Successfully Negotiating When You Have No Alternatives with Prof. Giuseppe Conti

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 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. Giuseppe, thanks for joining us today.

My pleasure, Kwame.

Yeah, it's great to have you, my friend. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

My name is Giuseppe. Giuseppe Conti. I am Italian, as you could quickly spot from my accent. I have three lovely daughters and Luisa, and I'm currently living in Switzerland. From a professional perspective, I am fundamentally a procurement person. I worked in procurement for 25 years with a number of leading multinationals. Procter and Gamble, Novartis, Merck, worked in five different countries. And probably what is unique about my career development is that in parallel to my corporate job, I started teaching in 2005. One business school. In 2006, it became three. In 2008, it became five. And then, you know, in 2018, while I was teaching at 11 business school, while managing my corporate job, I decided to quit the corporate job. I became a professor in 2019, and now I'm focusing on my passion. So I'm currently teaching in 14 business schools. The next one, the 15th one, is in Africa, by the way, so it will be my third continent where I'm teaching And now I live my passion. So I'm teaching and training and consulting in negotiation and influencing.

This is incredible. Kudos to you. The joke I always say for myself is that I'm a stereotypical Caribbean American. I have five jobs. And here you are teaching at 15 universities. That is impressive, my friend. So let's jump into the topic today. So negotiating when there are no alternatives. And I feel like this is a topic that is more important now than ever just because the market is so tough. We're facing unprecedented challenges. And in the negotiation trainings I do, people are always asking, how do I deal with single source suppliers? How do I deal when I have. With situations where I have no alternatives? I feel like they have all the power, what can I do? And so this is perfect timing for this episode. And the three things that we're going to talk about today as it relates to this topic are first, anticipating the challenge, second, shaping the deal, and then third, what do you actually do during the conversation, during the negotiation? So anticipating the challenge. So tell me a bit more about that. What should we do here?

I think it's the fundamental step really, not to start at an early stage. What I mean is that often people say, oh, you know, I have a negotiation, I have no alternatives and the negotiation is tomorrow. Then of course, you know, whenever we're going to give a number of strategies during today's discussion, but whenever, whenever you didn't plan it in advance, whenever you go into the meeting at the last, without preparation and without having done the background work, then no surprise if the other party will take advantage of you, if they will use the leverage that they have and will strike a much better deal than the one you can get. So I guess that's really the foundation, is to think a bit ahead, especially for those more difficult negotiations.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of a Chinese proverb. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today. But I think it holds true in this situation as well. When you don't think ahead, you're limiting yourself in terms of possible solutions.

Exactly. And one of the advice that I give to people, for instance, when they take a new job, you know, you take a new job. I think, you know, one of the simplest things to do is to go through the different contract to understand, you know, which are the important relationship in your portfolio and to understand where you're likely to have a problem, where you are in a situation with limited alternatives, no alternatives, or, you know, a balance of power which puts you in a difficult situation because, you know, once you identify the. Those problems at an early stage, then you know, you can start already building relationships internally and externally. You want to have a good relationship with the supplier, which has a lot of power, but also you want to work with your internal colleagues. Maybe you have to motivate your internal colleagues to do something different, something extraordinary. And of course, you know, it's going to take some time to do it well. And then of course, you know, as you do those things, then you start looking for alternatives. You started building alternatives that will make you in a stronger position, will put you in a stronger position when you're actually going to have the negotiation sometime in the future.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I really like just how it's such a simple step, but so very important. And I feel as though sometimes it's those simple steps that are so crucial, but because they're simple, we often overlook it. Right. And essentially what you're saying is we need to be proactive. We need to think ahead and recognize which are the. Where are the relationships where we could potentially have a problem. Because the thing is, when everything is okay, then we just, we sit back, we get really relaxed, and we say, well, everything's okay, I don't have a problem. And then when things have. Then when a problem comes up, we're not prepared. And so even when things are good, we need to recognize which relationships that we have in our life, which business relationships we have that exist where the person has a disproportionate amount of leverage. And so if they're our only option, then they have a disproportionate amount of leverage. And so then you start to build your strategy from there. You're saying, if something goes wrong, what do I do?

Exactly.

And so when it comes to anticipating the challenge you mentioned, we want to think about the relationships with the external stakeholders. We want to think about it from the internal side. And I think procurement gives us a really good framework for us to look through this. And so for those of you out there listening who are not familiar with procurement, just making it very simple, imagine you have a big company, that big company buys things. That's what procurement is. Right? So when you're in procurement, you have to negotiate with the outside parties who are selling you things, but you also have to negotiate with the people inside the company who are saying, hey, buy this for me. And so when you think about anticipating the challenge and you recognize the potential problem, how does the conversation have to happen internally with your internal clients and stakeholders within the company.

I think first of all, I will say in full alignment with what you say, is that the quality of your internal negotiation will determine your success with the external negotiations. And so the internal negotiation, of course, are more challenging because when you're negotiating with buyer and seller, okay, there is somebody wants to buy, somebody wants to sell. There is a reciprocal interest to do business most of the times. But with the internal stakeholder, there may be a number of other elements which makes the context difficult. There may be political game, there may be the perception of your department inside the context that have an influence. And also you will be dealing with those people over time. One of the key advice that I will give is the foundation internally is trust, relationship rapport, you know, is the human side. You know, people will buy your ideas because they buy you. And in one of the typical mistakes, by the way, that procurement people tend to do is they go in because they want to do a tender, they go and talk to the stakeholder because they need it, because they want to do their project and get their savings. Then they disappear for two years, then they come back two years later and say, hey, by the way, can we do another tender? So that's not what they call relationship management. That's not what they call stakeholder management. So that's a different way, of course, of working when you're building those relationships over time and you build the trust. And I like, by the way, when we talk about trust, my favorite simplification of trust is the trust equation. The trust equation says the trust is made of credibility plus reliability plus intimacy divided by self orientation. What I mean is credibility. You have to know the market, you're a good professional, you know what you're talking about. Reliability. You keep your promises, you work at the talk. Intimacy, the quality of the relationship. Am I comfortable to have a difficult discussion with you? What is the lower part of the equation which has a negative impact is self orientation. If I'm perceived as the kind of guy who only cares about my goals, my targets, my KPIs, then of course it's going to be difficult to build the trust. If instead I'm the kind of person that understand and looks for solutions that are satisfactory for everyone, then of course this makes stronger relationships.

Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And now back to the show. This is great. So listeners, okay, I hope you paid attention to that point. I always encourage the listeners to give a five star point so you identify something in the, in the episode that is worthy of a five star review on the podcast player. For me, that's my five star point right there because I think that's brilliant. It really is brilliant because you have to consider when you're building trust with other people, the impact of your self orientation, right. How selfish they perceive you to be, how focused on yourself and your needs are you in this situation. And that will pull away and deter and detract from the amount of trust that they feel. And I think about again, when you think about procurement, for example, your goal usually is to get the best deal possible. So something that has a quality that is sufficient at the lowest price, the best possible product at the lowest possible price. And so if you're only focused on the numbers and hitting those numbers for yourself, the internal stakeholder, they don't. That doesn't feel good. I remember doing a negotiation training for a big hospital system and they say our internal clients, our stakeholders, the people that we're buying things for, are surgeons. Surgeons are very particular about the product that they have. You can't just say, hey Ms. Surgeon, I got this for you. It was really cheap and I'm happy about it. You have to build that relationship and have them feel comfortable with it. With the fact that you actually have their back, you're actually looking out for them. And when they do feel as though you actually have their best interest in mind, not just your interest in mind, it leads to a higher level of trust.

Absolutely.

That's great. Well, any other major takeaways before we transition into shaping the deal?

Well, I think, you know, at this stage, you know, we'll probably also look at building alternatives. Right now we talked about the idea of building alternatives. Now there are a few situation where, you know, you're just stuck. It's a pure monopoly. There is one customer, one buyer or whatever. And then you know, there are not many options. But, but most of the times that's not the case. You know, we create the limitation ourselves. But there are a number of tools that we can use in order to broaden the number of alternatives that you can use. You know, for instance, we can qualify a supplier from another geography, from another continent that is going to come through. What maybe you can do is go for a vertical integration. What I mean, with vertical integration, you start making it yourself. When I was working at Procter and Gamble, for instance, we were producing bleach in a number of remote locations. You know, bleach is a, is a product for poor people. And our plants were in a remote location. And you know, at best there was one blow molder that could make the bottle from us. So we were in a single source supply type of situation. Now we started to make the bottles ourselves. And this prevented us, you know, from being exploited in those type of situation. Or maybe if I think about my pharmaceutical experience, then sometimes contra manufacturing, okay, you can either let somebody else do it for you or you can ask one of your plants to produce the products. So this gives you alternative. Even if there is only one contour manufacturer that can do it. You can move to perform a specification to increase the number of options that you have. If you're buying an equipment, you can look for the used market and then you may look for those kind of things. You can look at new technologies. By the way, one of my favorite is you can buy from the same company, from a different division of the same company. Let me give you a real life example that even non procurement people can connect to. In Europe, one of the cheapest rental company is called Auto Europe. There are bigger names like Earth, Avis, etc. And Auto Europe is a company that is quite popular in Europe. Now what many people do not know is that Auto Europe as a European website, as an American website and the prices are different. So you can still buy from Auto Europe, but you may buy from the American as opposed to the European and get a better deal.

That's incredible.

The idea is that there are possibilities to look for alternatives. But maybe again, think about non procurement people. Let's imagine a situation. You have a friend, an electrical engineer in Colorado Springs, and he tells you, hey, I'm really not happy with my career, but I am really a specialist. I am an expert. There is only one company that can give me a job. I have to continue to work with them. Now that's a mindset that I hear quite often that people limiting their alternatives because of what they decide to do. Now of course you can do something, maybe you can remove a barrier. You say, well, I don't have to live in Colorado Springs. Maybe I can work in all of Colorado, in all of the US in all of the world. And then you ended up having more choices. Then you know, okay, you are an engineer, so maybe you can do other type of engineering jobs. And maybe it may not even be a purely technical job. You may ended up being a technical project manager. Maybe you can do additional qualifications. You can get another degree or just to get a certification. That will open up different kind of things. So you see, there is a way of looking at it. Oh, you know, I have only this company that works me and my company is not. My career is not evolving too bad for me. Or you may start saying, okay, wait a minute, let me do something so that I can broaden my horizon, broaden my outlook.

This is great. And I think really all of those great tips can be tied into one word. It's creativity. Right? We're thinking outside the box. We're expanding our horizon. We're considering other alternatives that are different from what our narrow original mindset might have been. And so I think that's again, a great example of just the power of creativity in negotiation. And remember this, you're going to be more creative when you are under less pressure. That's why this falls so perfectly within anticipation. Because whenever you're under pressure, when you have time pressure or you're feeling a lot of stress, it has a focusing effect, right? When you're afraid of something, you think about the fight or flight response. What ends up happening is you focus on that thing that scares you. A really interesting example is when they think about sketches in criminal types of scenarios. They say, if somebody's holding a gun to your head, somebody could describe the gun with a lot of detail, but they won't be able to describe the person's face because they're focusing on the thing that scares them the most. And so again, that's why we want to try to have these creative type of brainstorming conversations within our team and within ourselves when we have time. That's why it's so important to think ahead. So you're not under time pressure when it's actually time to negotiate.

And in fact, you know, one of the simpler strategy to increase your creativity is to give yourself some time to think it over. So you look at the situation and then you let pass one hour, one day, one week, whatever is needed. And guess what? This is gonna increase the number of ideas that. That's the approach that Thomas Edison used, you know, to do is to do his work right. You know, you don't try to, you don't come up with the best idea in a minute. You have to let it sink inside you and then it's going to give you much more option.

Fantastic. Well, let's transition into shaping the deal. And so now we're actually at the point where we're negotiating with the other side and we're talking about deal structure. So what are the main things that we need to think about when we're talking about actually shaping the deal at hand?

Well, I think a good starting point is already thinking about preparing the negotiation in writing. It's something that people tend to try to put everything into the red. And realistically, that doesn't really work because as you have a good negotiation preparation template and maybe as you start reflecting, this is going to help you to think a bit in broader terms. For instance, one of the questions that we can ask ourselves is, how can I be more attractive to my supplier or to my customer? Let's assume that the relationship is good, but, you know, you still want to try to get a better deal. And then you say, okay, and how can I make sure that they are going to do something more for me? And then, you know, you may say, okay. What many people think is, okay, maybe I'm going to give them more business in another business unit or maybe in another geography so that, you know, that expands the pie for them. But, you know, there are many other things that you can do. Maybe you can do a joint cost reduction at Initiative. Maybe you can write a case study together. You can offer them demand forecast, you can give them access to your marketing and R and D people. You can reduce the risk, you can give them marketing intelligence, you can offer them training. Let me give you another example. You know that now we are losing a bit because we are not traveling. But I'm thinking about acting as a reference. You know, remember the old good days when we were spending our time flying from one airport to the other. One of the advertising that you tend to see at the airport is something which says, Adidas runs SAP, Louis Vuitton runs SAP. So whatever, you have Nike runs SAP. You have big brand names that have decided to give their brand name support to SAP in order to negotiate a better deal. You know, the typical SAP relationship or Oracle relationship are those difficult kind of contexts where you're stuck with somebody for a long period of time. And then, you know, these are the kind of situation where you say, okay, let me see if I can do something out of the box that they become more attractive to those people and makes them more keen to do business with me.

I think that's a great example and it's so funny the I walk past that type of marketing all the time. I said, oh, that's cool, those companies like each other. I remember when I was younger I said, oh, they like each other, that's nice. I didn't consider when I was younger just how much like negotiation went into that because that's an incredible amount of value being able to parry yourself publicly in such a public, forward facing type of way. But again, it's a great example of a unique deal structure helping to move things along when it comes to breaking through in these tough negotiations.

And you know, there are situation where you may not have alternatives, right? Or you have limited alternatives and you have to think a bit deeper about what you're going to do. The idea is maybe you want to make them feel some pressure, you know, even if they have most of the power, you want to take some action to make them feel some pressure. There is an example that comes into my mind. At the time I was adding packaging procurement for Novartis. I was having a difficult relationship with a supplier that was making pumps for nasal spray. And you know, it is a fairly complex product, you know, it takes 13 small parts, you know, to be able to make it, to dose it properly into your nose. And I was stuck with only one supplier and this supplier was taking advantage of the situation. Now what we decided to do is work with another supplier who was making pump but in a different type of industry. And they were prepared to invest in order to develop something for us. And guess what? Then we let somehow know the existing supplier that we're looking at alternatives. Maybe you let them meet in the reception, they ended up being meat at the reception. Or maybe one of the engineer by chance tells to one of their engineer about the fact that we are doing some work as we created this type of context. I've seen the attitude of the supply, you know, change and immediately becoming much more cooperative and offering us more things and wanted to do a better relationship with us, etc. And by the way, what is interesting is that the new supplier never managed to make pumps to our specifications. But the simple fact that we tried then created a different dynamic into the relationship. Another things that you can do in those type of situation is pretend that you have competition. Now maybe you send a request for proposal even if you only have one supplier. You know, those kind of tricky kind of things. But of course it's a very dangerous strategy. And especially if you decide to do it, make sure that you have your organization lined up. You don't want to be in a situation where one of your technical colleagues gives away this information to one of the technical colleagues, then of course your credibility is lost and the relationship is down the drain. And of course they will end up taking advantage of the situation.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And really what we're saying here is even if there are not alternatives, you can be creative in trying to manufacture the alternatives. And in the example that you gave, literally manufacturing alternatives and you're bringing introducing new competition into the market where it doesn't exist. And even if you insinuate that that is something that you're trying to do, you leave those breadcrumbs for them to follow to say, oh, wow, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not the only person, I'm not the only option. Okay, yes, then you can create some pressure. And again, I think people think too narrowly about this and they only think defensively in these situations. And as a result, they don't these unique opportunities to apply a little bit of pressure on the other side. They're just feeling the pressure. They're thinking about different ways for them to manage the pressure, but not thinking offensively in that situation. So I think this is a great way to balance the scale of power in these types of interactions.

And in fact, if we look at negotiation strategies, one of the first advice that I give to my students, to my participants in corporate workshops, is to look at their butner rather than your butn. So maybe most of your listeners are familiar with the concept of but just, you know, but means best alternative to a negotiated agreement, which means, you know, the kind of alternatives you have if you're not able to close the deal. But you may also want to look at the alternatives of the other side and this may change your perspective of the deal. Maybe let me make again a real life example that just happened recently that may explain this concept to the people that are not in procurement and sales and may struggle to understand some of the more detailed business example that I was giving. One of my friends has bought a new apartment. She was moving from one apartment to the other. She got a bigger apartment and she was leaving the old one. She came to me and told me, listen, I had some very nice curtains into my old apartment, but unfortunately, you know, the window had a very strange shape. So the old curtains are not going to fit into my new apartment. It is really A pity, because I had spent €2,000 in doing those curtains and now they're worth nothing to me. You know, maybe I should try to sell them to the person that bought my apartment. Even if I only sell it for €250. That, you know, at least is something. And of course, you know, she was looking at the dealer from her perspective, right? You know, they're worthless to me. I paid €2,000. If I can get 250 is better than not. But what I told her, you know, look at the dealer from the other perspective. Imagine the person that has just bought your apartment and is moving in. They have hundreds of things to do. They have, you know, they are overloaded with all the different things that they have to set up. Will they be happy to have curtains into their house so that they don't have their neighbors looking into their apartment? And if they like your curtains, of course, you know, if your curtains are very special, very extravagant, and the other people may not like it, then they're not going to buy it. But if they like them, well, they can really associate a lot of value to them and they may be prepared to pay the price or maybe just give them a small discount. Maybe you just give them a small discount rather than just give them away for no value, for no cost. And that's the different perspective of looking at the deal from their perspective rather than your own perspective.

Right? And there, that's a great example of demonstrating the strategic and tactical power of empathy. Because in that situation, you're putting yourself in their shoes, you're putting yourself in their perspective to see how they're seeing, thinking and feeling about the situation. In this situation. It's funny because if you think about it just from a self interested point of view, it actually puts you in a worse position. This is an example of where empathy can actually lead you to utilize a more aggressive strategy in the negotiation, even though it's a more transactional type of interaction. Let's switch gears to the third topic, which is negotiation techniques at the negotiation table. So let's say we're actually in the conversation. There's some things that we should do, some things we should avoid. And also psychology plays a role in that too. And as a psychology nerd, I'm really excited to hear hear about that. So where should we begin when we're talking about actual negotiation techniques?

Let's start maybe with some of the classic, you know, for instance, one of the things that you can do is bundle or unbundle things. What I mean, let's say that you have a raw material which is in single source supply, a raw material where there is competition, you put them together. And then since the supplier wants to win both elements, they may give you a better deal, even when you are stuck with only one option because they have the incentive of wanting to win the other part. Or what you can also do is unbundle part. So you can say, okay, I'm going to buy the machine from you, but the installation and the maintenance will be from somebody else so that you create, you get some of the leverage. But sometime, you know, we may be in a difficult situation, the other guy is pushing us. And my idea is that they should earn it. You know, I rather will put a deal which gives them an incentive to make more money. So let's say, let's imagine a concrete situation. Let's say a contract manufacturer comes to you and says, hey, listen, I need an increase of the price. Well, a possible way to deal with it is, rather than give them an increase of the price, is link the increase of the price to an increase in quality and service. So if your KPIs goes up, if you ended up having better manufacturing process because of better quality, better service, then okay, you're happy to give them more money, but you're gonna get even more value as a result of the improved service and quality. So that makes it a much better way to look at it as opposed to just to say, okay, I'm gonna give you the extra money.

I love it. That's great. That's great. And what I love about this too is that it's simple to understand, right? This isn't one of those negotiation techniques that is needlessly complicated. It's very simple. But we can demonstrate its practicality and its power actually during the negotiation. And again, this isn't something that you just come up with off the fly. You have to prepare. And I know we're going to put links to some of the preparation guides and templates and helpful resources that you have. Of course, if you're a listener of the podcast, you've heard me say it about 3 million times. We have negotiation preparation guides on our website too, at americannegotiationinstitute.comguide and then we'll put links in the description for both of those resources there as well. So I think bundling, unbundling, and being creative about finding new, not just alternatives, but options for sourcing the entire deal from different places instead of just one person. I think that's a really great negotiation strategy to use. And one of the things that we discussed before is birth psychology during these negotiations. What are some of the most important things for us to keep in mind.

When dealing with suppliers? I think, you know, one which is important to keep in mind is loss aversion. Now, there is a psychological bias which tells us that losses loom larger than gains, that people are much more influenced by potential losses than by potential gains. And so this means that, you know, the supplier is worried about losing the deal. So what we have to do is create some anxiety to make sure that the supplier will want to do the business with us. Now, what can we do? For instance, if you're buying a physical product, maybe you can play with stock and therefore you can increase the stock before the negotiation. And then you stop buying right before the negotiation to give a signal to the supplier that if they don't do something, then they may end up losing the business because you have somebody else that can give you the business. Maybe sometime you can just not purchase something. For instance, a software upgrade. Maybe you can decide that you do not buy the software upgrade because it doesn't make sense if the supplier doesn't give you good terms. But more in general, I will say I like to make the other party aware about the consequences of what they are doing. You know, if the supplier comes with a realistic request as well, you need to listen in those kind of condition, maybe I will have to prune this product because it's not going to be competitive anymore. Or, you know, if the impact is not so big that you may decide to stop producing something, then you may say the impact that this is going to have on the relationship, the impact this is going to have about the future business. Let me share, you know, one of my negotiations that I fail. I had recently joined a company. At the time, I was the global procurement director for indirect procurement. And one of the first negotiation I was involved was the renewal of an outsourcing deal. And to give you a bit of background, this outsourcing deal was done a few years before by the IT department without procurement involvement. Fundamentally, they had some problems. They didn't know how to handle it. So it's okay, let's give it to a supplier and they will deal with it. So we didn't have good processes and the supplier was doing everything. So in this kind of situation, the supplier knew that whatever we will say, we will still continue to buy from them because we didn't have the capability to do it internally. We didn't have the specs even to tend to extend. I still tried to do my procurement job, I did the benchmarking, understand what was happening, etc. Etc. And came to the conclusion that the rate that we had was substantially higher than a competitive market. So I went in and asked the supplier for a sharp reduction of the price. But guess what? They said, hey, there is this new kid in town. He just arrived. They had the good relationship with the cio. They said, know, we don't believe it. So they defended their price and they only give me some very minor type of decrease. But then, you know, okay, they went for short term benefits as opposed to long term kind of perspective. So what we did is, you know, we gave them a two years contract, so a fairly short contract. In the meantime, we developed the SPECs, the process, etc. And two years later we ended up giving a substantial part of the business away to somebody else.

I love that. I love that. And you know, to your point, I. One of the things that I always tell people is if you're, if you're dealing with a professional and they don't have any stories of failures, then your professional isn't very good. You know, you have to have some losses. If you're, if you don't have losses, then you're not trying. And that's the thing though, because that's what makes you better, right? I'm sure at the time it didn't feel great, but now you can look back on that as a fond memory because you can say, look at the lessons that I've learned and the negotiation successes that I've had as a result of that failure too. Well, this has been great. I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. And I know there are a lot of listeners out there who would be interested in learning more about you, connecting with you, and potentially working with you as well. So before you go, can you let the listeners know how they can get in touch with.

Well, what we're going to do, we're going. We have a below in the details section. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. Maybe, you know, also write a small note to say I listen to the podcast so they understand from where the connection is coming from. And then, you know, what I prepared for the listener is a negotiation pack. A negotiation pack with a negotiation preparation template. Some slide. I also an article that I wrote for the Financial Times about how to ask your boss for a raise. So just in case, you know, you ended up, you know, being in need for a raise, then, you know, you may download the My Negotiation pack. That would be a great way, you know, to get some more information. And on LinkedIn, I make a post every day, every day of a new post. So that's an opportunity also to continue the learning journey. I do a number of workshops for corporate customers. So, you know, if your company happens to want corporate workshop, then that's something that I do a lot all over the world.

Fantastic, my friend. Thank you again for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. We really appreciate it.

Thank you very much. All the best. Take care.

Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team. So welcome aboard. What most of the team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you. And I will see see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.