the times and then he said, Hey Mike, let's show everybody what it looks like when two
negotiators go up against each other.
All right.
Welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson Calame.
I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guest leaders who are building fantastic
visions out there.
What's up Vision Pros and welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm your host Jackson Calame, founder and CEO of First Class Business.
I want to acknowledge real quick our sponsors Epiphany and ablehealth.us as well as the
opportunity to give back to the water project.
There's people who have greater needs in you and I, if you're listening to this, we probably
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I've got an interesting guest on today, Mike Inman.
I'm going to find out exactly how to pronounce his last name.
He is a professional negotiator and I have learned that in a matter of the four minutes
I've collaborated with him.
Most of y'all know that my background in sales means that I also know a thing or two about
negotiating.
I've read the book, Never Split the Difference with Chris Voss.
I have dissected that where they find tooth comb as well and have my good feelings and
negative feelings as well about what was taught and what is consumed in that book.
You really can't learn enough about the art of negotiation because really it comes down
to your ability to communicate with the world and your ability to have an influence for
the things that you want to accomplish and do in your life, whether that's with your
kids, with your family, for your business ventures, with the bank, with your business
partners, with your employees, et cetera, et cetera.
As a visionary, this is one of those arts that you want to keep learning time and time
again.
I saw Mike come into that room with me for those four minutes and showcase a number of
skill sets that I rarely see in leaders who think they know the art of negotiating.
With that said, Mike, I look forward to hosting on today's show.
Welcome to Vision Pros and we look forward to the value we're going to extract from our
conversation.
Thank you for being here.
Thanks for the great setup.
I hope you didn't set the bar too high.
We'll find out, I guess.
We will.
We will find out, right?
I'd like to exceed expectations, but we're coming in with a high bar here, so let's find
out.
We are definitely.
Negotiationtraining.com and TableForce.
We got two different types of brand names, which is totally fine.
Maybe it's a product, a market reality.
It doesn't matter.
Why did you start this?
What got you into negotiating?
I'm a lifelong negotiator from a business perspective.
I spent three years in sales and I found out that I was just average at that.
Before I was in sales, I had a degree in engineering and I always liked data.
This little voice in my head said, you need to get some data.
You need to understand why you're not a great salesperson.
I developed a survey.
I passed it out to all of my peers who I consider world-class sellers.
We were selling into Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors, some fairly large, sophisticated purchasing
organizations.
When the survey came back, I was really disappointed because there was only one common data point
across all these world-class sellers.
The common data point was this.
They had all been in purchasing roles before they went into sales roles.
That didn't make sense to me.
I went to my boss and I said, hey, you know the survey?
He rolled his eyes.
He said, I've heard all about the survey.
I said, well, do you know that everybody here has been in purchasing before they were in
sales?
He said, duh.
I could have told you that before the survey.
I said, no, not duh.
I don't get it.
Why is that important?
He said, Mike, it's because we understand the other side's sheet of paper.
I said, I have no idea what that means.
He said, okay.
I don't either.
Let me explain it to you.
He said, we understand when we've worked with the end user community, when we've influenced
the spec, when we know the decision makers, when we have one of very few manufacturing
plants in the world that can produce the parts to that level of quality or in a location,
basically when we have a strategic advantage.
On those deals, we work to close them at high margin.
On the other side, we understand when we're the third or fourth or fifth bidder or when
we're dare I say a commodity.
On those deals, he said, Mike, what I've noticed is you come in early and you stay late, but
you're not working really smart.
Working hard, not smart.
I had my fax machine program to dial my beeper when a quote came in so I could hurry up
and quote it.
He said, Mike, you got to figure this out.
I said, yeah, it would be powerful, though, when I probably had the order.
I could prioritize those conversations, make that a big part of my day.
It would also be powerful to know when I didn't have the order so I could lose fast.
I said, how do I know?
He said, well, you're a smart guy.
Eight or 10 years in sales, you'll probably figure it out.
Or I know a hiring manager over at General Motors.
They're hiring buyers right now.
If you'd like, I could put your resume in front of them.
I said, well, if I was a buyer, how long would it take me to figure out?
He said, a year or two tops, you definitely figure it out.
That little voice in my head said, that sounds efficient.
Eight or 10 years in sales, maybe figured out.
One or two years in purchasing, definitely figured out.
Would you please make the phone call for me?
Here's the vice president of sales, takes his young protege and he gets me a job at
General Motors purchasing.
That's when my career changed.
What I learned as a purchaser, after I understood the sales sheet of paper was this.
My first job at General Motors, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I would
work with the end user community, build out the spec package, send it out to all of our
suppliers.
Then I played Mahjong and Solitaire.
Just killing time in the day.
Quotes would start to come in, start to stack up on my desk.
I'm playing Mahjong and Solitaire.
New date would hit.
Play Mahjong and Solitaire.
Then I'd get a phone call from a supplier and the phone call would go like this.
They'd say in a high stressed voice, hey Mike, we submitted our bid a few days ago and we're
wondering how do we look?
Without even looking at their bid, I'd say, are you kidding me?
You're way too high.
Click back to Mahjong and Solitaire.
The next day I get a phone call from that same supplier.
Would say, hey Mike, we check with finance and you're right.
We sharpened our pencil.
We can give you an 8% discount.
How does an 8% discount sound?
Without even looking, I would say 8%.
You got to be double digits if you're serious or you're going to lose this order.
Or I would call a meeting with a supplier I had no intention of doing business with
and I would take, take, take.
Somebody who was weak and desperate, I would abuse that relationship.
I would take everything from them.
Then I'd call a meeting with a supplier I really wanted to do business with.
I would say, I've met with your competition and I've got all this stuff from them.
I cover the name because that would be unethical.
If you can't beat this, you're going to lose this deal.
And I was really good at it.
Jackson, I was, I was getting rewards for that type of behavior.
Here's the problem.
That type of negotiating is not sustainable.
We drove hundreds, if not thousands of suppliers out of business with those types of negotiation
tactics and a little voice in my head one day said, you're better than that.
You just can't be abusive.
That's not in you.
So I started to study negotiations and I read books on negotiating, took classes like the
one I now teach.
And from that point forward, my career went from a buyer to a manager to a director in
the GM system, moved over to America West, which is now American Airlines through acquisition,
had all the indirect procurement responsibilities, had $800 million to spend there.
Moved to a company called IAC Interactive Corp.
And IAC is a holding company that owned match.com and let's see, Expedia, Ticketmaster, Home
Shopping Network.
My job of head of procurement there was to get all the companies to negotiate together
internally so then we could then go negotiate with our suppliers with one voice.
And my last gig before joining Tableforce was with a company called MGM Resorts International.
So 50,000 hotel rooms on the strip and globally.
And I had all the indirect spend there.
So I've used negotiations throughout my career, sales side, purchasing side.
And I believe if you negotiate properly, you can actually have better relationships.
You can get to that mythical win-win.
If you put the effort in, if you have a process, if you try, if you raise the bar on yourself,
you can actually have a better deal and better relationships with your suppliers.
Because here's what I figured out in procurement.
If you beat them up, if they don't go out of business, but you need that phone call
answered after hours or you need that email response on the weekend, sellers do not prioritize
you.
Buyers of the world need to understand that the sellers have to have their wins.
And you can actually do that in a kind professional way.
You don't have to just beat them up.
And if you do that, both sides get happy with each other.
I've got a ton of ex-suppliers that I'm Facebook friends with.
Now that's not real friendship.
Don't hear something I'm not saying.
But it is building a relationship that's lasting and that only came because of the way we negotiate.
So that's a long way.
I get off on these tangents sometimes.
No, it's good.
You ended the book super well.
Those who hear the wisdom and what you just shared and went through in the course will
benefit tremendously.
I can teach you how to beat somebody up in about an hour.
The problem is the other side figures it out and they may have to do the deal.
They may decide to do the deal because it's better than nothing.
But it's not.
So let's look at this.
So today is a good experience.
I had a good experience that goes along with exactly what you're saying.
And in this case, it was that entrepreneur that I don't want to say they lost their opportunity
to be on the show because this is one, we're not the Joe Robbins show and we don't have
a million people listening in.
But there was a lesson that required that me to say, you know what?
This may not be the best opportunity for you.
That hurts.
As a professional, to get denied by a podcast, whether it's small or big, if it's small,
you're going to feel bad about it because it's like, wow, who are you to deny me?
If it's big, it's embarrassing.
Like I didn't make it onto that show.
Well, here's what happened.
The entity I was talking to, I was asking them about one of their web pages after having
a fairly awkward first pre-show discussion.
And when we were talking about their website, they had some critical flaws in the wording
on their website.
And the person said, oh yeah, like that designer did an awful job.
We fired them.
It's all their fault.
So here I am as a seasoned entrepreneur knowing, man, anytime we point our finger that hard
at somebody, there's three pointing back at us.
And so I'm like, oh man, how do I address this?
This is such a negative vibe.
And they went a step further because I said, well, how much did you pay them to work in
your website?
And they said, oh, I didn't pay them on the front end.
Are you crazy?
I've learned the lessons.
I've learned how to run my business.
And I'm thinking, wow.
They didn't even pay the person exactly under the thumb.
Exactly Mike.
And what happened is I got myself in a situation where I realized there's no way I want to
have a relationship, a working relationship with somebody who treats people like this.
That was revealed in the process.
And so there was this hostility and toxicity that existed where I knew there's no way I
wanted a relationship of negotiation with this person.
So let's go there.
How do you define negotiations?
Because I think you have a unique take on it, whereas most people think it's this hostile
back and forth of Mike, let me twist your arm and you twist my arm and let's see who
wins.
But what does negotiation mean to you?
So it's in its simplest form.
It's just two or more parties trying to reach agreement.
And if we do this properly, I should want you to be happy with the deal.
I've heard a lot of people define win-win as both sides equally don't like the deal
or both sides kind of don't like it.
And I'm like, fine.
But I want to see both sides actually excited about the deal.
So for example, when people negotiate with either table force when companies negotiate
with us or when people find out that I'm a professional negotiator, I know I'm making
assumptions here.
And that's not a bad thing.
There's that old saying about don't make assumptions.
It makes an A-S-S out of you and me.
But I think we should make assumptions.
We should test those.
So the assumption I generally make is when someone starts negotiating with us, there's
a little reluctance.
They're like, oh my gosh, they're professional negotiators.
And they're going to take advantage of me.
They're going to screw me over.
And all this junk in their head gets in the way.
So I'll start a negotiation off saying, hey, listen, here's the deal.
I want you to imagine that in five years, we're up for renewal.
And we are so happy with each other that table force is funding a get together down at the
Fountain Blue in Miami.
We're paying for you, the supplier, to come join us.
So with that end game in mind, how do we build in a contract that aligns us so that we're
happy with you in five years and you're happy with us in five years?
So begin with the end in mind.
Love it.
And now we've got to talk about your wants and needs and my wants and needs and how do
we align that.
One thing that you said that I teach that's not a negotiation lesson, it's a life lesson.
I learned this from our founder, Bill Garcia, who's not only a master negotiator, but master
in life.
Bad news early is good news.
Too many deals happen and then both sides are unhappy with it or find out later that
this sucks and we shouldn't be together.
If you can find out early in the process that a deal won't make sense, then you can go away
and say, hey, listen, this doesn't make sense for us.
We're not in alignment.
I love you as a person, as a business.
Just doesn't make sense.
So if something changes on your sheet of paper, if a new variable comes in, if you find another
supplier and they don't work out for you, we'd love to be there to pick up the pieces,
but this just doesn't make sense right now.
And have that conversation really early on.
I think people can be happy with each other instead of just trying to beat each other
up and run each other down and then it will not work out in the end.
That's just a waste of everyone's time.
Right.
I agree with that.
So hostage negotiations, what most people think of, but your term of negotiation is
what I define as healthy dialogue.
Healthy dialogue consists of two people coming to bat, ready to give their best.
That's usually what ultimately results in the win-win opportunities.
So how do you go about, well, let's look at this from another perspective real quick.
I should go back to my, I'm just, I love going off the hook with this, but let's go right
here.
Mike, who should be listening to this podcast right now?
Why should they listen to you and what are they going to get out of the rest of today's
show?
Sure.
So we primarily teach salespeople, 80% of our audience ends up being sales or project
management, customer facing roles.
And the other 20% is on the procurement side.
So people that are in buying and selling roles are going to get the most benefit out of this.
The lessons we teach are applicable to other things like salary negotiations.
They're applicable to things like going to Home Depot and getting a better lawnmower.
They're applicable to things like, so when I go out to dinner with my wife and she does
not like negotiating at all, she's one of those people that cringes and like the blood
drains out of her face and she walks away.
Here's what I know.
When I go to a new restaurant and I'll check in at the host stand, they'll say, do you
want inside or outside?
You want the bar or the restaurant?
Do you want the high top or the booth?
They'll give you a binary choice.
And I always say the same thing.
I want to sit with your best server.
And they go, huh?
And I go, yeah, yeah.
You know, the server, the server that trains all the other servers, I know disrespect,
everyone's got to start somewhere.
But if I'm going to pay full price and my wife has made it very clear, I'm going to
pay full price.
I want the best experience possible.
Now that's an opportunity to negotiate.
The studies show that most people miss there's five to seven opportunities to negotiate every
day.
But because it's not buying a house, buying a car, sourcing business, winning business,
people don't think of it as a negotiation.
Related to the finances.
Right.
And I want to expand the definition of negotiating to all these other things.
Now most hosts or hostesses miss an opportunity.
If I'm coaching them, I say, now, when somebody says, I want to sit with your best server,
you need to say, hey, listen, can you wait five minutes?
I just sat them.
I don't want to slam them.
And by the way, if you have a good experience, will you leave us a Yelp review?
Right.
They're going to get some value back.
They're going to give me what I want and need, the best service.
And if they deliver on that, I should then be willing to give them what they want and
which is the opportunity to get more business.
Yep.
And this is about exchanging value between two sides.
I'm not trying to trick them into giving me the better table.
Right.
I'm trying to say, I want that.
That's high value to me.
So if you can give it, if it's low value to you, that's a good thing.
Now what could be low value to me, high value to you, like a review?
Now here's what most people don't know.
So I've trained people on six continents.
I've been in more than 30 countries doing negotiation training for the last 10 years.
When I travel, I leave a review for restaurants that I eat at.
Anyway, for me, because if it's a really good one and I go back to that city, I want to
know that that was a good restaurant and I'll even use the server's name.
I'll say, Sarah gave me great service.
So when I show up at the lion's head pub, I can say, is Sarah here?
Right.
So it's my own reminder, but it's low value.
It has some value to me, but it has more value to them.
But that should be in the deal to look out for each other.
It's funny that you should mention the lion's head pub.
That is one of my former clients in Milwaukee, north of Milwaukee.
I believe so, with restaurant software.
So it's all brands that you would mention.
Let's move in real quick, Mike.
So 15 seconds version.
What's your vision?
My vision, I want to help people understand negotiations is not about a crisis or a negative
process.
We should have fun negotiating.
Most people have to go to work.
I get to go to work.
Negotiations are all I do.
So that's my quick highline there.
Let's have fun negotiating.
So what's your vision for the clients you work with?
So the word negotiate comes from the Latin term.
I'm not a Latin speaker.
It's negare optimum, which means to deny leisure.
So the whole word, and in fact, in French and Spanish, it means business.
So there's all these negative things that get associated with it.
And I just want to change that so that people get to negotiate.
In fact, when I negotiate with somebody, especially if I'm on Zoom or in person, I put a smile
on my face.
They'll say, hey, listen, I hate to bring this up, but, and I'll go, oh, are we negotiating
now?
Like, I want to bring that positive energy.
Tell me what you need.
Please be honest with me.
And by the way, there are some cultures in this world that have a hard time being honest
and they hold back because they don't want to hurt someone's feelings.
I love negotiating with people like from the Netherlands or from Germany because they will
just like tell you.
So I call them direct.
In fact, I was doing a class and I said, I love negotiating people from the Netherlands
and somebody from the Netherlands, because I said, because they're direct and somebody
from the Netherlands raised their hand.
They said, thank you.
Most people think we're mean.
And I'm like, no, no, you're just direct and that is efficient.
So we should also, how do we get yes or no faster?
Sorry, that's a little over 30 seconds.
Like my passion doesn't cause shame on me.
No, that's awesome.
All right.
So with that said, what are some of the powerful lessons that visionaries can learn?
So we're not necessarily talking about the person who's the sales rep they want to hire,
but when they're in the process of running their own sales or building their own influence,
what can they learn from your experience about negotiating that can help them succeed in
the here and now?
So the first thing we tell people is one of our three foundational principles is to try.
Now that sounds very trite.
Like this guy's going to tell me to try.
Visionaries are going to tell me to try.
Yeah, I'm telling you to try because here's what happens a lot.
Sales leader will say to the sales team, hey, go out and get an 11% price increase.
We're going for 11% this year.
Go get 11%.
Sales person, their knees under the table are shaking because they don't want to call
the customer and say, hey, I got bad news.
11% is coming.
They'll send an email or a text or a phone call and they'll say, hey, I got really bad
news.
My boss said we're supposed to get tried to be 11 and a half percent.
What do you think about that?
And the buyer will say, because buyers are trained to do this, get out of here.
You're out of your mind.
No, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah.
Now the salesperson will go back to their boss and they'll say, I tried.
No, no, you didn't try.
No, we have a saying, I'll never take a no from someone not empowered to say yes.
So when you say, Hey, I needed 11 and a half percent price increase.
I did my best internally.
I've already negotiated 11 and a half percent as your number.
And the buyer says, no, get out of here.
You're out of your mind.
Salesperson should say, well, it sounds like we've reached your level of authority.
Who could say yes?
Can I talk to your boss?
Can I talk to your boss's boss?
Can I talk to the end user community?
Can I talk to finance?
Salespeople are generally taught to hear no three times in most of their techniques in
negotiations.
They don't do that.
They hear no one time and they go away afraid.
Try, keep trying.
Try with somebody else who can say yes, who can negotiate with me.
Keep trying.
So that's number one.
The other thing is to have a plan.
Most people think that negotiations got to be flexible and entrepreneurial and you do,
but that's the 20% of the Pareto you got 80% you should have a plan for a famous negotiator
said they busted a myth that you should have a negotiation plan that you should play detective
before you go negotiate.
And they're they're reasoning and I don't intellectually.
I understand what they're trying to say.
They said it's because most people lie on social media.
So if you looked up someone, they would probably have a couple of lies on their LinkedIn profile
and that you can get more in 20 minutes with them than you can by reading their bio.
To which I say, but what about the stuff that's correct?
What about reading between the lines?
You know, most people don't have the benefit of going to training to understand how to
psychologically profile someone in 20 minutes.
And by the way, if you have an hour set aside and you're spending 20 minutes profiling the
other side, you haven't really used your negotiation time efficiently.
So part of the plan is, and I tell people don't stalk anyone, like that's rude and inappropriate
and it may be illegal.
But LinkedIn is a billboard that people freely choose to put out there about themselves.
So if somebody doesn't look me up, I almost think, wow, that's disrespectful.
I looked you up, right?
We're going to have a meeting.
I want to know things like, were you in the military or not?
And my assumption is people from the military are a little more formal in their processes.
So my language will shift a little more yes or no, sir, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, until proven
otherwise.
It depends on what university they went to, what country they're from.
Again, I mentioned some countries are very rigid and strict and hierarchical and other
countries are really more collective, socialistic.
So I want to just build out a little mini profile before I start talking to that person
to see if we can build a bridge.
I'm not using that information.
Let me back up.
People have said, well, that could be manipulative.
If you are using information to hurt the other side, to put them at a disadvantage, that's
manipulation and that's wrong.
I'm against that.
If you were using the information you find to build a bridge, then that's manipulation,
but it's used in the context of...
Yeah, I guess they're both strictly in the definition.
But hold on.
That's when you're looking at the semantics game.
So if I were coming back at you and saying, hey, that's negative to do, then that's one
thing.
But the word manipulate means to mold.
And so we put negative connotations on things as Americans or as speakers of English brought
up from our own homes where we learn to fight or we learn to harmonize.
So it just depends on how we're utilizing the term.
But I think it's a beautiful way of showcasing how much value we put in the other entity,
the way that you're talking about.
Jackson, you've said it.
So the English language.
So I read this study.
Now this is about 10 years old.
It said the number one failure rate for US expats, a US businessperson transferring overseas
is in the UK.
And what they found was when somebody from the US goes to Spain, a little voice in their
head says, okay, you're in Spain.
It's a different language.
It's a different culture.
You might need to take a siesta.
You need to adapt to them.
And they have a decent degree of success because they're saying to themselves, I need to adapt.
When people from the US go to the UK, they go, oh, we speak the same language.
We fight wars together.
We're the same.
And they find out in the UK, we are not the same.
To your point, the word scheme, you know, in the US, it's a very, oh, there's a scheme.
That's like illegal, legal scheme.
In the UK, it's just a plan.
You know, everyone has a scheme.
But the world has different connotations, even though the definition is about the same.
Yes, I love that.
I'm not a fan of the semantics games at the same time.
I play them constantly and what I do, but it's about, you know, can you as a leader
create space for that person?
So another little thing that came up, and I'm glad you utilized it as an opportunity.
I know this wasn't personal, Mike, but I know how it matters for the context of what we're
talking about.
We've talked about utilizing that 20 minutes of the time that you have to pre-frame a call,
right?
To be prepared for that call.
There's far too many people out there who don't, who go into situations where they could
have found out more about the situation and didn't.
On the flip side, there's the potential of being pretentious and thinking somebody should
have done more research than they actually did.
Right?
For instance, if I'm going to meet with Mark Zuckerberg and he doesn't know who I am,
so freaking what?
It's Mark Zuckerberg.
You know, if I'm going to meet with Elon Musk, so what?
We have to be careful as people not to box ourselves in on either side, right?
Where we put ourselves into a limiting belief or we're like, oh man, this person didn't
research me because of X, Y, or Z.
So coming in with an open mind, knowing you did your best to do your research and that
you at least tried.
I also, real quick on your other thought, when you talked about trying, you talked about
the salesman who called and failed in their try process because they kind of preemptively
told the person how they should feel about the 11% price increase, right?
Saying, oh man, I bet you're not going to like this.
Be prepared not to like this.
Like they kind of unsold themselves.
What about the person who didn't make the call to begin with?
They just quit, right?
You're certainly going to have those two who quit.
And they told their boss they tried.
Oh, even worse.
Boss, I called it.
They wouldn't call me back.
They ghosted me.
Sorry.
That's not trying.
Yeah.
No, it's not.
Trying with the intent to win.
Right?
I love that you guys have that as a principle.
So you mentioned that you mentioned having the plan.
What's the third point?
So we like to call it raise the bar.
And it's about having high expectations for yourself.
If you're a salesperson, you're closing deals at 18% margin.
And you know with a 90% confidence that 18% is a good number and you're probably going
to close that deal.
Why aren't you trying for 22?
I'm not asking anybody to go from 18 to 36 overnight.
But if we can be a better me tomorrow than I am today, make incremental improvements
1% a day.
And when you're closing deals at 22% interest, you get a little more confidence.
And now maybe we go for 24, 26%.
But to raise the bar on ourselves, I think is a good healthy practice that we should
all get into regardless of your negotiating or your accounts payable and you're processing
120 purchase order of invoices a day.
Why can't you get to 130?
You know, I see all these people online and not that I want to make this about salary
negotiations.
But if I just had salary transparency, I could get a raise.
No, you couldn't.
Salary transparency does nothing for you.
Even valuable to your boss, to your company, that does value to go in and say, Hey, I'm
10% better than everybody else in my peer group and whatever your job is, whatever your
KPIs are.
How can I get on the path to get a raise?
How can I get on the path to get a promotion?
How boss can I make your life better?
And when I make your life better, I expect you're going to make my life better.
That's true negotiating and part of a plan and to raise the bar on yourself.
Why can't you get a little more out of it?
That's being valuable, knowing your value and expressing your value.
Right.
I like the way you frame that up.
Yeah.
You've just done all three of those things.
Um, and it's a big difference between somebody who, who, uh, wins and somebody who doesn't,
um, right.
It's knowing to take those steps.
Um, and then actually saying, you know, you don't get what you, you don't get what you
deserve.
You don't get to what's fair.
You don't get what you negotiate.
You know, I, I spent a lot of years in charge of teams and finance gives you a budget and
they say, here you go, split this up how you want.
And you want to give your A's a little more, but then HR will say, Hey, how come Sally
is getting 4.8 and Jimmy's only getting 1.2.
That's not fair.
And I'll say, well, here's why, because Sally produces more results than Jimmy.
And I'll have to fight internally, negotiate internally, but you know, whether it's 4.8
or 1.2, you know, that's not going to really change anybody's life.
You know, getting a 20% raise, you know, you got to go to your boss and say, how do I get
that extra 20%?
Ooh, okay.
Now it's not in the 3% yearly budget.
Now I got to go to finance and get an exception.
Now I got to go to HR and talk about why the job description and how you perform that you're
an outlier in a good way.
The 20s and 30% are, I don't want to lose you because it's going to cost me 30% more
to go get somebody on the street new.
I'd rather give an existing employee 20, 25% than go pay 30% more for a newbie.
Yep.
Use the word that I wish more entrepreneurs would seek out or would be less scared of.
You said fight.
You almost corrected yourself, but I'm glad you said the word fight.
I had a therapist that one of his big claims was fighting in relationships is the fertilizer
of a relationship, you know, which is what?
It's the manure.
You know, it's the nasty stuff, but it's the reason it's so necessary to help relationships
move forward that are built on substance and aren't just surviving.
So how do we-
Hey, Jax, can I back that up?
Go ahead.
Yeah, absolutely.
If you won't fight with somebody, and I'm not saying we should all fight all the time
or make up things to fight about.
I know there are people who make up drama, right?
That's a different story.
But if you won't put the effort in to say, I disagree with you, if you just go, ah, whatever,
that's not a real good relationship.
If you don't even care enough about the person to say, I think you're wrong, then you don't
have a solid ground.
Bill, my boss and I, I call him my boss.
He's our majority owner, our founder.
We fight regularly.
And you're managing partner, correct?
You're managing partner.
Yeah.
And we're doing our role and that's just for signing contracts and deals and stuff like
that.
But he's founded our company.
He taught me to negotiate.
He was one of those trainers who taught young Mike, young buyer Mike, how to be a better
negotiator.
I respect him immensely.
But Bill approaches things from a sales perspective.
With a sales mind, Bill's got an MBA from Thunderbird.
I don't have an MBA.
And Bill, by the way, grew up in Latin America, speaks Spanish, Portuguese, English.
Cool.
Been to 40 countries, not 30.
So Bill's approach to things is often different than my procurement guy approach.
So we will disagree vehemently, passionately.
At the end of the day, the best idea wins if we can convince the other side that maybe
it's a little better or maybe to try.
Let's see.
Let's get some data.
You would think one thing.
I think another thing.
Let's see what the market thinks, because ultimately the market is the one that's going
to tell you if you're right or wrong.
So we raise our voices to each other.
Sometimes we hang up the phone like we used to hang up the phone.
Now we hang up the phone or delete the email.
And you get that dopamine fix.
But it's all through love and passion.
At least it should be.
When you fight, it should be about I care enough to put some passion into this relationship.
Yeah, I love that.
I'm glad you brought that up.
And yeah, Bill Garcia sounds like an interesting man to learn from.
What parts of Central South America did he live?
Do you know?
Yeah, his father was an executive with General Motors and he grew up in Sao Paulo, Buenos
Aires, and somewhere else in Colombia.
And yeah, he spent a lot of he grew up there.
He speaks.
In fact, I got to travel to Cuba with him and he speaks fluent Spanish.
And I spent 20 minutes in a cab listening to him and a Cuban cab driver just go off
and that built the relationship because we weren't some gringos going down to Havana.
He built that relationship through because Latin cultures, again, very different.
I don't like to stereotype, but they are.
Every relationship.
Yeah, different zip codes have different cultures.
Absolutely.
There you go.
So we have to respect that and embrace that.
So he spent the first 20 minutes with me in the cab just looking out the window while
he's building a relationship with the cab driver because in Cuba, you have a if you
have a tour guide, if you have a cab driver, you get to see the inside stuff, the good
stuff.
You get picked up first.
It doesn't matter what you pay.
Twenty bucks will keep those cab drivers happy for the day.
That's I mean, it's a poor country.
But boy, if you're the first person to be picked up, if your cab driver will wait for
you, that's high value because now we're making use of our vacation time.
Absolutely.
And knowing how to honor people based on their etiquette, based on their circumstances, it
definitely matters.
So well said in regards to programs that you offer opportunities.
I know you help you help sells people move forward their negotiations.
What does that look like?
What if an entrepreneur is listening to this and they're considering working with Table
Force or negotiation training dot com?
What should they anticipate is the next step.
So pre covid all we did was in person workshops.
Again, 80 20 rule 80 percent of those were two day workshops where they pull their people
out of the field, whether it's a sales kickoff or purchasing.
We're all going to get together and talk about our yearly goals or we're behind on our goals
and we got to catch up, whatever the situation was.
And for two days we would talk about negotiating in the context of that customer.
So we've got a couple of differentiators.
And one of it is we try to make every class relevant to the people in the class.
I've taken open classes, taken the Harvard class, MIT class, taken the Keras class.
They're great classes, great content, but in the class I have to connect the dots back
to my negotiations.
What we try to do is connect the dots for them.
So when I'm with a sales technology company, I'll pull role plays that are about sales
technology.
We have a library about 100 role plays, all different types of buy sell situations, small,
large, you know, twenty thousand dollars, one point two million dollars.
And we'll give them these role plays that help them take the material they just learned
and apply it in a negotiation.
Sometimes people get like bunched up when they hear about role plays.
So this is what I tell people.
It's a safe learning environment.
So they've learned about some negotiating techniques, learned about a negotiating process,
then they get to use it.
Our safe learning environment is this.
When you're done with the negotiations and we write up all the deals on the board so
you can kind of see how you did.
Because the real world, you never get to see how you did relative to other people and you
never get to see how you did relative to the other side of your negotiation.
So we'll write up some data and then if you did something well, you're allowed to take
credit for it.
If the other side did something well, you're allowed to give credit for it.
If you failed at something and have the confidence level that you could admit that you failed.
And I love people who can say, hey, listen, I failed at something.
You're allowed to talk about your failure.
And if the other side did something that they could improve upon.
There's some people who talk too fast when they're under stress or they talk too high.
Everybody's got to tell.
Don't talk about that in public.
I want to protect egos.
But on a break, at lunch, at dinner, tell the person, hey, by the way, I noticed when
we were negotiating and then whatever the constructive feedback is to be that one to
one coach, but to do that outside of the public area so that people can feel safe to try things
and dare I say fail at things in this role play process.
So we do that for two days.
We wrap a bow on it.
The expectation is the feed.
The impact is immediate.
In fact, I had one COO in the UK for a tech company.
We gave him homework at the end of day one.
We said, go negotiate something.
Could be personal, could be over a bottle of wine, could be a deal.
COO comes back the next morning and says, I just saved 60,000 pounds negotiating because
of what I learned on day one.
And I said, oh, goody, because day two is even more powerful stuff.
Could have saved even more.
But that's the type of impact that we have.
Generally speaking, people pay for themselves the two days that they're there and the class
in the first negotiation they do post-class.
Good.
COVID hit.
Go ahead.
Well, we went to zero overnight.
In March of 2020, we were 80% booked for the year.
COVID hit.
And by April, everyone had canceled.
Our quality standards are very high.
We think it's the highest, but we don't know everybody.
And we thought video training wasn't as good.
There's no way it can be as good as the in-person product.
So we built out a Zoom session.
Now here's where we failed at first.
We took two days in person, and we put it into two eight-hour days back to back in Zoom.
And we learned about Zoom fatigue and about people tuning out.
So now we have our Zoom product is three three-hour days with a little break.
So you're not in class for more than an hour and a half.
And it's all the same content.
The role plays are structured as activities instead of actual formal role plays.
But they get all the same content.
They get all the same stories.
They just get them in a little different format.
Absolutely.
So those are the two primary ways that people can experience our negotiation training.
Well, you learned one of your own lessons there, too.
And that was like the 11% increase.
The thought process that video couldn't be as good held you back initially.
Absolutely.
You tried.
The junk in our heads.
Right again.
You tell people, yeah, start the class, turn off that voice in your head.
You know, Henry Ford said whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
Right.
And when I say A, B, C, your voice is already a D. Yeah.
And when I say one, two, three, your voice is already at four.
There's times in class that I want to shift the paradigm and I want to go A, B, one, two.
And you'll miss it if you listen to your voice instead of mine.
So we got to get out of our own way on a lot of things in life.
That's a life lesson, not just a negotiation lesson.
It's a lot of fun to challenge your brain like that and to make sure that you are shifting
the way that you think.
So real quick, I want to circle back to your vision a little bit.
We have a little bit of extra time.
And so your vision of helping others with the negotiation process and ultimately look
for ways to become 1% better each day.
Why is that important to you, Mike?
I'm kind of blessed in life.
I've had a lot of great mentors, I'll say sought out and found a lot of great opportunities
for myself.
And my life is fantastic.
And I see a lot of people struggling and that hurts my heart.
I genuinely want to see people doing better.
What I see a lot of is it's unfair.
So and so makes more than me.
And I go, Hey, when I found out that people made more than me and many people did.
Many people do.
The voice in my head says, Hey, good for you.
That's awesome.
And now I have a data point that says, how do I get to that level if that's what I want?
A lot of people focus on salary.
Compensation is so much more than just salary.
But you know, whether it's getting the corner office, whether it's getting the bigger accounts,
whether it's getting a different title, whether it's getting more vacation time, whatever
it is that you want to improve upon.
I want to help people get there through some simple, practical tools that actually help
their relationships as well.
I love it.
So I'm getting something out of it.
It's dopamine.
I like helping people.
I like when I click the like button.
I like when I comment on people on their posts.
I enjoy that.
I get something out of it.
So in negotiations, there's a rule that don't ever give anything without getting something
in return.
I'm getting something in return when I help people.
I feel good.
And there's values.
It's huge value there, Mike.
It's been a pleasure.
Vision pros, those of you listening in.
You know, if you know somebody who can improve their negotiation skills, who understands
the value of healthy dialogue, who wants to be able to pull from these points of try,
plan, and raising the bar.
You know, if you have somebody themselves who's working with you that can use some help and
guidance, then definitely reference them back to this opportunity to listen in to what Mike's
up to.
You can go to negotiationtraining.com and see some of the videos they have on there
and the materials that they have on there.
I'm constantly looking for new friends that know how to improve my own communications
and how I can help the market.
So if you need help, reach out to Mike Inman on LinkedIn.com.
Reach out to him on the website, anywhere else that you can.
And if you have any questions for us, don't hesitate to hit us up in the comments as well.
You know, I'm sure Mike would be happy to jump in to address those.
And we'll also alert him to let you know that you have follow up questions.
So everybody have a fantastic week.
Mike, thank you so much for being here and Vision Pros.
It's always been a pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Yes, sir.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
I invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving.