By Poornima Vijayashanker
Two weekends ago I was hanging out in sunny Miami attending and teaching at the Bullish Conference. One of the workshops was on negotiation, and I was really excited to participate in it. If you haven’t noticed by now, I LOVE negotiating!
My love for negotiating stems from a childhood dream of wanting to be a lawyer. But I of course changed my mind when I got to college, and decided to pursue engineering instead because I also LOVE to build.
The negotiation workshop was led by Jamie Lee. One of the exercises Jamie had us do was a role play exercise. We each had to partner up; Person A would ASK Person B for something, and Person B would initially reject Person A’s offer. Then Person A would need to follow up with a question to understand the reason for the rejection with the goal of modifying their ASK. The objective was to make Person A get comfortable following up to understand the reason for rejection rather than just walking away.
When it was my turn to create an ASK, I set the context for Person B, and told them they were a CFO at a tech company. My ASK went something like this:
“Hi Person B, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule today to meet with me.
I’m the founder of Femgineer, an education company. For the past 2 years we’ve been running a Lean Product Development Course that has graduated 70+ students around the world.
The course is for engineers and tech entrepreneurs, and teaches them how to transform an idea into a software product. In the course, we advise all our students to use your Product X, and they’ve found it to be really beneficial in building their product.
In 2015, we’d like to offer scholarships to students who might not be able to afford our program, and I’m here to ASK if you’d be open to a providing a $50K sponsorship, which we can use to provide our students with scholarships.
In exchange for the sponsorship, we’ll highlight you as our marquee sponsor, invite you to meet with the students, and continue to highlight how your products and services will benefit our students as they build software products. I know you’ve got a great base of customers in the US, but this will bring you a lot of great exposure in international markets, and be a part of our students’ success.”
I was obviously winging this, and I probably would have come up with some hard data if I was doing a real ask. After I presented my ask Jamie turned to me and said, “What I like is that you don’t just ASK, you make and OFFER.”
What Jaime meant by that is the following: too often when we ASK for something, we phrase it in a way that is mainly meant to benefit us. The reason for the ASK may be based on something we did to benefit the other person initially, e.g. “Over the past quarter, I’ve reduced the bug count by 50%, which has made the company $100K. Clearly my work has benefited the company, and I’m now here to ASK for a $10K raise.” But this ASK is based on a benefit that the person we’re asking has already experienced. Since it’s in the past, it doesn’t give them a concrete incentive they’ll experience in the future.
While you might say there is an ongoing benefit to this ask, i.e. having an outstanding employee, it’s just too subtle, and that’s the main problem.
When we instead make an OFFER, we clearly state how the other person is going to benefit from our ASK.
Let’s revisit the example above, and go from ASK to OFFER:
“Hi Person C! As you know I’ve been implementing a new process over the past quarter to improve our existing code base. I recently measured it’s progress, and noticed that it’s reduced the bug count by 50%. I also spoke to Person D in sales, who told me that customers who were originally on the fence about renewing their subscription to our product, were thrilled with the quality improvements, and have gone on to renew their subscriptions. This has resulted in $100K in sales.
Now I’m here to ASK for two things. First a $20K raise for my contributions over the past quarter, and the second is a $2K education budget. I actually learned how to improve the process through a course I took, and there is an advanced course I’d like to take that costs $2K. The advanced course will teach me a process for how to scale our code base, which will enable us to service more customers going forward.
Given that the previous improvements have increased renewals, I’m certain we’ll continue to see renewals go up in the next couple months. But if they do, I’m concerned that we’ll run into a scaling issue. I’ve pulled up some stats [show graph of performance] and here you can see for yourself how our performance has gone down with the increased customers.
Right now our customers experience a minor slow down, but as we grow, our product will not be able to support the additional customers. So I’m sure you can understand why we’re going to need to scale the code base before the next quarter. If we put it off, then we’ll lose the renewals we’ve gained.”
You might think this is cheesy and be able to poke some holes in it, but I actually mentored someone earlier this year, who presented a very similar offer, and ended up getting a $15K raise and the $2K education budget!
So how you can go from an ASK to making an OFFER?
Set the context. What did you do and what were the positive results?
Make sure the facts add up. In the above example, the customers renewed because of the improvements, it was a direct benefit, it wasn’t correlated.
Present your ASK and make an OFFER together. The ASK can be a benefit to you, but the offer needs to highlight how the person you’re asking is going to benefit. Most importantly it needs to be obvious! The reason it needs to be obvious is not just so they get it, but because they might go and share it with their boss or other people who are involved in the decision-making process. To avoid the offer from getting muddled as it’s repeated to others it needs to be presented clearly!
Present them with the cost of inaction. This is really the step that seals the deal. In the above example, the person asking talked about what will happen if the company fails to scale the code base: they’ll lose renewals! By presenting it in this way, the person who is hearing the offer will understand the problem they’re going to experience if they say no or wait.
Now it’s time for you to summon your best Marlon Brando, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” But unlike the Godfather, I’m NOT suggesting you make threats 🙂 Instead, think about something you’ve been wanting to ASK for. What is it? Phrase the ASK as an OFFER, using the steps above, then just let me know in the comments below. I’ll be happy to give you some feedback.
If you’ve made a successful offer, what was it, and what are some additional strategies you’d recommend? Let me know in the comments below!
