The Role of Communication in Successful Deals with Mark Mirra

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Here at A&I we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

Foreign.

Thanks for joining us today.

Thanks, Kwame. Love to be here.

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

Absolutely. So my name is Mark Mira. I'm the founder of Aligned. We're a negotiation consulting and training firm in the same space, which is pretty cool. My background has been in negotiation for the past decade. Live in Brooklyn, New York with my wife Nicole. Got a cat named Zelda and a dog named Barney. And I love to motivate, inspire and develop individuals, specifically in the skill set of negotiation outside of that bit of a nerd video games, anime and fitness.

Yes, listeners, and also if you, if you want to hear a little bit of our conversation, when we first started, we had the coolest, nerdiest conversation to start this off talking about video games and anime and stuff. So if you, if you want to hear some of that banter, listen to the end. But yeah, Mark, I'm happy because I've been seeing your work. It's exceptional. So I'm really excited to highlight the work that you're doing. It's exciting to see another player in the space. We need more negotiators and negotiation experts and people sharing the word. And so I'm just happy to have you in the industry too.

Yeah, the feelings mutual. Been following you for a while. Couldn't wait to get an opportunity to hop on a podcast and just talk shop.

Yeah, man. So, listeners, we're going to do this episode a little bit differently, so we're going to See where this goes. This is a create your own adventure episode. Okay, so, Mark, in the field of negotiation, conflict resolution, or just human interaction in general, what is it that is giving you the most energy right now?

Communication. I think communication in general is the bread and butter of negotiation. Conflict management, conflict resolution, name it. So when I talk to a lot of the clients or individuals that I work with, I try to break down negotiation across four different phases. Preparation, communication, proposal, and alignment. And when people think of negotiation, they tend to think of what I perceive as phase three, proposal. If you do this for me, I'll do that for you. We can open extreme. We can move whatever it is and think about proposing things. I want to open up people's minds to. How phase two, communicate is so critically important to setting the table in the right way. So we can lay out all the different ingredients, talk about the flavors and spices that really excite us, talk about where we're flexible in different areas. And if you do that part really, really well, the amount of time you spend proposing back and forth is pretty short. But the reason why some of these deals are out for so long, many months, many years, or the reason why you walk into the room and you feel like the gap is insurmountable, it's usually because you didn't communicate well enough on the front end. So communication supercharges me up on how people can do that so much better.

I love this. Okay, let's break this down. So for the listeners out there who are saying, well, communication, isn't negotiation like communication? What's the difference? So for those people, how would you break that down as a unique phase within negotiation?

Yeah. So I talk about the process of information exchange. It's the ability for you to understand and articulate all the terms in your negotiation and then discuss the preferences of those terms for yourself and then understand the preferences on those terms for your other party. So a lot of people heard of gets and gives or takes and gives, whatever it is, whatever language you tend to use, what you're trying to do during the communication phase, understand your gets and gives, understand and articulate the areas of the deal that are preferable to you and the direction in which you need them, and then understand the areas of the deal that are preferable to your counterparty and the direction that they need them. And I can give you some examples on that as well. But I think that's the biggest piece is how do you communicate effectively by setting the table?

This is so important because going back to what you said you earlier you mentioned that sometimes these deals take forever unnecessarily because we haven't taken the time to communicate. Sometimes they fall apart because we haven't taken the time to communicate. And it seems like a lot of times we rush to that proposal stage in order to save time. And in doing so we waste a lot of time because we skip that communication stage.

Exactly. I totally agree with you. Everyone wants to jump the gun and say, all right, well, you seem interested enough. This is the price or this is the proposal. These are the terms. And that's cool to a degree. For less complex deals, yeah, you can jump right into the proposal phase because you know exactly what that product does on the tin. But for more complicated and more complex negotiations, if you're not setting the table the right way, then when you get to the proposal phase, you're going to make offers that the other party might not desire or might not be interested in, or are so far outside of their capabilities it doesn't even make sense to propose something like that. I'll give you an example. Let's say we're having a discussion about payment terms. We're in the communication phase and we're doing this part really well. I may say from our perspective, cash flow is really important for us, but we can be flexible in some areas of the deal. Specifically on payment terms, is that of interest to you? Do you need us to move the payment up? Now what I've done is I've signaled a little bit of flexibility and tailored it with a question. Now the other person to respond by saying, absolutely, cash flow is really important for our business. If you can move payment up, that gives us flexibility on delivery time. The quicker we get paid, the quicker you get your items. Now I can return by saying, wow, that's great. For ours, delivery time is really important. If we can get the items by the end of this week or early next, that helps us on our side of the deal. Now by setting the table appropriately, we now know preferences. They want quicker payment, we want quicker delivery time. None of us made any promises or commitments to anything. We didn't make any hard and fast proposals. But now when I send that follow up email or we have that secondary discussion on the specific proposal, I'm going to make a proposal where I'm going to get a quick delivery time and offer expedited payment and they should be much more receptive to it. That's what I mean by doing communicate really well, preferences, flexibility and expectations.

It kind of reminds me of this saying, they ask the person, hey, okay, let's say you're tasked with cutting down a tree and you have an hour. What would you spend that time doing? They say, well, for the first 50 minutes, I'd spend my time sharpening the ax instead of just getting straight to it and trying to chop down the tree with a dull axe. And I think we go into these deals with so little precision a lot of times because we're just, we're impatient and we don't trust the process and so we don't understand fully what we want, especially not relative to what they want. And then we run head on into resistance and potentially creating resentment in the process, unnecessarily that we could have just completely circumvented if we would have just taken the time to communicate effectively and clearly earlier in the process.

100% agree. And I'm sure you've been in these situations, whether you're doing consulting engagements or in your own day to day life. Someone will deliver a proposal and you say to yourself, do they even listen to what I said before? And if you're truly active listening, and obviously one of your more recent podcasts you just dropped is about active listening and talking about signaling some of those behaviors. Yeah. If you're doing the communication phase really well, when you get to the proposal phase, will it be lockstep, exactly the same proposals for both parties? No, of course not, because movement provides satisfaction. But you'd be so much closer to finding true alignment on your terms if you communicated things much more effectively. So I talk about 80 plus percent of the game is preparation and communication, and then proposals 10 to 15% and alignments 5% or whatever it is to balance it out. It's so overwhelmingly more important than just delivering proposals is how you tee everything up.

Yes. And I think one of the things that presents a challenge to people is that the communication phase, I don't feel like it's really focused on enough. When you think about traditional negotiation literature, I think if you look at most negotiation books, like the classic negotiation books, you feel like you've been dropped in the middle of a negotiation every single time. Like some kind of like paratrooper right in the middle of a conflict, they don't talk about the setup at all.

They spend a ton of time on preparation and then a ton of time on proposal, and they miss this gargantuan piece on bridging both of those activities.

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And that's what I want to really open people's eyes up to. And I'd love again, your research and your thoughts on the space as well, is if you just talk to each other as humans, as individuals, and you're a little more confident in conveying the things that are important for you. Negotiation doesn't have to be this cloak and dagger, manipulative, sneaky activity. It could be an activity where both parties articulate their needs without making promises or commitments, but articulate their needs and then understand their counterparty's flexibility and what their needs are that leads to better agreements in long term anyway, you know.

Mark, okay, so let's, let's hypothesize here because I'm trying to figure out why this occurs, right? Because we're in agreement. There's not enough focus on the communication element. And I feel like a lot of times negotiation experts and negotiators negotiate kind of like a rocky montage. So you have the eye of the tiger playing the background. And so they spend all this time preparing. It's great because preparing feels really good. I know, like when I. I'm a nerd when it comes to prep, man. Like the guides that I put up for free on the website, those are the guides I use to prepare. And I just blare loud music with a lot of bass and I do research for hours. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to get up, I'm going to get up. And then it's like, great. I want to get straight to the action. I want to get straight into the negotiation. And here's my thought. Tell me what you think about this. I feel like the communication aspect isn't a sexy thing to focus on because it doesn't have that rocky montage preparation feel. And it doesn't have like that grit and conflict feel. So it almost feels anticlimactic that so much of the negotiation can be won with what could seem from the Outside looking in, like chit chat.

Yes. 10 out of 10, totally agree across the board. It's almost like we need to manufacture, which is what I did. I manufactured an entire phase around just having a chat, talk about things. You've done all this prep, you built all these hypotheses around the terms that are important for me and them and the walkway points and break points and potential moves you can make. But then you're going to propose them. Why don't you test your hypotheses a little bit first? Why don't you ask some questions? Do you really want X, Y and Z? Are you really interested in higher quality materials or goods? From our perspective, we're interested in A, B and C part of this deal. How does that resonate with you? You can start testing all the assumptions you have before you get to the sexy part, the eye of the tiger part with the proposals. And when you do that, this huge gap you have between both parties now becomes a lot closer because you set the appropriate amount of expectations. If someone articulates that they need something by the end of the month and I can't deliver it for another two months, it doesn't even make sense for us to keep talking. So let's have that chat now before I deliver your proposal to you, because you're not going to want what I'm selling anyway. So I think all of that is super important. Some people call it discovery. Discovery kind of bleeds into the sales process as well. But it's the art of sharing information and like I said, setting the table. Let's lay out all the ingredients. Let's talk about how I like these flavors, you like these flavors. We'll both negotiate really hard over the paprika for whatever reason.

I love it. Okay, now let's talk about within this communication element. If we're going to. Now let's go into it and see, like, the different stratifications of it, like the different layers. Because again, like I said, for somebody who doesn't fully understand what's happening during that communication phase, it just seems like Mark's just talking. He calls himself a negotiator, and all he does is just have friendly conversations and then magically get good deals. For somebody who doesn't understand the nuance of it, what's your strategic approach during this communication space phase?

Yeah, so let's talk about the blend between prep and communicate. So during preparation, you're laying out all the different terms you're negotiating over. Could be price, volume, delivery time, payment terms, contract, you Name it. All the different terms you're going to discuss in your negotiation. Then you're going to have some hypotheses around them. These are the areas that I believe are important for me. These are the areas that might be important for them. Cool. I feel good about my prep. Let me test some of these hypotheses. Now we're going to move into the communication phase. So you set up a couple, maybe several, maybe many conversations. So an opportunity for both parties to ask and answer questions about the terms of the deal. Yeah, you'll have some pleasantries. Yes, you should get to know them as an individual. Yes, you should build some of that relationship and rapport. But we're here to discuss the terms of the deal. Not in a way we're going to make any promises or commitments. Not in any way we're going to make any proposals. We're going to set the table. We do that in two pieces. Positioning your priorities and demonstrating flexibility, all while setting appropriate expectations. We talk about positioning your priorities. What we mean is signaling to your counterparty the things that are important for you and in which direction you want those things to be. I'm not saying give them a huge billboard that says, hey, here are 1, 2, and 3 ranked most important things for us. Use this against me. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, when it comes to payment terms, payment terms is on our agenda. From our standpoint, we have policies on payment terms where they are fixed at net 60. I've set the expectation now that our payment terms will be net 60. However, when it comes to volume, we could purchase anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 units, subject to the rest of the terms of the deal. So I set an expectation. I positioned a priority payment terms, net 60, clear and concise. And I also demonstrated flexibility on volume. Anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 units. Now, Kwame, I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, man, Mark just gave a range. Ranges. I don't know if they're great in negotiation. I don't know if they're not great in negotiation. In the communication phase, ranges are perfect because you haven't made a promise that you would do 2000, 20, 500 or 3000. You just set an appropriate range. So now the other person is not going to make a proposal on 5,000 units. Because I told them I wouldn't buy that. So ranges are perfectly fine as we're demonstrating flexibility subject to the rest of the terms of the deal.

Oh, man, this is so good. I can't write fast enough. This is powerful. And again, listeners, what you're seeing is the nuance of it. This isn't just idle chitchat. And I appreciate the fact that you corrected me when I said, how do we approach this communication phase? You said, no, it's the preparation and communication phase because they blend. This is really great. And I think something that's really important to highlight here is that you're not hiding the ball. This isn't any kind of cloak and dagger type of thing. You're saying, no, this is. This is my range. I'm setting an expectation. And then you're building trust because they're not saying, you know, it does. I don't know exactly what Mark wants. I don't know what's coming next. That ambiguity creates, like, anxiety, and they sense that risk and it makes them more skeptical of everything that you say. It makes you less persuasive throughout the engagement. Right? And so during the negotiation, if they say, well, you know what, Mark said that his range was 5,000, but, you know, I bet he could go seven. You can very clearly and confidently say, listen, like I said before, I cannot go above 5,000. I wasn't playing that. That's a realistic range. And so now let's say I hear a listener out there sitting at a long boardroom with their arms crossed, leaning back, furrowed brow, and they say, well, you know, what about some of the more aggressive negotiation techniques? It feels like we're giving away leverage by giving away information. I like to withhold that information, Mark, and then hit them over the head with it in a negotiation. What do you say to some of those old school negotiators that want to be a little bit more strong, army and power based in their negotiation?

Information is power, right? They are absolutely correct. Information is power in negotiation. But I break down negotiation across four different types to hear a theme of fours here. Hard bargaining, concession trading, value creation and partnership. Hard bargaining and concession trading, much more distributive, finite value valuation and partnership, much more integrative, collaborative ability to grow the pie if you are programmed. This old school boardroom executive with the furrowed brow and arms crossed may have always hard bargained. That may have been how they become so successful. They may have swapped out suppliers and vendors quickly over their years, but they've made a career out of themselves being a hard bargainer. If you hard bargain all the time, you're absolutely right. Your need to share information is very minimal. You're going to be secretive, you're going to be close to the best with a lot of your information. And you're going to use that to your advantage to exploit and extract leverage. But the reality is the vast majority of negotiations business professionals should and could be having are between concession trading and value creation. And when you're in concession trading and value creation, you have the ability to create a level of value for both parties. You have more complexity, you have more terms to discuss, and there's no need for you to treat everyone like a nail just because you have a hammer. So you absolutely need to be sharing information for the best possible joint outcomes for both parties. And if you're a concession trading, yes, you want to tilt the scales in your favor from a value standpoint, but your proposals and your ability to be credible still need to be balanced. And when you're in value creation mode, you're never going to get there, let alone partnership, if you're not sharing information. So the short answer is yes, when hard bargaining information is power. But concession trading and beyond where most people should be commercially, you have to share information for the best possible deals.

Yep, that makes a lot of sense and I think that's really compelling too. And when you think about the fact that in a lot of these commercial negotiations you're going to have repeat interactions in one way or another, even if it's like an enterprise sale and it's like, okay, we assume that you're going to be with us for life. Yeah, the salesperson. For the salesperson, it might be a one time thing, but you can't set up your team that's going to be servicing the organization for failure by saying, you know what, we got your product, but Jimmy over there was a dick in the negotiation. And so you're guilty by association. Right? So. So you have to have an approach that still fosters collaboration and the relationship throughout. And I'm interested to hear your perspective on this approach as it relates to more. More serious. I don't. Serious isn't the word. Issues of true conflict. So for example, let's see, for me as a lawyer, let's say it's a situation where it's a lawsuit and we're trying to negotiate a settlement where we are literally in the adversarial system and we might have a client who's pushing hard saying, no, I don't like them. Be mean in this negotiation. What does the communication stage feel like in that situation where it is almost a little bit more zero sum in a situation like that?

Yeah. The reality is many negotiations are zero sum where there's A fixed pool of resources, and you're competing over those resources. You can still do that in a credible, professional, and respectful way, which I'm extraordinarily passionate about. But you can be tough on the terms and warm on the people. So I've seen a lot of negotiations break down because people get personal and they focus on things like maybe relationship or maybe past experiences or maybe other individuals they've worked with. The best possible negotiation outcomes I've seen is when both parties are working on the terms of the deal and removing a lot of the personality from it. Because you can interact with each other as humans, you can have a great time with each other, and we can have a really tough negotiation about specific terms of the deal that are important to me and my business and important to you and your business. So to the best of your ability, try to separate the humans from the terms. And when negotiating, be tough on the terms and really warm and collaborate with the people to the best of your ability.

Yeah, I love that. And the best negotiators are able to manage that tension because it doesn't mean that it's easy for them, because we are all humans, and sometimes our threat detection systems can be a little bit oversensitive. And when there is something that we want and it seems like somebody else is standing in the way of that, it's hard not to see that person as working against you. But that's why it's so important to override those natural instincts by saying you can still be an effective negotiator and get good deals by being tough on the terms, warm on the people. I think that's great. And sometimes that's hard for the stakeholders to appreciate, especially when they are embroiled in a really heated situation. And I know for me as a lawyer, sometimes it can be surprising for a client where you're fighting for their life, but it might have been a buddy from law school on the other side. And so you go really hard in the negotiation or at trial, for example, and then you might be, like, chatting friendly like friends afterwards. And so let's say you're in a situation where you have stakeholders who might have higher levels of emotionality, but you still want to be tough on the terms, you want to be warm on the people. How do you still maintain a good working relationship with the other side and maintain that warmth while still making your stakeholders feel as though you are advocating really forcefully and on their behalf?

Yeah. So first it starts with conflict. And great. One of your recent podcasts is about conflict as well, and without conflict, there is no negotiation. So we define negotiation holistically as the process of managing conflict and finding alignment on terms. Again, it all comes back to the terms. So for your stakeholders, it's about saying to them, we're going to be super tough on these terms here, but we're going to carry ourselves with professionalism, with respect. When we get into the room, pleasantries are perfectly fine. Humans like to be liked. We're not saying to go out there and always be liked, because sometimes they're going to be disliked, and that's part of the game, so that's okay. But we will always be respected. We'll carry ourselves professionalism, and we'll fight as hard as we can on your behalf over these specific terms and issues that we've already prepared for. We'll concede in these areas strategically that we've already prepared for, and then we're going to trust the process. So it's about instilling that confidence with the senior leaders that you're working with, that you will be doing this on their behalf or coaching their teams to do this on their behalf. But we're always going to do it in a way that is credible in our approach.

Yep, I love that. And when we're transitioning from the communication phase to the third phase where we're trading proposals, how do you manage that transition?

It happens pretty naturally, because what you'll find is you get to a point where both parties feel like they have a good grasp on the negotiation, and someone's going to say, okay, this makes a lot of sense. Why don't you send me over a proposal? And we get to the nuances on who goes first and anchoring and all that sort of stuff when you get into the proposal phase. But at some point, someone's going to say, okay, well, how much does it cost? When can you get it to me? Buy, et cetera, et cetera. And that's when you take a step back and say, great, why don't I put proposal together and I'll send it over to you, or we'll set up a quick time to talk about it and I'll send it over to you in an email. So you have this kind of natural progression from preparation bleeds into communicate, testing your hypotheses. Communicate bleeds into proposal. You're proposing things back and forth against each other. You'll feel really close on a bunch of the terms, and you blend into alignment. So there's this natural progression, it's very iterative, across the four phases. But they do feel independent of each other once you're in the middle of them. So you'll have that segue between one into the other once you feel like both parties have a good idea of what's going on.

Okay, now, I'm glad that you brought up anchoring, because that's one of my favorite negotiation techniques and one of the. It's not that it's impossible to do. It's just you have to be mindful because anchoring is a very. I don't want to say aggressive, but it's an assertive technique. But you always want to be maintaining the relationship. I think the way that I look at it, I think about anchoring just like it's a. It's a psychological priming mechanism. Somebody will be anchored regardless. We just want to make sure that people are using anchoring with intentionality. So actually, I think we should just start off. Can you define anchoring and then talk about how you can still anchor effectively while still setting realistic parameters beforehand?

From my perspective, anchoring can come in many different forms. The visual I like to use is, we're going to take our proposal, and we're going to take this big sledgehammer, and we're going to slam our proposal into the ground. That's our first anchor. By going first or delivering the first proposal across a term, a number of terms, or all the terms, that's our first opportunity to slam our position into the ground, recognizing when they counter, they're going to slam their position into the ground as well. Now we have an anchoring range, which is really cool. There's some awesome research that came out a couple of years ago from an academic that I follow named Remy Szalinski, where he talks about the anchoring range and how the subjective value can decrease between both parties depending on how big the delta is between both parties. First anchor, we can go really on a tangent on that. But when I see anchoring, I see the psychological conditioning of someone playing and understanding my terms and playing on my turf, which I think is really important. So even when I move off of my position, which movement provides satisfaction? Negotiator should always plan to move. I'm going to anchor my position, then move, slam a new anchor into the ground, anchor my position again, then move, slam that anchor into the ground. So psychologically, people are thinking about, how do I move Mark off of his spot? Instead of how do I get Mark to move to me? And that is a big psychological difference because now I have them thinking about my terms instead of them thinking about Their own. And I'm much more likely to condition them to come closer to me because I've stated my proposals more frequently. I've slammed them into the ground much more confidently and earlier on, and hopefully I'm conditioning them to move closer.

Oh, this is brilliant. And shout out to Remy. He was a guest on the podcast because once you said, oh, recent study, recent two years, I was like, I have not kept up with the study on this. I wonder what the study is. It's Remy. This is great. I'll have him on to talk about it. That'll be great. And I really, I like this approach. I like this approach because I think when we talk about anchoring traditionally, traditionally, as Todd, it's like, okay, you walk in, you slam your hammer on the ground, and it's very aggressive, very aggressive. And I really like the fact that in your approach, with the communication approach, what we're doing is we are essentially. Tell me if this is a good way to conceptualize this. It seems as though the communication phase could almost be seen as a light negotiation of the zone of possible agreements, the Zopa. And then that gives you the ability to anchor with more precision at a place where you can reasonably interpret is pretty close to the zopa. That's slid in your favor. And then you can start from that reasonable position versus anchoring blindly and risking offending people.

Yes, and we also want to recondition how people look at negotiation. The communication phase is also part of your negotiation. That's where you're priming, your preconditioning, your positioning, you're demonstrating flexibility. And yes, opening extreme, opening outside of that zone of potential agreement, outside of that bargaining range. To reset their expectations is a thing. But the more complexity you have, the more you dip into concession trading and value creation, the less opening extreme is required because you can create leverage using multiple terms. So when I work with clients, yes, we'll have some extreme strategies, but for the most part, we're going to create leverage credibly and professionally using the terms at our disposal within the bargaining range or zone of potential agreement, because that also comes across much more creditably to our counterparty instead of making outlandish demands. That may work for a deal or two, but fear is a short term motivator. We want people to be working with us over the long term. And the pandemic really opened up people's eyes to that. Old tactics are not working in a global economy anymore like that.

It seems like this approach would also make your anchor more palatable as well, because during the communication phase, you're also letting them know that you are flexible. And I'm assuming that triggers a little bit of that reciprocity to say, yeah, Mark is flexible. I can be flexible, too. So that anchor isn't as scary. They know it's not going to end there. We're going to go back and forth. And it seems that it. I feel like it makes that traditional dance of negotiation a little more inviting and manageable and approachable for everybody involved.

Yeah, I talk about this a lot with clients when we're in the communication phase. It's not an interrogation, so notice the difference. We want them and encourage them to answer our questions. So instead of us saying, well, where are you at on payment terms? What do you need? That's a very challenging and direct question. You may or may not answer that. But if I said, when it comes to payment terms, we have clients that are between 30 and 45 days, we have other clients that are between 60 and 90 days, depending on the overall package of the deal. We could be flexible with you. Where do you stand on payment terms? What's your preference? Now, what I've done is I set some context. I've shared some information, and I've invited them to share information for me. That's information I planned to share. That's information that is not detrimental to my position. But now we encourage them to do the same with us. It is very easy to get competitive with people. It's harder to be collaborative. So we have to walk them through a collaborative process with us and be much more inviting in our approach. Deliberate and intentional.

I love it. And that context piece is so important, because if you were to just throw that question out, that can be scary. Like, oh, he's painting me into a corner. I know how these negotiation experts are. I read books in the 60s.

But.

When you said that context, you're essentially saying, hey, this is why I'm asking. It's different for different people for different reasons. I care about you and what it is that you're looking for. Just give me. In general, it seems like you do a really great job of letting them know. I'm not going to hold any of this against you. It's not a game. It's not like a trap or something. It helps me to be a better partner with you if I know that information.

Yeah. And one thing that comes up a ton is the concept of red herring. A lot of my clients, oh, well, let's say this is really important for us, but it's not really important for us and we'll back off of it so we can make them work for this specific thing and then we'll realize it's not important anymore and we'll pull it out. So, okay, let's play this out. So you want to use a red herring on delivery time. You want to say it's really important, but it's not really important for you. What if they start becoming collaborative and what if they start leaning in to help you with delivery time and then all of a sudden it's not important for you? What are they going to think now about that relationship and about everything else you've been talking about up until that point? So we're really unlocking people's minds to listen. Are you always 100% truthful in every single negotiation? Absolutely not. There's things you're not going to share, but the more you do share in a credible and professional way, the more you can condition your counterparty to work with you. If you want to use a bit of a red herring, you do not make it sound like the most important thing in the world for you, but maybe it's somewhat important and then you can pull that strategy back over the course of communication phase into proposal. That's fine. But when you're using these red herrings, you're trying to use a lot of deceit and lies. When you're trying to manipulate the counterparty in your position. It may work once, heck, it may work twice, but is not a long term strategy for growth. It's just not.

Yeah. And especially considering the fact that again, we're going to have an ongoing relationship with people. And I can think of times where there was like a feeling of dread when contract negotiations were coming back up. It's like, man, I got to negotiate with this person again. You know, because it, it became a battle, right? We never want it to become a battle. And so it's like you said, we can use these power based strategies and things like that and might work once, twice. But when we find ourselves in that situation where we're constantly having really, really tough negotiations with the same people simply because we are using tactics that invite that type of resistance, then we are setting ourselves up for more of the same going forward. But if we start to essentially lead the relationship as a whole and say, hey, no, this is how I negotiate. It's a collaborative approach. We're going to communicate. I'm going to figure out what you need, you're going to figure out what I need. We're going to set an effective range and then we're going to have a much smoother negotiation than next negotiation is going to be like that. It's like you're creating your own little personalized negotiation culture with you and the other person. That makes all subsequent negotiations a lot easier.

I'll leave you with this last story where I came in last second to support a client in the manufacturing space. This was an organization that they're negotiating with. They signed an agreement six months ago. They have a new procurement manager on the other end that was looking at this agreement with a lot of scrutiny. So we're trying a bit of negotiation, disaster recovery. They're going back and forth on pricing. There was an issue on the manufacturing run from quality. And eventually we get to a point where I asked my client, hey, the deal that you struck six months ago, was it too good to be true? And they said, yeah, a little bit. I said, well, here's the situation. You got them to agree to a deal that you knew was overwhelmingly in your favor. They had a new procurement manager come in and I'm not going to be surprised if in the next week or two they just tear up the contract on you. And that's exactly what happened.

Wow. Yeah.

If you push people too hard, their first opportunity to renegotiate with you, they will. And they will not be as kind as they were the first time. But if you negotiate, still tough on the terms, but warm on the people, incredible and professional and oftentimes collaborative, the first time you need some help, they may be the first ones to raise their hand and say, hey, I can lean in for you. And that's the world in which we want negotiation to be. Yes, it's the most conflict rich activity in the world. But conflict isn't a bad thing. Conflict can be very healthy. It could also be the most problem solving activity on the planet. And we just wish for a world where people appreciate negotiation just a little bit more.

Man, I like that world. I like that world. Mark, this was exceptional. It was great meeting you and thanks for the work that you do and I really appreciate your perspective. And before you go, remind the listeners about Aligned and how they can work with you.

Yeah, reach out to us on LinkedIn. We're aligned. Negotiation on LinkedIn. You could also drop us on our website, aligned platform.com or connect with me, Mark Mira on LinkedIn. We'd love to be able to work with you. We offer tons of different training and consulting services. We hope to be a breath of fresh air in the space and can't wait to change the way the world negotiates.

I love it. Mark, thank you so much for what you do. Appreciate it.

Kwame, you're the best man. Appreciate it.

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