Salary Negotiation Guide

We all know we should become better at negotiating, although maybe you don’t view yourself as the tough, stubborn, hard-nosed type. In fact, if you read about negotiation, you might hear that the most important thing in a negotiation is to know things like your “ZOPA” (Zone Of Potential Agreement) and your “BATNA” (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.)

Or maybe you haven’t heard of those terms and now you’re really wondering how far behind you are.

Yeah… I felt that way too.

We Negotiate Every Day
Negotiation is something that permeates nearly all interactions, every single day. The biggest mistake is thinking that we don’t need to become better at it. I used to avoid reading about it because it sounded too dry and business-y.

Truthfully, most of the 1469 books on Amazon in the “negotiation” section do seem to be both dry and business-y.

After digging through a bunch of them, they all say a lot of similar stuff. They also use esoteric examples like negotiating an oil price raise for Shell or a movie deal for a large Hollywood agency.

Those examples didn’t help me because I wanted to become better at negotiating in my everyday life. Better at negotiating prices of things I buy, better at persuading people around me. I wanted to *FEEL* like I was doing well. I don’t get to negotiate oil prices or even the price of a car every day, so I wanted the small wins to help me get better at negotiating at large. Then, when the next car, house or job offer comes up… I am prepared.

We Need Simple, Everyday Tools
Over the last six years, I’ve gone through many negotiations on the job, either being too aggressive or too nice. But when I was negotiating with investors to fund my previous company, I realized I was getting kicked around and beaten pretty bad in some of our interactions. When I learned about some of the investors’ inner workings on another deal, I realized I had been on the wrong side of some dirty tricks.