What I Learned Negotiating Against The Top 0.01%

I've added over $1.25 billion in lifted outcomes for deals that I've advised for Hollywood A-listers that you've heard of, some of the largest companies in the world that you're likely using right now, and with some of the billionaires that run them. And whether this is you taking a look at this video to negotiate your first salary or you're navigating a billion-dollar exit, the art of negotiation, or perhaps the science of it, never seems to change. My name is Jacob Warwick and I'm Silicon Valley's compensation negotiator. In today's video, I want to reveal the 7 principles that only really the top 0.01% of negotiators do that most people do not. If negotiation feels like something that kind of gives you a pit in your stomach and you say like, I don't want to come across as greedy, I want to give you these tools so that you can use them to get more out of what you're looking for in your next negotiation. They will make everything so much easier, I promise. Top negotiators understand that you don't go into the room aiming to win it, you realize that you've won it before you ever step foot. For those that win the room ahead of time, what we've done is that we have almost orchestrated the board in our favor before any conversation ever happened. That means we have controlled or commanded the language that others speak about for us. So when we get recommended in opportunities, somebody says, look, I want you to meet Jacob, He's the best damn negotiator I've ever worked with. Now, I've trained them to say that. So when that conversation comes my way, someone says, hey, Jacob, I've heard that you're the best damn negotiator that my friend has ever worked with, and I respect the hell out of them. What can you teach me? I don't have to go into that conversation saying, oh, well, I see that you need help with a negotiator. Let me tell you a little bit about what I do. All of that is unnecessary because their friend said Jacob's awesome. they're more likely to believe it, and that conversation is pre-won. We have the opportunity to control the perception about who we are before you have a conversation with us. That is significantly easier to negotiate under those conditions than one where you're unknown and you have to explain yourself. For those that don't have a large media presence or a large network, that means controlling the words that you say on LinkedIn. Oftentimes sharing less is better than sharing more. Same problem we have with resumes. It shows a timestamp of who you've been, not where you're going. So we wanna be very mindful about the language that we use, and we wanna share, this is where I'm headed, not where I've been. When a recruiter calls you and they ask you about your career, you say, hey, this is what I've done historically, this is where I'm heading. And so we control the frame. You don't walk into the room having to win it. You control every conversation along the way. That's what the top 0.01% of negotiators do that most people do not. Number 2, don't just say a number. I promise you, you don't know what you're worth. If you think you know what you're worth, you're wrong. Value is very subjective. You may be worth $10 an hour to someone down the street, and you may be worth $1 million a year to someone down a different street. You don't happen to know the number until you've done research to explore what the other party is willing to do. Back 10, maybe 15 years ago in my career, I was making about $12 an hour in Silicon Valley. And trust me, $12 an hour in San Francisco is not enough. I was flirting in and out of homelessness. It was honestly a challenging period. I was constantly looking for work, stressed out because I knew if I lost my job, I'd be on the streets again. And I happened to have a decent title. I was a marketing manager at an early-stage startup, just barely getting by. And I happened to know that other marketing managers in the same Bay Area tended to make $70,000 to $80,000 a year. So one day I get an outreach on LinkedIn, kind of put myself out there, got a little lucky in this situation. Recruiter reached out and said, Jacob, it looks like you've been doing some work with HubSpot. Looks like you've been a marketing manager for about a year and we have this director opportunity. Would you be interested? And I, of course, at this point in my life, every opportunity I was chasing, right? This sounds great. But they said inevitably, how much money do you want? Now, what would you say in that situation? Would you say, well, I make $12 an hour right now, what are you thinking? What's gonna happen? Are they gonna say, ooh, you're not as good as we thought you were? Or am I gonna do the other thing? Sometimes people do this, they say, you know, I'm $150,000 a year, right? Then they're gonna say, okay, uh, prove it. And I can't. Okay, so in this situation, I didn't know what to do. I just said, You know, I've been talking to a handful of companies and I've seen ranges all over the place. Can you give me an idea on what you're expecting? And the recruiter said, yeah, you know, we're— for this role, we're budgeted around $100,000 to $120,000 a year. In this case, stayed silent. And I was like, oh my God, my life's gonna change. I have to get this deal, right? Like, this is gonna change my life. And I said, yeah, I'm on the upper end of that. And they said, oh great, like, when can we schedule an interview? And It was just this almost dumb luck. I was just like, don't say anything. Don't say— don't tell 'em you make $12 an hour. Don't do that. Just find yourself into this situation. Turns out I got that job, and for the first time in my life, I could put gas in my gas tank without maxing out my credit card. I could put food on the table without having to understand every single dollar amount in my grocery cart. What? By dumb luck, a couple of different sentences Could change the lives of my friends who were in those situations, or maybe change the life of you. If one or two sentences can change your life, if you catch it at the right time, I want people to know that. So I want you to have that feeling. Never be so sure of your worth that you wouldn't accept more. Number 3, there's a simple sentence that if you're not using it, could cost you 20 to 40%, and it's not confrontational, and it doesn't At least it shouldn't give you butterflies in your stomach when you, when you have to say it. Let's say you've, you've done the interview process, you got a job offer, maybe you tried to negotiate, maybe you didn't. And they said, look, Susan, this is our best and final. Now, in that case, what do you do? Maybe it's a little under what you want, but maybe you want a little bit more, but you don't know how to ask. You can simply say, you know, I appreciate the offer. I'm grateful for the chance to work with you. What's the chance there's a little bit more here? Or if you were in my shoes, What would you ask for? You just never know if you don't ask. And oftentimes asking is more than half the battle. The reason I like put yourself in my shoes is that it forces empathy. Like, you force the other person to walk through this visceral experience of, okay, I'm, I'm at this point in my career. You know, they didn't ask about severance, or they didn't ask about how this equity bonus is paid out, or I know there's actually like $10,000 more here in the budget. Let me see if I can get that for them. If you can force that empathy, if you can force them to coach you, what we do is that a coach wants their players to be successful. So if we give them the reputation of being a coach, we can increase the likelihood that we influence them to take care of us. And so this is a mind hack. You might think that it's a manipulation Manipulation. It's actually influence. And the difference between influence and manipulation is that influence is something where you're trying to solve the greater good. Manipulation is extractive. And so if you truly think that your value is there and you're going to provide impact for the organization, lean on influence, not manipulation. Number 4, top negotiators let silence do a lot of the talking for them.

What's this?

I want you to be my general manager. That's my offer. You make an ask and then you just shut up. You don't say anything about it. Because if you find yourself needing to justify your position, you start losing. You start giving concessions. And the first person to speak often is the one that starts to lose ground as they reveal information. I've even had this with some of my clients where they'll say, hey Jacob, what's it gonna take to work with you? And I'll put the number out there and then I'll just ignore it. I just won't say anything and I won't check to see if they emailed me back. I won't do a damn thing. And then 3, 4 weeks later, I'll hear somebody say, great, I'm ready to work with you. And I could have chased, I could have offered concessions, I could have lowered my prices. I could have like, I could have done any number of things to close that business. I simply did nothing. And in this case, it was email. Email is a lot easier to be silent in than in a room where you're staring at somebody just waiting for the other one to blink. Time and time again, silence increases deals significantly more than you'd think. And the rule of thumb I have is when you don't know what to do, the best thing to do is nothing. So put yourself out there, don't say a thing, let the silence do the work for you. Number 5, We simply don't believe in ceilings. And I have so many cases where ceilings have been broken, it's almost obnoxious. Rules get broken all of the time, and it makes you wonder, why can't the rules be broken in my favor once in a while? If you think the outcome is predetermined, you're right. If you think your outcome is not predetermined, you're right. And the difference here is mindset. So if you feel like a company's at the ceiling, you're not going to try to change things. But I have enough evidence where an L7 at Google is getting paid at L8, or a friend broke 3 or 4 comp bands to bring another friend in, or somebody is comped by one company and then secretly comped by another to make a deal happen. Or you should be asking yourself, how can I make sure that this ceiling that's offered to me is the actual ceiling? What questions would I ask to see if there's more here? Going back to our sentence earlier, what's the chance that there's a little bit more here? Or if you were in my shoes, what would you do differently? If you have a predetermined mindset that the outcome is fixed and that there is a ceiling, you won't ask those questions. You'll justify and you'll commoditize and you will fit within that band. And oftentimes we get stuck there. But if you make just one or two or 3 opportunities in your career where you break that band and you break it by a significant amount, whether it's the first time going from $15 an hour to $20 or from $20,000 to $100,000 a year, something like that. Every time you do that, it compounds over your entire life. And so if I could just challenge you, don't believe in ceilings. Your outcomes aren't predetermined. There are some paths where you can ask the right questions to break it.

We should hire you.

And start to challenge the system. That's how we break out of this. Number 6, we recognize that a yes is often the most expensive feeling in the world. If somebody is so quick to say yes to your demands, you probably didn't ask for enough. And I'm not suggesting you be, you be greedy or you be deceitful or you be, you know, completely out of left field when it comes to your asks, but I'm suggesting that You often need to ask much higher than you think you do. And that's, that's probably because people tend to try to split the difference. They try to offer concessions in the middle. Oh, if I said, hey, I want to sell this for $20 and someone said, I want to buy it for $10, oftentimes people will end up at like $14, $15, or $16, something like that, somewhere roughly in the middle. And depending on which side of that you, you sway on, somebody will feel a little bit more hurt than the other person. That's not how negotiation needs to work. Now obviously I've oversimplified it there, and I saw this in a book, and it was— I think it was a book written in the '70s, and they were playing negotiation games. Everybody was negotiating the same thing. They had half of the teams try to be reasonable, try to offer little concessions here and there, try to, you know, be reasonable. Like, you said 20, how about 18? You know, like within reason. Now the other half of this group, they were doing audacious, like very assertive asks. So instead of 20, they were saying like 80, for example, like completely 4 times the number. The smaller part, the one asking for generous asks, had moderate concessions. The ones asking for bigger asks won 70% more, and nobody walked away from the deals. And then I started seeing this in some deals that I did in Hollywood. An actress asking for $20 million a year, the production company asking for 3, and then the actress said, okay, how about 18? And the production company said, okay, how about 12? So like they came up in a single conversation, $9 million, and the other one only conceded $2 million. Like it was so big, but they still wanted to work together and they made that deal come forward. So the problem is if you try to be reasonable and it said yes right away, you probably left a lot on the table and you didn't spend the time to really discover the value that you can have in that conversation. So ultimately, yes can be very expensive, especially when it happens too early in a conversation. Number 7, this is probably one of my favorites, but we close deals without it ever feeling like a close. It's not a sales pitch. It's not a once we get the contract in order, we do the work. Instead, we execute what I call the phantom close. And the phantom close is to pretend that you're already doing the job even when the deal hasn't been inked yet. And ultimately what that looks like, I had a CEO go into a conversation and The board was really unsure whether they can afford her, and they were, they were kind of putting an offer out there, and they expected this conversation to be about comp. Is she going to accept the compensation? Now, I advise a CEO, I said, hey, let's not talk about comp at all. Let's say, hey, you know, we'll deal with the comp, we'll review that. Instead, what we focused on is what was it going to be like working with the team? What was the rollout going to look like? What was the PR message we were going to share with the market? How excited was everyone going to get about this new CEO hire? How is the board gonna feel better 6 months, 12 months down the line as the stock improved? Those types of things. So we led the entire conversation just talking about all the things that we were going to accomplish together, not the things that would only happen if this deal met our comp demands, as an example. And what changed from a mindset perspective is the board came in ready for a fight and they left with a partner. And fast forward 2 weeks, we lifted that deal another 40%. And one of the things that that triggers is it's a little bit of a sunk cost when you start to get all parties very excited about working together. But the board and the company started to feel loss aversion. If they lost that CEO later, after they had built all that excitement and all of that promise and all that enthusiasm, they were going to feel pretty dumb. It was also going to mean they'd have to reengage with a search firm. They would have to spend weeks, if not months, looking for another backup candidate. And ideally, they would be comparing constantly to the CEO that got away. And so what happens is that loss aversion feels about twice as painful as just getting it in the first place. And so we played into a little bit of the behavioral psychology there. And ultimately, that's what brought the deal past the bands. It had nothing to do with us arguing over the comp. It had more to do with us building a vision of we together and selling like we would have already had the deal. If I think back to that kid, Who maxed his credit card out just to put a quarter of a tank of gas in his Honda Civic to where I'm at today. If I could bottle that feeling up and give that to every one of my watchers, if I could change some lives like that with these tips, if you could take these 7 tips and just change a little bit of your life because of that, that would bring me the most joy. That's the best way that I can give back. Be sure to stay fearless, and I'll see you next time.