How to Lower The Temperature in a Negotiation With Andy Dale

Hello, my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for joining us today. With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of of the American Negotiation Institute. Now, before we get into today's insightful conversation, I have a golden opportunity for those of you who recognize the power of negotiation in your professional lives. Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could navigate those high stakes conversations with more confidence? Or perhaps you're looking to empower your team with the art of persuasion and conflict resolution? At the American Negotiation Institute, we've crafted special specialized keynotes and workshops tailored for those very needs. We've transformed the negotiation skills of professionals worldwide and we're eager to do the same for you. We believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And our goal is to help you improve your lives and the lives of those around you, one difficult conversation at a time. Don't let another challenging conversation leave you second guessing. Click the link in the description to discover how we can help you find confidence in conflict, negotiate better deals, and have stronger relationships. Because in the world of business, every conversation counts. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Andy, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

Hey, man, it is my pleasure. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

All right, thanks for having me. I'm the GC and chief Privacy Officer at a company called Alice, which is a business to business gifting technology platform in the marketing and marketing space. And before that, I was the GC at a company called Session M, which was also in the marketing space, but more loyalty program software. And we sold that company to MasterCard and had a great ride there. A couple companies before that. And before that I was in school.

Love it. And before that I was an embryo.

Yeah, all the way back. Yeah. Well, I grew up in Baltimore, so, you know, which I love my hometown. So we could, we could, we can always. I'm always happy to rap about Baltimore.

That's awesome, man. Well, we're excited to have you and I'm excited to talk about negotiation with a fellow lawyer. We have the same scars and have been hazed in the same way by the legal profession. So this will be fun. So the three things we're going to Talk about today. First, lowering the temperature in our negotiations. Talking about legal arguments never win, which I love. We need to go into that. And then good books on leadership and negotiation and listeners. We started to get all excited talking about this, so I said we need to save some of this energy for the actual podcast. And I think this is great for obviously people who are negotiating contracts, but really the principles from this episode can be applied in any aspects of business and personal life because. Listen, Andy, I don't know about you, but when my wife says I'm acting like a lawyer, it's never a good thing.

I want to say I'm happy to have this chat and I'm excited about it. I don't think any of these things will work with anyone's spouse. I know it doesn't work for me. So in the business context, these things work very well.

Listen, it's so funny. Again, typical lawyer hitting us with a disclaimer. I love it.

There you go. Well, cool.

Let's start off with lowering the temperature. What should we know about that?

I think especially in a remote world when people are negotiating, often over zoom, haven't met before, haven't had conversations, and maybe they've gone back and forth over email or the sales teams and procurement teams have been talking. When you get on the phone, you finally get into that negotiation position with somebody. I think it's really important to set the tone. And, and in my case, that often means let's lower the temperature. People are nervous. They don't know what the other side's going to be like. They don't know if somebody is going to be contentious or not, if there's an issue or two that really stand out. So try to have some non fake pleasantry that actually happens in the beginning. You know, real stuff, real talk. And it doesn't have to be about the weather. It can even be about, you know, current, current things that are happening in somebody's company or in somebody's business. You know, I'm struggling with an issue around something else, you know, something else unrelated. It. It humanizes both sides. And then you're starting from a place of, of real sort of genuine, like, all right, we're here to solve problems. One thing that I'll do, if I've met someone before or if I know someone in common with them, I'll go like, check out who we're talking to. And I'll just say, like, oh, you know Sarah, like, I know her too. And like, there's just something to that sort of exchange. There where you're, you're getting off on the right foot.

I love it. It's, it's so simple, but really, really powerful. Andy. Because, and let me know if you think this too. I feel like that art of rapport building is, is becoming a lost art because so many people are either busy or like to act like they're too busy to actually invest in the relationship in this way.

Let me tell, I'll tell a quick story. At my last company session M, one of the things I tried to do was to make sure that I had pretty good contacts at our biggest customers. And that could either mean the biggest paying customer or big, big brands. And in one case, we had a medium sized customer was Coca Cola. And we were renegotiating part of the agreement and I was working with a lawyer on the other side. And she and I worked well together and were able to do the things that establish some rapport, get the deal done. And afterwards we stayed in touch and we started talking about issues that were affecting both a small company and a large company and things that were just sort of outside of that. And we started bonding and we started introducing other people to other people around and we became friends. And interestingly, that that came from sort of lowering the temperature and having a reasonable negotiation between, you know, frankly, a party that had way more leverage than I did. Coca Cola and I was an upstart SaaS company. So fast forward, we're selling session M to MasterCard. And at the very end of the deal, I'm talking the goal line. There are five contracts that require the customer to approve assignment, you know, over to a buyer. It happens to be that I have contacts at all of them because we sent, we spent the time establishing those connections and Coca Cola. So I texted her, look, you know, we're, we're, we're on the goal line here. And, and she said, the person that approves this is going on vacation, like today, and he's going to be gone for, you know, a week. And like, time kills deals, you know. And so I always start freaking out. And I was like, can I, can I talk to him? Can you help me? Can I talk to him? And so half an hour later, she sends me a text. You know, here's, here's his number. Give him a call. So I call him, I reach him in the airport, he's in the airport. And I'm like, can you please approve this? And he's like, I don't know, I'm about to go out. How urgent is it? You know, I'm sitting here in the gate, the airport. I said, look, you know, this is the deal, the deal to sell the company. Can you please? And he's like, I'll take care of it. And it was approved and it wasn't a roadblock to the deal at all. And I'm not saying every situation works out like that, but it certainly was instructive to me.

I love that. Andy, first of all, impeccable storytelling. Thanks. That was great. That was great. And I think there are a couple of gems that I want to pull from this. The first thing is I think a lot of times people are too tactical when they think about relationship building and creating these connections and building rapport because they're thinking tactically in a very short term type of way. I'm doing this right now to close this specific deal in this specific moment right now. And then they don't have the long term perspective. And what I'm finding more and more is that it is never a bad move to make the right decision. Making the right decision in this case is just building relationships, investing into people. It might not always lead to some financial benefit down the road, but it's not going to hurt you. Right? And so I think this is just an incredible testament to the value, the ubiquitous value of relationship building in negotiation. Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations? At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered. Don't just negotiate. Master the arts with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate and succeed.

It shows up in ways you don't even expect. So there's that story I had with her. She left Coca Cola, went to another customer of my same company. So then we still had the ongoing relationship. And then she left again and went to another company that is again, sort of tangentially related. So you're able to keep those relationships. But more importantly, we're friends now. And so more importantly, I have a friend at multiple companies that I can reach out to and say, give me your take on this. You're at a much bigger company than I am. What are the issues you face versus the ones I face. And it gives you that really clear person to bounce things off of so that when you go on to the next negotiation or the next situation, you can say, I've really touched on this with my brain trust around this space, and I have a pretty good sense for the issue.

One of the things that you mentioned earlier that I really, really liked is at the beginning, we have to set the tone, and we do that by building the relationship, creating these connections and things like that. But one of the things I want to really highlight there is that you, the listener, whoever you might happen to be, you should take it upon yourself to do this. It should be your responsibility. And so you'll listen to this episode of the podcast and you'll say, yes, Andy said, lower the temperature. The temperature should be lowered by who?

You.

By you. Right. One of the things I always say is that it only takes one person to improve the quality of a relationship. It's better with two, but it only takes one, and it's up to you to get that momentum moving.

I completely agree, and I love that. And I was at a conference recently, and our panel was on this. So this applies internally as well as external. Like the, the panel was on privacy and marketing, that relationship between the marketing team and the privacy team. And how do you. How do you, you know, make that a good. A good, strong relationship? And I, I said, you know, sort of an iteration of what you just said. I said to the, to the audience, it's up to you. It's your job. And this was an audience of lawyers and privacy people. Like, you have to reach out to marketing. It's not marketing's job to come to you and know, this is a legal issue. You're the issue spotter, not them. So you need to establish, I'm here, this is where you can find me. These are the things I care about, and these are the things we're going to do together to be successful for our own mutual gain for the company. So that that mantra totally applies internally, too.

Absolutely. And so what I'm realizing, too, is that we can diffuse a lot of these bombs before they go off, just by taking the time to build rapport. And so I remember a couple of times people would ask, maybe it's students in my classes or the, like, people at the corporate trainings that we do. They might say, well, what do you do if somebody blows up during these negotiations, if there's a major emotional outburst? And I thought about it for a while, and I said, honestly, that doesn't happen to me that frequently anymore. And I don't think it's anything special about me is that I'm realizing that I'm doing a better job as I get a little bit more mature and developed in my career of identifying the signals of a potential emotional outburst early. And so, like you said at the beginning, we set the tone, we lower the temperature, but then we're constantly looking out for these indicators of emotional distress. And so before it becomes a big problem, we try to solve it when it's a small problem.

I think that's true for me, too. I think I'm doing a better job at identifying that. Just the Gladwell 10,000 hours, you know, just thousands of negotiations with, you know, thousands of people on the other side. You just start to get a feel for it and feel for the tempo. I think it happens less frequently, but I still think it's a good question because it still happens, and it happens maybe to varying degrees. Like, it doesn't happen in the same way, but I still get thrown off when somebody on the other side is really, really aggressive or really passive aggressive and. Or the red lines that preceded the negotiation were filled with comments that were insulting or sort of like, overbearing on the kind of leverage front, you know, and so I come into it heightened.

Yeah. And, Andy, that's. It's so important for us to recognize that, though, because a lot of times when we're in the heat of the moment, we understand there's a difference between facts and feelings, but they feel the same right then when you're really hot under the collar. And so it's really important to understand when you're triggered so you can adjust your approach to think a lot clearer. So when that happens to you, how do you respond?

I think better now, you know, than. Than when I used to. I think back to when, you know, in the early days, I was at a big company, and so I was the buyer, and I was negotiating against a company that was selling us services. They were very over. The lawyer was an outside counsel, and they were very overbearing and very, like, trying to push us around. And I was very junior, and I had a couple sticking points, right? And I kept sticking with them. And we got off one of the calls, and I went, you know, to a mentor of mine next door, and I was like, he was the IP guy, and it was an IP issue. And I was like, am I wrong? Because I needed to sort of pressure test this and check it. And he said, no, you're not wrong. Stick to your guns here and the next call, the guy totally blew up. I mean, he was furious, yelling. And I was heightened back to him. And I just said, like, I basically. I think I sort of said, like, we can't go forward. And so I just kind of called stopped. And what ended up happening was they ended up pulling him out and bringing in their internal attorney and finishing the deal. So that sort of showed me, like, hey, that I was so young, right? Like, I didn't realize that. That I kept questioning if I was wrong still, you know, I kept questioning, am I doing something that is so off market, or is my position, you know, unrefined? You know, do I not know? And it ended up. I think they needed to bring someone in who is more kind of willing to get the deal done. But as I progress and as I learn over time, those issues seem to be coming up less and less and less, because when someone gets heightened, I think I'm better able to modulate myself.

That's a great story. And it's. It's so true, though. Like, as you get more experience, you can. You can handle yourself a lot better. But your story demonstrated a really important principle when it comes to holding your ground under pressure. And it is a simple reality. That is true, but I don't think it's very comforting. And so really, under those circumstances, what do you do? You double check with other people just to make sure your emotions aren't getting in the way of clarity of thought. And then you come back and then you hold your ground, and then they breathe fire and you hold your ground. And I think that's the thing that people struggle with, because they want this silver bullet. They want the magic negotiation techniques that make somebody nice. Sometimes it's just not going to happen. And the negotiation technique is simply resilience.

There's power in saying something really calmly, like, I hear you. I just have a different view. Like, we think about the issue differently, and then kind of pause and stop there and no more rhetoric or comment on it. Now, they may come back at you with some and. And you can say, I've talked about it a lot with my team here. I've talked about it with my outside counsel. And just like we. We have a different take on it and like, let the silence hit. And typically they're not going to come back at you again and again on an issue. They're going to move to the next one. And so I think that helps. Even if you disagreed and you had some fire around that disagreement, once you move on to the next one. And maybe you sort of show again another sort of olive branch about we're here to solve a problem. It usually, like, lowers the temperature again through the rest of the negotiation because there's always going to be little moments when the temperature spikes up and down.

Right? For sure. For sure. And one of those things that can make the emotional temperature of the room spike up is when you start to get into legal arguments. And now I don't want people to say, I'm not a lawyer, I'm going to move to the next podcast. No. Unless you're moving to another episode of Negotiate Anything when I would accept that. Or. And his podcast too. But. But yeah, sometimes we get into these legalistic or moralistic types of arguments where I'm right, you're wrong, and we feel a lot of conviction, but we're surprised that somebody feels the same level of conviction in the opposite direction.

So.

So let's go deeper. When you, as it relates to this topic of legal arguments and the lack of efficacy there, when I say legal.

Arguments never win, I'm sort of referring to the idea that someone quoting chapter and verse to you or someone quoting a case or case law or something, or somebody just saying, like, I'm, you know, Acme Corp. Inc. And my position as a company is that every vendor we do business with gives us uncapped liability, like that kind of thing. It never wins. If you have a good, a good counterparty, they'll play games with you with that argument. And so I think the truth is what wins is facts. The law has to be there. You have to have an underlying understanding of what the deal is and the commercial terms matter. And the way the, if it's a tech deal, the way the tech operates matters. If it's a services deal, the way the services will be delivered matters, the leverage the parties have, you know, all of those things matter way more than the nuanced, intricate, you know, what is the, what article of the GDPR are we discussing? Or, you know, is this legal under, you know, contract law in New York? Like, it's just, it's never going to get you to the finish line. What does get you to the finish line is I can't do that because my software doesn't do this.

Right, right. It's so funny when Andy, when you explain it that way, it's so obvious. But again, in the heat of the moment, we lose that. And so let's say, hypothetically, people say, all right, Andy, I'm not going to do that, but I'm negotiating against somebody who does? So how do we pull somebody else out of that mindset?

I think it depends on where you are sort of in the life of that negotiation. Right. Are you down to the last two things? You're down to the last two things. Last two things, in your experience and mine, they're often indemnity and liability or reps or warranties or something of that ilk. We're down to these critical things. All right, What I'll try to do is I'll try to say, I hear you, I hear your position, I know you've heard mine, and just let me know, are we at the point where you. Where we can't move anymore? Tell me. Because what I'll do is then I will go back to my team and we'll have a very serious discussion about whether we can move forward. And I think that because you have to stop at that point, you have to take a breather. And if you've narrowed it down and you're at a bet the deal moment, if it's an uncapped liability versus capping at a reasonable cap, you are at a bet the deal moment. Because you won't do the deal. If you're a smart company, you just won't do the deal. It won't be worth it. If the revenue of the deal on One side is 100k and you're at an uncapped liability position and you have real liability, you're going to go very seriously discuss whether that deal makes sense. Because I'm not going to close that deal and then go to our board and our investors and management team and the whole company and say, great deal, great logo, but it's fraught, it's not going to work. And so I think you can say, I've said that exact thing to the other party, like, I want to work with you, I want to close the deal. But these terms make the deal potentially untenable. So we're going to have to go have that conversation. And then if your sales team or the procurement team or the other business teams that have been working on this deal, if they truly have pull and they truly want the deal to happen, they'll get some flexibility on that other side and you'll get some flexibility on your side. And then the next time you have a call, you'll either get the deal done or it wasn't meant to be. You weren't meant to get married.

Exactly. And I think that's a really important point to make. And I think about negotiation not as the art of deal. Making, but more the art of deal discovery. We're working together to see whether or not a deal exists. And just like you said earlier, you said that you have to focus on the facts. You have to focus on the truth. And the truth for you and what is factually accurate is, listen, this is a deal breaker. I'm not trying to grandstand here. If this, in fact, is a deal breaker for you, talk to your team about it, I'll talk to my team about it and see if we can make something happen. If we can't, that is completely okay. And I think a lot of people are afraid of being that honest in a negotiation.

I think there's some level of playing chicken, and I think, especially lately when I am a smaller vendor dealing with an enterprise customer. There's a lot of playing games of chicken here, but you have to be thoughtful again about the facts and the commercials. Like, I'm in the middle of a deal right now. It's a renewal with a really big customer that has a really big, really, if I'm being totally honest, messy and difficult procurement organization that just is getting in the way of deals getting done. And I. It got to a point where I just had to say, we can't. We can't do the deal. And it's. I said, I'm so sorry. I know, I know we've worked on this, but the position you've taken is not possible for us. The next day, they were emailing us again about, well, we went back to legal, and, you know, we. They're willing to do this and do that. And so you're really kind of. I don't like it. But there is some. There are. There are situations when you do have to kind of put it out there. Like, this is my point. I can't do it. And so if you put it out there to the other side and you do it in the way you just described, I think it works. But obviously people are afraid because they're not framing it in the way you framed it, which is, you know, really important, the way you framed it. Like, we may not have a deal. I want to have a deal, but we may not have one just because of the facts. And it's nothing against us. I just think we may have hit a stalemate here.

Absolutely. And one of the things that I've found is that it makes. It's never easy to hear no. When you want to hear yes, but it makes it a bit more palatable when you keep a couple of things in mind. Number one, if you Focus on the relationship. Andy, this is not personal. It's not me against you. I understand your position. I appreciate you articulating it so clearly. Just based on how you said it and how you described it. It can't work for my team. Right, Cool. So I'm going to reaffirm the relationship while still setting a very clear boundary. And then the other thing is giving them the opportunity to save face. Because if we allow somebody to exit every conversation with their dignity and self respect intact, it makes everything a lot easier. And this kind of, I mean, it circles back to what we're talking about at the very beginning, about creating and maintaining that connection.

It said said differently and sort of more simply, you don't throw anyone under the bus and that includes someone you've never met in a procurement team that you think is being too complex and not being flexible enough, still treat them with respect and dignity. I'm so sorry, but we can't do the deal the way it's framed now. Thanks for all your work and time on it. Appreciate it. Leave it there. Then they may go to bat and try to figure it out.

Absolutely. All right. See, this is one of those, those episodes where I could just keep on going and going. But, but for the sake of time, let's move on to books on negotiation and leadership. First of all, let's, let's. Before we start like listing books, let's just talk about your philosophy around self education.

I think as we were talking about before we started recording, you know, I have young kids and so my ability to find time to read entire books is limited. And so I have to really take suggestions and take advice on what kind of content I'm in. So I try to get snippets here and there. Content podcasts. You know, my CEO and I will bat around different things. He's a big podcast person. So we have a Slack channel on podcasts and on, you know, things. So there's a. There's internal resources to, to get good ideas and he loves snippets of YouTube talks and stuff. And so I think those things are great and I listen to them while I do the dishes. So that's one hack, I guess. But when I do get into a book, it's usually been recommended by a few people multiple times and has different applicability to me. So not necessarily something super hyper specific for me personally, like I won't necessarily read a book just about contract negotiation, but I'll read about something that has negotiation in it, has leadership principles in it, has business principles in it. And then I can extrapolate something from there.

Yeah, and I agree. I think it's so important for us to invest in our self education. And very few people, I shouldn't say very few people, but I feel like a lot of times as professionals and everybody listening to this episode is a professional negotiator. When you are having difficult conversations trying to persuade people, you negotiate for a living. Everybody does that to a certain extent. But I feel like people are missing out on the opportunity to educate themselves. And you're spot on. It takes time, but it pays off. What would you say are some of those books for you that were really.

Strong resources for you, specifically on negotiating? I'm a little bit biased, but my father wrote a book and he's a ghostwriter for professionals and professional athletes. And so he wrote a book called the Power of Nice, which is the. I don't know, it's sort of the principles espoused by a sports agent who was Cal Ripken's agent, among other, you know, pro athletes. And so that was the first book that I read that focused on a lot of what you and I have talked about. You know, everybody can win, both sides can win. You just have to get to a deal. It's not about eviscerating the other side. So that book was powerful. And then kind of more generally on the leadership side of things, I read Shoe Dog, which is the story of Nike and the story of how Phil Knight created the Nike brand. And there's just a lot of lessons in there just about business, about relationships, about loyalty, about relationships with athletes, relationships with Michael Jordan and Prefontaine and just how he got the business off the ground and, and how he handled pressure and handled really, really, really like sort of earth crushing pressure. And I think it helped me recognize that my discussion over IP terms isn't as critical. And we can take that break, I think, to what we discussed earlier. It's okay to bring the temperature down and take a break. And I learned a lot of that from some of these books and resources.

I love that. Yeah, man. I tell you, it's an incredible resource to have at our disposal now more than ever before. If you're a tangible book reader, you like the physical book, we can have access to that in Amazon prime two days. Right. We have ebooks, instant access. And so for me, I'm a book junkie. I don't know if I've ever said this on the podcast, but in years that I am not currently writing a book, I try to Read a book a week and use the word read loosely because I do audio books. So I go on audible listen in 3.5 times speed, and then I take notes using the dictation function. So at the end of the book I can get through it in about a week. And I can end up with like 20 or 30 pages, size 12 single space. And then every morning before I go to the gym, I review the book notes. I can put it into an audio file and listen to those book notes in the morning to make sure I'm retaining. Because I realized that for any problem, almost any problem that exists, somebody has thought about that and written a book on it. And the people who have written these books on these topics have put way more thought into it than I ever will. So I just go straight to the source.

It sounds like you're putting a lot of thought into the retention of that and that's really interesting. And it made me think of another book called the Messy Middle, which was really helpful to me in tech companies. And so if anyone's listening and they're in an early to mid stage tech company, that one provides a lot of comfort for the leadership journey, whether it's negotiation, hiring, any of these key issues. It was a really helpful book for me to understand that this is normal, that there's chaos and there's success and then there's peaks and valleys and these things are really normal and we could manage our way through them. And so that's. That's probably the last one that I'll call out by name as an example, but what you just said made me think of that one too.

This is great, Andy. I could talk to you forever, my friend. But same. We have to wrap this up. But before you go, remind the listeners about where you work and your podcast and how they can get in touch.

Thanks a lot. I work at Alice A l y c e.com and our podcast is available on Spotify and Apple. Podcast, it's called the Data Protection Breakfast Club. It's myself and my, my good friend Pedro Pavone who runs ads, policy and monetization at Facebook. Meta. Now it's Meta. And he and I have been friends for a long time and so we have really good guests on, you know, chief legal officers, chief privacy officers, so people look into to hear from those leaders.

This is great, Andy. We will put links to all of that in the description. Thanks again for joining us.

Really, thanks for having me. Yeah, it was really fun.

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