Richtig verhandeln

0:00This is actually from a Harvard Business School thing that I learned from Sharon Sarvatha. It's called BATNA. Now, I didn't know the fancy term for it, but it means best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So, what does this really mean? Research has shown that having strong BATNA, basically a strong alternative, gives you significant leverage in negotiations. Negotiation's all about leverage. London Business School did a study and they found that negotiators who know their alternatives set higher aspirations, so they ask for more, they make more aggressive first offers, and they negotiate ultimately better outcomes. So, your BATNA serves as almost like an anchor, a counter anchor that you have in the back of your mind of what you're negotiating with.

0:39It's kind of like a source of power. It's a decision standard that you only accept deals that are better than your best alternative. You can think about this in any setting. So, if you're with a girl and you know that you can only date 10s, if a seven comes along, you're like, "Well, my alternative is a 10, so I'm only dealing with 10s." If someone says, "Hey, I'll be willing to buy all of your inventory for 10 bucks a piece," and somebody else comes along and says, "I'll do it for nine," instead of just saying no, you're like, "I'll do it for 10.50," or "I'll do it for 11." You can edge them up, but if you know that it's not going to matter, then it doesn't matter. So, I'll tell you something that recently happened. I'm right now negotiating to buy a home. It's something that Layla wants, and it's aggressive. We already have a home that we like a lot. I really like the house we have. My best alternative to buying this house is doing nothing and just enjoying the home that I already have.

1:27They're in a terrible position because right now I know that they haven't had anyone else who's bid on the property because it's aggressively priced, let's put it that way. It's them versus me, and it's who wants it less. The reason BATNA's so important is you're like, "Okay, I get that. How do I have a best alternative to a negotiated agreement?" You win negotiations, and I'm starting with this one because I think it it's all five of this or six of ones that I'm going to show you going to be so important, but this one is probably the greatest source of psychological power.

1:53And you do this before you you down to the table. Me going to look at these homes, I know I don't have to buy the homes. When I was selling Jim Launch and Prestige Labs, I was like, I can just keep the businesses and they'll just keep making me money. I don't need to sell them. And from negotiating for that position, you only want to sell when you don't want to sell. You want to buy when you don't want to buy because you have something else. If you're looking for jobs as an employee, you want to negotiate when you already have another offer. So, if you're going to your existing employer, get another offer and then negotiate with that. You can only do that so many times before you start losing goodwill. So, you have to make sure that you're balancing that well. If you're dealing with a vendor, then you're like, "Okay, I'm going to get multiple bids before I'm going to decide to work with you because these are what I'm considering." You'll get so educated from actually negotiating four, five, six of these vendor agreements that you'll learn other terms that other people include that you can use, which is a later strategy that I'll explain.

2:42Getting multiple offers before you sit down increases your bets. So, for sure don't take the first offer because even if your first offer within the negotiation with one guy, but then you have that offer compared to all the other offers you're ultimately going to get to do the work. On the vendor side, it's reversed. What's my best alternative? What are my other customers? If I've got 20 other customers, I've got people that banging on the door, it's a supply demand thing. So, I've got more demand for my services than I have supply. And so, if you don't want it, don't worry, I've got another customer behind you. And so, this is the leverage that we go back and forth in negotiations. And then finally, with partnerships, it's the same idea. How can I get multiple offers from people wanting to buy my business? And to the same degree for me, if I'm trying to buy a business, then I want to not have to buy the business cuz I got other businesses I'm looking at. So, no matter what, all of this is won before you sit down at the table. Right now, if you sit down and you need this deal and you have no other offers, all the little tactics that you can try, sure, you can try to do it, but the thing is that it's just trying to win at poker only on bluffing.

3:38It's a bad position to be in. I would rather have pocket aces. If you have other offers, there's two different ways of thinking about this. So, one is you can be overt about it and say, "Listen, this is the counter offer. If you can beat the offer, beat it. If you can't, no worries, we don't need to waste time." The other way is that you just have it in the back of your mind and then you just see what you can get cuz the thing is, somebody else is giving you a $10 offer. If you say, "Hey, I've got a $10 offer." Maybe this person will just beat it by 1025. But, if you have the confidence that you know you're going to sell the inventory no matter what for a profit, shoot for 11. Shoot for 12. Shoot for 15. Like, you can shoot way higher because you know your plan B is not bad. And so, when you show it, they're just going to basically marginally edge it versus you having the confidence to basically swing big. Real quick, if you're a business owner and you're not growing as fast as you like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct your business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.