How Do You Earn $1 Million More? | Executive Salary Negotiation

I'm curious, some of the clients that you work with, because you work with a wide range, some of them very high profile, like you said, and you've helped a lot of people who are in career transition and you've helped them get a higher premium or to be said a different way, paid what they're worth. And I'm interested what that takes. If you can share that, because I think everybody wants to be paid what they're worth, but a lot of people don't know how to get there at a high level. What is the secret to that?

So there's a couple of pieces here. One is you should never negotiate against yourself. So a lot of the times it's a mindset piece on our own where even, for example, you said, I want to be paid what I'm worth. And I don't think anyone's paid what they're worth. I think they're paid what they negotiate, right? And that's why some people make millions more than others when you can't really tell them apart on paper. There's a lot of different things where they've clearly identified a gap and they can expose that gap and negotiate for it and create more pie. Now, the mindset piece here is I don't want you to compare yourselves to others. I don't want you to go look for compensation reports and say, oh, I, as a CMO at this stage, I should expect a $300,000 to $350,000 base salary with a bonus of 20% to 30% and this much equity. Like when you're comparing yourself to the mean, whether it's the 10th percentile or the 90th percentile, you're still comparing yourself to criteria that fits most people and you try to fit into that box for some reason. And good negotiation is really about saying there are no boundaries. There is no box. Every situation is unique and it's your job to explore what that value you can provide in that situation is. Occasionally it means as a marketer engaging more on revenue activities or scooping up another piece of another department or simply proving the impact that you're going to have across the function of the entire business and working through that. But you should never assume that you know what you're worth. You want other people to say what you're worth and then push them forward with that. So that's step 1, just never be so sure of what you're worth that you wouldn't accept more. That's a Chris Voss quote too. And I think it's actually ripped off from Shakespeare and there's a Shakespeare quote that's never assumeth You don't know, like it's that you wouldn't accept more like this very similar kind of quote there from Shakespeare that you don't give yourself the opportunity to see what more could look like. So that's something to think about through the process. And also there are tricks that we can do, and I'll give it a tangible one here to set the expectation that you are valuable. So Eric, let's say that you're interviewing me for a VP of marketing position and you're looking for someone 10, 15 years of experience and I have 18, right? I might say something like, Eric, can you tell me a little bit about why you'd talk to someone like me, someone with a little bit more experience versus maybe promoting someone internally or hiring somebody more inexpensive, right? So I didn't tell you I'm expensive, but I, I'm asking you about what are your alternatives? I'm, giving you the psychology that Jacob is a premium resource and I'm going to be more expensive than said inexpensive. I didn't give you any details on what that might be, but I'm priming the stage for you going, if I'm going to work with Jacob, I should expect expensive, right? And so we can set just in the types of questions we ask, we can differentiate ourselves from the competition. Now, what may happen too is Eric, you might say, you can't promote anyone internally. They're a little too junior or they need some handholding, or we have C players and B players and we're just not quite sure if anyone's there for leadership yet. Great. I might say, why not hire, uh, an agency? I don't like to work with agencies because XYZ. Why not hire somebody with a different industry profile? You say, I don't want that because XYZ. And what you're doing is you're telling me everything that I need to do to close you. Ah, it makes sense of why you and I are on the phone today because I am that senior leader. I can handle these problems. I've seen this before. I can tell and tap into some stories from before. And I can really focus in on what you care about most versus only talking about my experience in the past. So I want to focus on solving your problems and then also psychologically working to say, I am a premium solution. I'm better than all your alternatives there. I've differentiated myself from the competition. And now when you're ready to make an offer, you don't have any other choices, or at least no choices that I don't know about. And so you can significantly increase your leverage right from the very first conversation. And that's about as high level as I can get right now, because obviously the co— uh, the process is pretty complex.

Yeah, that makes sense. A lot of the psychology behind it is just setting the right expectations and then understanding what people's options are and setting things up in the right way. I think everybody always has options, right? And, but a lot of times the options are worse. However, the psychology of it, as you said, is if you go in and you don't position yourself of you get what you pay for and you come across instead as overeager or desperate, then you're, you just set the expectation wrong before you even get to the point of they want to hire you and they're going to start negotiating the salary. So even very early in the process, the psychology and the expectation and understanding what their options are so that you can close them. It starts pretty early in the process and maybe in the first conversation, like you're saying, right?

Yeah. And there's a lot of mistakes that marketers make often, and some of it's their fault and some of it's not. So marketing's often last to hire, first to fire. People see it as a cost, not an investment. And so with that mindset going into the conversation, you feel like you have something to prove. You have to prove that marketing's valuable. You have to prove all the, you have to prove you're valuable. And when you're setting out to prove yourself constantly, you're diminishing your leverage. From the get-go. We need to assume that it's valuable and talk to the point that they get it and that it will be valuable. And so that's one mistake that marketers particularly make. And then marketers that are out of work obviously have very little leverage. They might be interested primarily in paying their mortgage and doing these other things. So they shift the way they talk into more of, I'm excited and I'm eager. And they do this fluffy bullshit that makes them milquetoast with all the rest of their comp— uh, competition and nobody stands out. So the one that pushes back and is more assertive and focuses on the challenges, less about, oh, I'm really excited about this opportunity, especially with companies that are pretty fricking boring, which we all know them. And we're feigning excitement for bullshit. Like people can see right through that and you're not even fooling yourself. And that creates a lot of loss of leverage and desperation and all of those things work against you. So the initial offer you get is significantly lower should that even work through the process. And that's only going to work for middle to bottom tier opportunities in the first place. So you're groveling for the weaker parts of it, not earning the greater ones. There's a little bit of a rubber band effect and a push and pull. I'll do one final little trick because I know you promised behavioral psychology in the intro and we only touched on a little bit of it. This is a trick I like to use. I might say, Eric, I want to give you a positive reputation, whether you've ever behaved like that in the past before. So I'd say something like, Eric, I appreciate that you've always been an advocate for me and that you share the good work that we've done together with some of your clients. And I just want you to know that I recognize that and I appreciate it. And so what I'm doing is I'm trying to give you a positive mentality, a positive reputation to entice your brain to keep doing that, to live up to that reputation, to be, oh yeah, when I think about Jacob, I do think about promoting him in this way or talking highly of him or doing this. And you could do that in the interview process when they're talking about compensation and things. You could say, look, what's most important to me is finding alignment. And I appreciate that as a hiring manager, you're going to do the best that you can. And you're going to be a great advocate for me. And I'm thankful for that. And so we give them the reputation, you're going to go to battle for me. Now we know that they might still cut you back 20% or those types of things, but we influence them every step of the way to be thinking, how can I be a better advocate for this person? And we use them to coach us on other interviews through the process and continually collaborating as an advocate. That's the person that they're going to want to hire, the one that's naturally already part of the team. So just a couple of tips there.

How much more have you been able to help people earn with these types of strategies? So people get a, a directional sense for how effective this can be.

Yeah, I feel very confident that just a handful of tips could make someone a million more in their career. Some cases, if they're positioned correctly, I've made that in one career transition. We had one, not specific, not too specific, but we created a bidding war in the Fang Group to get someone from $800,000 a year to $2.4 million a year, which was fascinating to me. I got a bottle of wine as a thank you for that, so I wasn't too happy, but that's what helped me trigger value-based pricing afterwards. There's been, I had a moment earlier this year where we had talked through 6 months of severance and it was on-target earnings severance, right? Which was about, I wanna say it was $350,000 for 6 months of on-target earnings for this particular executive. And the deal was almost signed. It went to legal, changed the definition from on-target to base salary so that essentially cut the severance package in half at the, in the 11th hour., right? And my client said, oh, I'll talk to the CEO and I'll just propose a compromise. I'll go right in the middle. Right? And I said, wait, hold on. Just take a moment. Talk about where you're coming from. Propose it this way and say, hey, this is why the decision, this is why I chose OnTarget as an example. I think it just got mixed up in legal. CEO said, oh yeah, you're right. No big deal. And signed it back to OnTarget just like that. So in one particular conversation, it was about a 3-minute conversation, we saved $350,000 in severance where we were going to just immediately go to compromise for no reason. So sometimes we just have to think through things and position them in a different way. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And you should never be so sure that somebody is going to say, no, I don't want to compromise, or that it was malignant in intent. When lawyers get ahold of things, you never know what's going to happen. So it can be a little tricky. To get things back. But that's just an example in 10 minutes making $175,000, something like that.

Yeah.

Or the difference between that, whatever half of that is, just in taking a quick psychological break.