Negotiation Mastery: master email negotiation: tactics for better deals

Alright guys, topic of this video is negotiating via email. Everybody wants to know about negotiating via email, how to do it better, what's wrong with it, how does it go wrong. We get a lot of questions about this because our emails aren't as effective as we want. Here's the crazy thing, we all hate receiving long emails, yet we send them. How is it possible that we engage in a behavior that we hate having done to us? So the first problem with emails is they're too long. A friend of mine has in his email signature that he's trying not to make any email longer than five lines. So less is more, less is more. What we're really trying to do is make one point via email. Let me ask you this, if you were playing chess via email, would you put your next seven moves in the same email? No. You want to make a move, you want to see what kind of effect it has, then you want to move after that. So let's not do seven moves in a single email. Less is more. Let's try to land one point. Alright, here's our guidance after less is more. Set it up, land it, finish positively. Now this is not the sandwich advice. A sandwich is nonsense, which is a negative sandwiched by positives. You know that nonsense which basically starts out with, hey I love you, hey you stink, hey I love you. Alright, so that's better than just, hey you stink, but let's let's do it more intelligently. Now in the less is more issue also, don't put all your negotiation guidance in the same email. I once gave a lot of great negotiation advice which the gentleman I was coaching took all of it and put all of it in the same email. It was crazy. Taught him to ask the no-oriented question, have you given up on this project? Which is a great standalone one-line email or one-line text. But what he did was ask, have you given up on this project? Because I haven't was his next line. So we don't put multiple tactics making multiple points in the same email. So set it up. If you got bad news in the email, warn them it's coming. Don't start out with, hey I love you and you stink. The short version of that would be, I got something that you're not going to want to hear. You stink. At least you warned them that the bad news was coming. You give people a chance to brace themselves for bad news and then you deliver it. Don't warn them 5,000 times because they're going to want to read what's coming, but warn them that the bad news is coming. Then land the bad news. Soften the bad news when you land it. Use I'm sorry and I'm afraid sprinkled liberally throughout before the negative statements or the potentially perceived negative statements are made. Not after. It's I'm sorry, you stink. Instead of you stink, I'm sorry. There's a big difference between those two. You've warned them the more bad news is coming on. Let people brace themselves before you hit them with the bad news. Here's another tip on emails. Do emails have tone? Remember, the tone that it's going to be read in is not the tone that was in your head when you wrote it. You write an email with this wonderful, loving, soft, nice, positive, upbeat, nurturing tone and it's not going to be read that way. It's probably going to be read in at best a cold and distant tone and potentially at worst as a harsh tone. I once sent an email where somebody asked me a question. The answer was no. And I wrote no because I heard in my head that I was going to say it soft and gentle like that. Will you send a one line, one word email? No. When you mean no, the other side is going to hear no. Here's some more great advice on how to think about tone in an email. Do emails have tone? They can. We got a no. We got some yeses. And we got to always do. Yeah, that's more. We got a maybe over here, right? I think you were just trying to be funny. Emails always have a tone and they always take on the tone of the mood that the reader is in at the time, which as a negotiator you have no control over. The fact that they got up that morning, their kid got in trouble, they had to give their kid a spanking and then their wife yelled at them and then they got into an argument with their boss. Then they sat down at the computer and read your email and they're really in that moment. You have no control over that. And so when it comes to email, it's not so much that these can't be used, but we like to drop in what we refer to as email softeners, which simply put are just I'm sorry's and I'm afraid's. And then our emails have always got to be short. You know, the other thing, and that's why I said it's tricky because number one, email's got to be short and sometimes your accusations are that there's 17 items. You might not necessarily want to list all 17 in the email, but you might want to use the email to drive them to the table so you can lay them out verbally. And then the second thing, as I mentioned earlier, is the tone and the way you combat that is when I'm sorry, I'm afraid. No matter what mood you're in, I'm sorry pretty much always reads as I'm sorry. And so I'm sorry, I have to lay this at your feet. I'm afraid if this doesn't get solved, it's going to cause this problem. You probably think this is some sort of a money grab, you know, in an order like that. But you definitely want to drop in your I'm sorry's, I'm afraid. I think who is getting more? I can't think of the author. Stuart Diamond. Yes, Stuart Diamond, Wharton professor, taught negotiation there for a long time. He's got a great podcast on sending emails and he says, write them out and then read them back to yourself out loud in the worst possible voice you could imagine. And he says, don't be one of these people that's like, I can hear the voice in my head. I can just read the words. No, no, no, no. Read it out loud because the process of hearing the words come out of your mouth and back into your ears is very important. And then rewrite your email. Now, after you've laid the bad news out in positively, tell the truth positively. Look, the reality is the reason why you're sending that email in the first place is because you want to work things out positively. That can be how you finish the email. You'd say, the reason I sent this email in the first place is because we want to work things out positively. Finish positively. Tell the truth. You wouldn't be sending that email if you didn't want to work things out positively. If you didn't want to come to a collaborative agreement. If you didn't want a great long-term relationship. Many people start emails with, hey, how are you? We think the world of you. We'd love for everything to work out well. And then they give you the bad news. If you don't know what to say at the end, pretty good chance of whatever you said at the very beginning to open it positively could be taken and put at the end. So worst case scenario, whatever you wrote to start that email, copy it, cut it, and put it at the end. Less is more, set it up, land it in positively. The last impression is the lasting impression should be your guideline for all your communications, verbal and email. The last impression seeds the next impression. It is what will ring in their ears when they go back over and remember what was communicated in that email.