, I was actually more exasperated with her and frustrated than I was helping her. And she went into the conversation. They said, look, what's it going to take to bring you on? And she jokingly was like, I don't know, I like Mercedes, like as a joke. And they said, what model do you want? And we were just so surprised because she was ready to walk away. She just threw it all out there, like, screw it. Like, I don't know, I like Mercedes. And then so she got a G-Wagon and she's like, I've always wanted a G-Wagon. I've wanted to be like a CEO mom driving a G-Wagon. It's like this weird fantasy of mine, whatever. And they're like, done. And the lesson there is because she was ready to walk away, she was more creative in her ask, right? And The other lesson there is that while the company couldn't do anything on compensation or bonuses because it was a public company, everything was shared with the board. They were already under scrutiny for needing to push prices down or compensation down for executives. Everything was publicized, but they could have write-offs on heavy vehicles. So like that cash could go on a different budget and it could go to her to persuade the decision over. And so sometimes there's a creative pie somewhere to be created, and sometimes that answer is just a little outside of the thinking, outside the box. Yeah, we're actually almost done here. So just want to be mindful of finalizing negotiations with Precision too. So you've done all this work to get deals moving forward. We want to make sure that we're Summarizing the terms, like, this is what the first 90 days are going to look like. This is making sure that everything is vocalized, making sure that everything's in writing. If you have hesitations, this is where you can create more opportunity for yourself. You might say that, you know, I'm like, I'm all on board here. I'm hesitant about our hiring plan moving forward. Can we talk about that first? It's like we can do more due diligence in our hesitations before we sign a deal. And we always want to make sure we're expressing our appreciation. Thank you for being an advocate for me. Thank you for doing your best for me. Thank you for bringing this offer forward. I'm excited to work with you and so on. So I'll go through these sections a little fast so we can have maximum Q&A here and laying the groundwork for more too. So I mentioned earlier What you can't negotiate today, you can sometimes negotiate tomorrow. And so we want to plant seeds for that. Accepting your opportunity is really just the beginning. Now the actual real work begins. Um, and so we want to set the, we want to plant seeds for what we're trying to accomplish in the future. I'd also mentioned in an earlier workshop, if you want to be a CEO, you need to start talking about it now, right? We want to show that whoever it is that's hiring us can be a mentor for us. And we find value in that. We're here to support them. And in exchange, we'd like them to guide us through that as well. If we don't get our way entirely in a negotiation, but you really want the job, we can use a line such as, look, to be honest with you, I'm excited to get started. Why don't we work together for a little bit, see where their performance is, and have this conversation again in 6 months or 3 months or whatever. So like, let's pick this back up after we've done some testing. Right? And we get to know what it's like to work with each other. Yes, you've lost a little leverage in that, but you've planted the seeds that you're not going away. And you're doing that in a polite way just to make sure, hey, please take care of me as we see this stuff through. Ultimately, it's always on you to deliver the results too. That's one thing I'm not good at with my clients. I don't know if they can deliver or not. I have to assume that they can. And we talk a big game too. And ideally they can show up and do that. But you always want to make sure that you're You're consistently performing and exceeding expectations. Those table stakes are maintained. Otherwise you won't be laying the groundwork for more. You'll actually be laying the groundwork for a possible termination or a layoff. Uh, and being the tall poppy, when you negotiate hard, you are the first one under scrutiny. And so you have to accept that responsibility and put yourself out there or shy away from it and go with more of a low-risk opportunity or low-risk negotiation, and then be okay with not earning more. So you kind of choose which battle you want to have there. All right. Now, final piece in this, and then we'll move into kind of a summary section here, is that integrity is the cornerstone of your negotiation. And I can't stress this enough that I do not want you to be deceitful. Right. I, I have seen people bluff. I have seen it be successful. I ultimately don't want people to have to put on a mask to show up to work because it's exhausting to do so. Like if you had to be someone you're not in the interview process for the sake of getting the job, you have to be someone you're not through that job to keep it right. So your character traits follow through. And it's why I push for being more assertive in the interview process and really understanding what it is about the role that that gets you excited, that character trait that you express needs to be consistent because that's what creates kind of that long-term impact. And it's also that your reputation is going to outlast any deal that you make. So I want you to make the right deals. And sometimes no deal is better than the wrong deal when it comes to protecting your career and making stronger decisions based off your integrity. Like you might say, I will not work for a company like BlackRock. I will not work for Pfizer, and I'm picking on a couple of, you know, or will not work for Nestlé. Like, your integrity and what that means is important to you, and that can be the cornerstone of your career. It's something to be mindful of. We can do— severance is really important because it's very awkward to bring up, and the timing for this is, is awkward as well. So in most cases companies don't voluntarily give you severance, right? They don't just throw it out there like, hey, when we fire you, we're going to give you a year for free, right? It has to be negotiated for. Now, what I advise my clients do is to assume they're going to get severance while knowing that they're probably not, right? So this is a mindset deal. So you go into the conversation and the timing for this is important. So you've already negotiated your compensation. You've come to terms with everything being within your zone of agreement, right? So compensation's okay, bonus is okay. All the big heavy things are okay. And it's the day you're going to sign it, right? And then you send the message, hey, getting ready to sign, but I didn't see your policy on severance. Can you forward that to me? Right? So like HR sends all the paperwork. Here's our culture. Here's our this. Here's our that. Here's our benefits plan. All that. You're like, okay, I'm ready to sign. Like, this is a done deal. Can you send me the severance agreement? Right? Because you're assuming you're going to get it. And they're like, uh, we don't have one. Then that opens the door for a conversation about severance. And this is particularly useful that if through the interviewing process, you built demand for yourself as an executive leader that is planning to hire other— and this is usually the term that's used— A+ talent. Oh, somebody hires me because I bring in A+ players, right? When you go that path in your interview process, at the severance stage, you're going to say, oh, okay, can I help you create a severance package? Because as I go to hire some of these folks or the 10 people you want me to bring on to the team, they're going to ask me about this and I don't know what to say. Right? Like they're going to expect this too. What do we do about this? I'm happy to be the use case on creating this for the first time. And so this way you weren't going to get anything. Typically smaller companies will give you 3 months. Ideally we want 6 to 12. Big company hire, like Fortune 500 C-suite hires are getting close to 2 years, sometimes more, very rarely more, but sometimes more. Some CEOs will also get like accelerated pension and things like that that we can negotiate ahead of time or on the transition out. We can occasionally negotiate severance even though you have significantly less leverage. And as we're going into this, you might say, I'm used to having— like, I'm familiar with anywhere from 6 to 12 months. I've seen companies also do like 6 months standard plus 1 month for every year served. Which is the path that makes the most sense for how you want to structure this out for our team. So like, we, we be the solution and we provide and we consult them on that if they don't have a plan in place already. I'm sure there's going to be— this is just a summary of principles, and it's important to know that there are no rules. There are no hard rules for negotiation because every person and nuance is different. And There's a lot of differences between cultural norms and status norms and industry norms. And there are so many nuances to consider that these are simply principles that you must make your own. I do highly recommend studying this stuff because mastering executive negotiation is what's going to advan— advance your career the most. If you want to retire several years earlier, get better at this. If you want to make millions more, get better at this sooner. Psychology and negotiation is what uplevels the final part. That's what keeps you in the C-suite too. It's what keeps you at that high level. And these are, these are basically the main tenets that I've been able to figure out through my work with clients. We're working on putting together more specifics because this is such a deep topic that's hard to articulate. It's— there's so much to consider that we're working on putting a, like, an actual focus together on how we go through an entire negotiation process so that we can spell it out. I want to make this probably a 10-hour course in the future to really go into the details and learning on this. In this accelerated course, we could really only scratch the surface. But the way that I've been thinking about it is first we gather that information We're primarily doing that through that interview process, what we can find online. Then we're aligning with the people on the team that we'll be working with. Then we're focused on influencing them, how to make them advocates for us, how to get them to work on our behalf. Then we're navigating the challenges as they come up, and then we're securing the deal after. And so we're working on putting together a full framework for this to get really hyper tactical. Session 8 workbook. This week's assignment will help you approach negotiations with confidence and clarity. You'll evaluate what matters most to you in a compensation package by ranking key elements like salary, bonus, and equity.