Speaker 1: Alright, this is on how to negotiate or the art of deal-making. Whether you like it or not, you are a salesperson. You're going to be persuading others to buy into your ideas, your services, your product, your career path, investing in you in some capacity. You need to learn how to persuade. So we'll talk about a few different techniques that I use routinely for negotiating, which isn't exactly the same as persuasion. If you're interested in the general broad scope of persuasion and influence, I highly recommend you pick up the book Influence by Robert Cialdini or Cialdini. I'm not sure how it is pronounced, but that is a classic that I read many, many times at the very beginning of my career and found very, very helpful. Getting into negotiating, a few things to keep in mind. Mantra number one is he or she who cares the least wins. So having options is very helpful for negotiating. The other is doing an exercise called fear setting so that the downsides of losing the negotiation are detoothed in a way. And you can find out more about fear setting at tim.blog forward slash TED. I did an entire TED talk on this, so I won't spend time on it right now. A few things when it comes to negotiating a price, a deal, structuring, etc. The first is that you want the counterparty, the person that you're negotiating with, to negotiate against themselves. First, how do you do that? If possible, I like to ask them to make the first offer, put something on the table to get the ball rolling or to initiate the conversation. And very often you'll be interacting with someone who you can position as the expert. You know more about this than I do. You've done this a hundred times. This is my first rodeo. Why don't you just put something on the table so that we can discuss it as a starting point? That is, in my experience, very often more beneficial than it is harmful. Sometimes they will try to anchor, that is, give you a very, very high ball price or a very, very low ball price, depending on if they're on the sell side or the buy side. But generally speaking, I like to get the other side to open up and show their initial hand. At that point, you can do what's called a flinch. And when I lived in China and Beijing in 96, I saw this all the time, where you'd go to buy a shirt or a phone charger, whatever it might be, and you would offer a price and then the woman selling it would go, ah, and make all these faces and contortions and so on. She did that very deliberately to get me to then back off or retract or back step, right? You don't have to make some type of extreme theatrics to accomplish this. You could just pause and go, hmm, you know, that's a bit more than I would have expected. And then wait. And the waiting is the hardest. So if you can develop the ability to sit in silence, you will have a tremendous advantage in negotiating. So you want to flinch in some fashion. First, wow, that's a lot higher than I would have expected. Then perhaps they backpedal, which happens a lot, especially with novice or intermediate negotiators. And then you can very simply ask, is that the best that you can do? Do you think this is the best that you guys can offer? And again, pause and wait. When you want to get into some of the more, I suppose, sophisticated or developed techniques in negotiating, different types of bracketing, how to make certain concessions, how to drill into what they want, the needs behind their requests. So they want a certain price, but what are the incentives? Are they trying to hit a quota? Do they want to, for instance, be remembered in some fashion or retain branding? Maybe a statue in front of the shopping center would do instead of them getting top dollar on the shopping center you're trying to buy, something like that. There are resources that can help with these types of more advanced techniques. One would be Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating. I listen to that in audio format. It is available in audio. I don't know the quality these days. I listened to that driving to and from work during my commute in 2000-2001. And if I remember correctly, Roger made his first fortune in real estate. And I found it very, very helpful, and particularly in audio, so I could hear inflection, how he delivered certain phrases, asked certain questions. The other book is Getting Past No. And the author, or at least co-author, is William Ury. U-R-Y. Getting Past No was a follow-up to Getting to Yes, which was a book co-authored by the founders of the Harvard Negotiation Project, I believe it is, one of which is William Ury. But Getting Past No is, I think, the more pragmatic, realistic way to phrase many of your experiences in the world of negotiating. You're going to be either trying to sell something that isn't immediately obvious to someone, or you're going to be trying to buy something at a price or with a structure that isn't immediately obviously appealing to someone. Otherwise, it's not negotiating. You simply put something on the table and you sell it or you buy it. The other facet of negotiating is avoiding it altogether. And that sort of leads to this, which is you can structure your life to avoid certain types of negotiation. In the case of, say, my podcast and podcast sponsorship, I have a very lean team of just a few people. And we want to avoid altogether the extreme back and forth that can be involved with ad purchasing or selling. This is very routine, and podcasts the size of mine very often have to be very, I've always had a staff of 20, 30 people, and agencies, and all sorts of folks involved. To avoid that, we decided that we would have everyone prepay. There are no payment terms, no net 30 or anything like that. We did not offer any discounts, still don't offer any discounts and we would charge a premium. The way you get a discount is by locking in today's pricing because with the rate of growth we expected with the podcast, the absolute pricing would always go up, not the CPM. So there are ways that you can set policies and systems in place in the beginning so that you do not have to expend many, many cycles of negotiating. To pull that off, though, in the case, say, of a podcast, you have to deliver very, very high amounts of traffic with high conversion, right? So that, in a sense, forces you to deliver a higher quality product. And I always find that the premium space or selling to the affluent, if you want to take a look at that book, to be much, much easier than negotiating with players who are looking for the lowest cost option. So those are a few approaches to dealmaking and negotiating and structuring different approaches to putting together, say, packages for buying or selling that I found useful and I hope you do as well. Thank you.