Was ist Reziprozität im Business?

0:00Reciprocity. Now, reciprocity is key in all sorts of persuasion and I'll say this one caveat that I believe. Reciprocity only matters in cultures where reciprocity matters. There are cultures where reciprocity is not nearly as important. This is where sometimes when cultures mix, people take advantage of systems because that's not as important in the culture they came from. And so the culture where the person is giving first in order because they expect something back, the other culture will just take advantage and be like, "Look at this idiot. He just gave me some free stuff." And so you will have to make sure that basically you're within a culture or society that reciprocity is the norm. But if it is the norm, then there's huge amounts of things that you can use from a persuasion perspective. So the beauty with how we structure reciprocity is that people are more sensitive to the fact that they gave something and you give something. What's more difficult is describing the relative value. So let me give you an extreme example. Let's say that I take someone's order from the counter and I bring it to the table where we're both eating lunch, right?

0:58The person might say, "Thank you for doing that." If I then said, "Hey, can you pick me up and drop me off from the airport tomorrow? I mean, I did get you your lunch yesterday." The thing is that it poses, it looks like, it smells like reciprocity, but the value of those two concessions are wildly different. And so the idea is that we're trying to trade concessions in a way that is still advantageous to us. What I like to do in terms of my thinking, like the example that I gave in terms of multiple simultaneous offers, which is why I think this works well post that, is that I try and break each of my things into as many different pieces as possible so I can trade more times. So like this house example that I gave you earlier, if I have 15 million but this thing is going to be financed, can I go cash or financed? I can do closing period. I can say it's a 90-day close or 30-day close, that's going to be significantly more valuable. I can say furniture versus not. There's other terms that we can basically weave into the deal that I'm not going to play all those cards at once. Now this one is a real estate transaction so it's much more straightforward. But a transaction like this, it's like you want to think, "What are all the variables?" We want to use all the value equation variables. Speed, how can I deliver this faster? How can I do it slower? We've got the actual price, obviously. On top of that we have the risk associated. So who's going to be taking on more risk in this situation and what are the different types of risk that someone's taking on? Then we have ease. How can we make this easier or harder for the other person? For each of these components, you want to take whatever you're offering, whether it's an employee or whether it's a vendor or whether it's a deal, I want to look through each of these lenses and think, "How can I have more variables at my disposal so that when it comes to the horse trading, I can make a small concession in ease and they only have two variables and I've got five." And when I have five, I can give without changing my price and say, "Hey, I'll do 15 with ease." They'll come down from 17 to 16 and I say, "Cool, I'll do 15 with ease and risk."

2:52And then they come down from 16 to 15.5 and I say, "Cool, I'll do 15 with ease, risk and speed." And so when we do it like that, then all of a sudden it's like I'm still keeping the reciprocity, but I just have more arrows in my quiver. When you're sitting down at the table, you want to think through all of these different variables that you have at your disposal. For me, I have this big deal sheet that has 80 different things that I can change about a deal so that when I go into the conversation, I have so many things that I can move flexibly to make my offers more compelling without the unstated assumptions that people all have because things they're assuming the deal just has these two things and everything else is the way they want. And for you, you have 80 other variables that you're like, "Oh, I can change this one, I can change this one, I can change this one."

3:35And that allows you to stay in reciprocity with the other person. That ultimately gets you a better deal long term. So as we're thinking through this, it's if we sit down at the table and we have one or multiple other offers that we think are really compelling and interesting and we use that as our psychological power so we can anchor super high and we anchor low in terms of our counters, right? Anchor high in terms of our initial, anchor low in terms of our counter offers. And then we have multiple simultaneous offers that are either presented to us or that we can present to somebody else using more variables and then horse trade with reciprocity so we can stay in the pocket but still more or less stay at the same initial offer, then we're probably going to increase the likelihood that we get a good deal done. Number five is framing. I would say this is most important, especially for employees and vendors, less so for partnership type or like M&A type stuff, but it can probably also be important here, too, but I'll just give more use cases in these two right now. So if we're talking about framing, then how we position something is going to matter a lot. So if I'm an employee selling to an employer, which is fundamentally what we're doing, I would probably say something to the extent of we want to make investments in these places and I see me coming in as an investment, not a cost. And ideally, if we frame this as how am I going to get a return on this investment, then I'm no longer a cost center in the business at all because I'm just a percentage commission, essentially, on what I'm bringing the business. If I'm a vendor to the same degree, I'm going to try and frame something as an investment. I'm going to frame it based on return, not based on overhead. On the flip side, you always want to reframe the other way, which is you want to reframe this as cost, you want to reframe this as overhead so that ultimately you have more basically negotiating power because you're pushing them down, they're anchoring themselves up. A lot of times people don't even understand framing and so they'll just accept the frame that you present. So rather than saying, "Hey, this is going to cost you five grand," we say like, "For $5,000 investment, you can see $15,000 in maintenance cost savings."

5:23That's very different than this is going to cost five grand. If that's the reality, then it's going to be far more compelling and far more likely the person's going to accept your offer even though functionally it's the exact same thing. I was talking to a few home services businesses that do like kind of construction stuff. And so I talked to a pool guy, talked to a patio guy, talked to an awnings guy who do like awnings on top of patios. And I said, um, "Do you have any data that shows resale value of homes that have awnings versus not? Or do you have any data on resale value of the specific neighborhoods that you're going to go into of pool versus not pool?" If someone knows they spent $100,000 on a pool and adds $100,000 to their house, I'm like, "Then the pool's free except you get to enjoy the pool the whole time."

6:03So this we shouldn't even be talking about that because you're really just taking it from one pocket and putting it to another. You're the one who gets to keep the pool, I don't get the pool. It's all for you. So the idea here is how we frame it. If you're going into these things that's going to cost you 100 grand, that's a very different frame than your house is currently worth a million. The other houses that are selling at 1.2 all have pools. It's going to cost you 100 grand for the pool, but you're going to add $200,000 in home value. What are we talking about? It's a very different conversation. So tactically, when you're in one of these situations, we want to have the data to support our argument for whatever our framing is. And typically, it's going to be some sort of return, especially if it's a monetary thing, right? We want to frame it in terms of what the end is. And so the strongest position is to say, "Look at the other 10 houses that sold in this neighborhood. Look at however many deals that have been done, they all have these components. The ones that didn't suffer this sort of loss." And you know what?

6:45Maybe it's not a one-to-one ratio. It cost you 100 grand and the houses with pools, it's an extra $50,000. Okay, let's not frame it as 100, we can frame it as half off. But you also get to enjoy the pool for that whole time. And so if you think you're going to sell this in however many years, do you want to enjoy it and barely pay much at all over that period of time? Probably. Rock and roll. Real quick, if you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, 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.

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