Episode 180 - Jim Camp, Start with NO – Negotiating Tools The Pros Don’t Want You To Know

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Jim Camp. Jim Camp is a CEO and founder of Camp Negotiation Systems, and he is the author of two amazing books. One is called Start
With No and the other is No: The Only System Of Negotiation You Need For Work and Home. And here’s the good news: I asked Jim to come on the show and he actually said yes. So you’re about to get your hands on some negotiating secrets that top global CEO’s and billion dollar dealmakers use to get great deals done. I’d like to welcome Jim on the show. Welcome Jim.

Jim Camp: Nice to be here.

Susan Bratton: Thanks so much for giving us your time. I really enjoyed learning about negotiation and influence strategies over many years. And so one of the things, when we were talking in preparation for this particular show, was that you really like to start at the fundamentals. Not at negotiation strategies per se, but a much deeper level, which is the human mindset. And I really want to start with that because you talked about the fear of failure being so fundamental to becoming a good negotiator, getting over the fear of the way we’re hardwired. So tell us about that first.

Jim Camp: Well, you know, we’re all negotiators. Everybody, Susan, across the board, and we’re all trained to be negotiators as small children. Negotiation is defined by Oxford Dictionary as the human effort to bring about agreements between two or more parties with all parties having the right to veto. So that’s what we’re all doing everyday, making agreements from where we’re going to go to dinner to what kind of car we’re going to buy, etcetera, etcetera. And it’s how we develop our habits and our emotions. And all of our decisions are made emotionally and justified intellectually. And when emotions are driven by fear of failure or fear of not getting the agreement we’re looking for or concern, that our decision-making becomes affected. We become less effective in our decision-making. So it’s very important that in my work in training and coaching the people and the teams I work with, actually around the world in any culture, we’ve got to get across that mindset of a very clear mindset of what we’re bringing to the negotiation because if we can see what we’re bringing then we can help others see it, and we lose that fear of failure and we gain that strength of having created vision for the other party. So that’s a very important piece to the puzzle that I really work hard with my clients with.

Susan Bratton: So how do we overcome the fear of failure? How do we lower our emotional angst and increase our ability to make rational decisions when we’re faced with having to negotiate something? ‘Cause one of the things you said was that we make agreements everyday. A lot of us don’t think about negotiation as making agreements. We think about it as being some big scary thing. So what are some coping mechanisms that you offer or teach people?

Jim Camp: Well there’s a whole system we teach. Just for example, I gave you that definition of negotiation. Within that definition the last three words are ‘right to veto’. Everyone actually has the right to say no, and if you really want to lower the emotions in a negotiation set the agenda for everybody. “Look, there’s no pressure here. I’m going to propose this and please feel comfortable saying no. You won’t hurt my feelings. So don’t hesitate. Please don’t feel put upon. Please be comfortable saying now.” Well not only do we help lower our own emotions because we’ve made that decision to give that freely, but we’ve also helped the other party lower their emotions and enhance their decision making so they’re more open to take a look at what we’re doing or what we’re offering or what we’re bringing to the table if you will. So that’s just one step, but the real key here is to constantly make decisions and the safest decision is to say no. It maintains a status quo. But you make the conscious decision, “No, I’m not going to study negotiations. Well wait a minute, maybe that wasn’t such a good decision.” “Maybe I will study negotiations. Well wait a minute, maybe I should become a student of it and really work at it to climb that ladder where I want to go.” So it’s all about decision making and calming the emotion. When we make decisions we take some of the blame out of our emotions. And the more effective the emotions, the lower the emotional level, the better the decision becomes down the road.

Susan Bratton: So when you’re talking about starting with no, what you’re really talking about is getting the okay to turn down any offers, and what I think that does, both in lowering the emotion, but also can potentially increase the number of offers that you make in a negotiation, right?

Jim Camp: Oh yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when you watch emotional barriers come down, I mean you can actually, Susan you can actually see it when you give that permission to say no, you can actually see the other side, the pressure come off.

Susan Bratton: Relax, yeah. You can see the, yeah, the air comes out of the balloon a little bit.

Jim Camp: Yeah, you know, “How are they going to try to take advantage of me today, and they just told me I could say no? Wow, what do they really have to say here?”

Susan Bratton: What are some of the other things Jim that we can do to create that behavioral flexibility, that lowering of emotional stress when we’re negotiating with someone?

Jim Camp: Well, you know, we teach, in our system we actually have what we call a checklist. And this is going to sound very simple to the audience but it’s really very difficult and it takes a lot of practice, and I don’t want anybody to be fooled that this is simple and easy to do, but we start our checklist with what we call a valid mission and purpose statement. What’s our mission? What’s our purpose? Now to take those two words, we’ve got to have a definition for them. So Webster’s Dictionary says mission and purpose long-term aim and continuing task and responsibility of an organization or an institution. So what’s our long-term aim in this negotiation? What’s our responsibility? What’s our task? And then if you study Peter Drucker you’ll find in Drucker’s Innovation In Entrepreneurship he talks about the mission and purpose must be what you’re delivering to the other party in their world to their benefit, not to your own. So for example, what’s the purpose of this call today? My mission, my purpose was to provide the audience enough vision in this call that they’ll want to take action to become a student of negotiation and begin to pay more attention to negotiation. There’s a lot of wrong minded training out there, there’s a lot of what I call compromise-based training, like win-win, where people make assumptions and compromise before they ever engage. That’s because they don’t know how to engage. So first step in the checklist is mission and purpose.

Susan Bratton: What’s the second step?

Jim Camp: Problems.

Susan Bratton: Explain.

Jim Camp: Problems. What you see you’re up against. What you see will hold back an agreement. Maybe past dealings with someone who hasn’t delivered what they said they would deliver. The problem is I don’t know how to work with you because past history, I’m having a hard time getting by past history of delivery. I’ve got a client right now in China dealing with another company in China, and the other company has failed my client and they’re just struggling to make another agreement because they’re having trouble getting past the past failures. So whatever problem you see you’re facing in a negotiation comes in the checklist and it has to be negotiated out. Next thing is what we want from the negotiation. Now that sounds really simple, but Susan you’d be shocked that when you really start speaking with people, they really don’t know or haven’t defined what they really want. It’s astonishing at times. And the person who knows what they want, what they really truly want and have really defined it has an advantage in any negotiation. And then lastly in the checklist is what happens next, what’s the next thing we want to see happen, or what’s the next step we want to negotiate. So we build checklists and we build our preparations in depth off of a checklist. Very powerful tool.

Susan Bratton: I like the list, yeah, right, having a strategy before you go into a negotiation. Basically what you’re teaching people is like what’s your strategy, what do you want, you know? How simple is it?

Jim Camp: Susan I notice no where in our checklist did we make an assumption of what we had to give up to make the other party happy. That’s not even part of the negotiation, that’s just made up gobblygook. You know, I can’t make anyone happy; they can only make themselves happy. But notice we didn’t sit back in the corner with two or three of our team members and say, “Well what do you think we should give up here?” And we didn’t prepare a fallback position. But why would we have a fallback – that’s a compromise before we’ve even been asked. So many people sit around, I’ve had teams say, “Well what’s going to be our fallback position?” I say, “Whoa, whoa, wait guys. Why would we talk about a fallback position, we don’t even know what they’re trying to accomplish. We don’t know what their issues are. Why would we prepare a fallback, why did they even call us? Why are we going to this meeting? We don’t even know that?” So why would you try to make an assumption on a fallback position and compromise without being asked? I mean you think about it, it’s kind of crazy, isn’t it?

Susan Bratton: Well let me ask you a question about this. So I went to Stanford and I took a course from Maggie Neil. You might know her…

Jim Camp: Oh I do.

Susan Bratton: being in the business, she’s got a big personality.

Jim Camp: Oh yeah.

Susan Bratton: She has a course called Influence and Negotiation Strategies, and one of the things that she taught us was a BATNA, which is Best Alternative To No Agreement, which was essentially…

Jim Camp: Garbage.

Susan Bratton: You’re saying garbage, let me explain and then you can poo poo all over it if you want to Jim. So what she would say is you go into a negotiation always having a BATNA, which is, you would call it a fallback, which is if I don’t do this deal with you I don’t have to go into this negotiation and get this deal done with you, which gives me more power because I have an alternative to doing a deal with you. And she says never go into a negotiation without a BATNA, even if your BATNA is I’m not going to do anything. If I don’t do this with you I’m not going to do anything. And you’re saying bull pucky, you don’t need a BATNA. Tell me how.

Jim Camp: I think that you really hurt yourself with a BATNA.

Susan Bratton: Because you’re not motivated to get a deal done? Because you can walk away?

Jim Camp: No, no, no. Where’s the mission and purpose? Did she teach mission and purpose?

Susan Bratton: No, I only remember the BATNA and another thing I’m saving for my next question.

Jim Camp: I love her teaching. I love Harvard teaching that, I love her teaching that. There’s a whole little clique of people doing that, that’s wonderful because it keeps me in business.

Susan Bratton: All right, so tell my why you don’t need a BATNA.

Jim Camp: Well think about this for a minute: there is no such thing as power in negotiation. But how many times have you heard people talk about power? There is no such thing. Let me give you an example. Vietnam War; if you don’t do this we have the power, we’re going to bomb you into the Stone Age. We’re going to turn North Vietnam into a parking lot, all because of this misconception of power. Now I know that’s a grandiose example…

Susan Bratton: Well it’s a personal example for you ‘cause you served.

Jim Camp: Yeah, but where I’m really going, when someone says to you, “You’ve got to do this, I’ve got the power”, what happens to your emotions?

Susan Bratton: Yeah, you don’t want to play with them. You feel subjugated and angry. So you’re saying that a BATNA sets up an emotion in the relationship, which makes them not want to play?

Jim Camp: Well absolutely…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Jim Camp: It’s a feel good strategy in one way or another, that we feel good, you know, we’ve got an alternative, okay. But the thing that really concerns me and what I see in my coaching – now Susan this is very important. I coach teams everyday. We’ve probably got $3 billion in play this month in dealings around the world, and so I’m actually in the game. And what’s interesting to me, you know, we see people who have BATNA’s, they prepare a BATNA against us, and the first time we say, “Gee, we can’t agree with that. What’s your very best proposal?” And where do they go? They go to their BATNA.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, they go to a threat.

Jim Camp: Yeah, they go to their BATNA. And what happens to their emotion? It goes up. And what happens to their decision-making ability? They lose their effectiveness in their decision-making, and I see it all the time. We just had a deal, I’ll tell you very quickly, we just had a client, again, in the Far East and they had a failure, which was not my client’s fault. It was actually their fault. But because of that failure they came to us and said, “Look, we want you to participate in this failure. We want $14 million.” And, you know… “In order to be a good partner”, this is what they said, “In order to be a good partner you should join in with us and give us $14 million. Now we know we made the mistake but you should be our partner and support us”, when we said, “Gee, we can’t do that. I mean we just can’t participate in that.” Then the other party said, “Well okay, just, I’ll tell you what, just give us $9 million. That’s our fallback position, that’s the best number.” Now they gave up $5 million in the first call. They went to their BATNA in the first call. We ended up getting 80% market share and giving them $200,000 and they gave us 80% of the market from 50%. So once you’ve set a BATNA, once you start compromising, that becomes your methodology.

Susan Bratton: So take us one level deeper there. What is that you did? What were your communication mechanisms that allowed you to hold your line? I mean, they went to their BATNA, they made their second offer, but what is that you did to hold your line?

Jim Camp: Well we just, as nurturing as possible and trying to be a reasonable human being with a calm voice and low voice, you know, we asked them interrogative questions – you know, how can we do that, how will we ever get this by our board – so we asked them visioning questions, we had very nurturing voices. Time and again we had the same message, no one on the team got off message when it came time to place what we call placing a blocker, because the team I was coaching could not make that decision and all they could do was take it to Legal because of the standing contract. So we just very, as nicely as we could, we just, you know, had to reject, you know, participating in such a way. And eventually the solution we came up with, “If you can grow our market share, we’ll contribute $200,000 to this effort”, and at the end of the day what really was required, they really truly at the end of the day, they saw clearly the importance of our technology, so that brought the agreement about, because the team was able to create that vision of the technology and the importance and value of the future for their market. So it was their vision that drove the negotiation; we just helped it along.

Susan Bratton: And that was from understanding what your strategy was and what the benefits were to them?

Jim Camp: Yes. Our mission and purpose was very clear, to provide them the very highest levels of technology in the industry that will ensure their success long into the future. That was our mission, that was our purpose. And that drove our decisions throughout the negotiation. We can’t pay $14 million and carry on the research; we have to carry on the product development, we have to carry on, how can we do that?

Susan Bratton: So on the continued theme of “Is everything I learned in Stanford Business School wrong”, let me tell you the other thing I remember. The other thing I remember from my Negotiation and Influence Strategies weeklong torturous class, and that was the myth of the fixed pie. Now I have to tell you that, Jim, I feel that this concept has served me very well my whole life so far in my agreements and setting my agreements, and I’ll explain what I think the myth of the fixed pie is and why it has worked well for me, and that was…

Jim Camp: You mean make the pie bigger, right?

Susan Bratton: Yes, exactly, that the pie is never fixed and when you go into a negotiation, the more – I mean there’s a law of diminishing return on this – but if you have more things that you can negotiate it’s easier for you to have some throwaway things and then get the things that you want because you’ve seemingly given up things that in actuality weren’t important to you, but you gave and that felt like a negotiation so you’re a competitor, if you will, in the negotiation. I know you wouldn’t even use that word; you use words like ‘nurturing’ and ‘vision’. But, you know, in the battle mentality that we’re taught in business school, the idea was that you have some throwaway things and they don’t know what you really want, so at the end they assume that if you did the deal you got what you wanted but you gave up a few things and then they feel better. So tell me why all of that is wrong.

Jim Camp: Well, you know, that’s collective bargaining.

Susan Bratton: Okay?

Jim Camp: You know, collective bargaining is something that’s manmade. It was brought about by the Labor Movement in the early 1900’s here in our country and in Europe, and it “requires” good faith bargaining, the process of give and take. So in the Labor Union or in management, in those kind of negotiations, you try to hide the price, what’s most important to you. And that works. There’s not a thing wrong with that if you’re a collective bargainer. I mean there’s no doubt about it. And I happen to be very good at collective bargaining. But the interesting phenomena is the definition of negotiation. Negotiation is the effort to bring about agreements between two or more parties with all parties having the right to veto. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t collectively bargain or come to an agreement; of course you can. But – and like I said, I’m very good at that – but here’s a question for you: do you always get what you want in collective bargaining? Has there ever been a time you didn’t get full price or everything you wanted?

Susan Bratton: Yes, I’m sure there has been.

Jim Camp: Okay. You’ll find that when you create vision in the other party and the vision you create drives their decision, they’re going to pay more than you expected. They’re going to give more than you anticipated. I’ll give another example. I did some work with the FBI a few years back in the Hostage Crisis Negotiation Unit in Quantico Virginia. When my book first came out they had had a case go bad in the Philippine Islands and they lost a couple people to a terrorist in a hostage negotiation situation. So they called me and asked me to come to Quantico and visit with them, and I did, I was shocked, I didn’t know what in the world could I do to help these guys? And they said, “Look Jim, we don’t read any compromise in your book. You understand, we can’t compromise in a hostage negotiation. We can’t give the bad guys a car, we can’t give them an airplane to escape, we can’t do any of that. So when we read your book, you know, we think that what you’re teaching applies directly to what we’re doing. We can’t bargain away anything. So we have to create vision, so we’d like you to help us with that.” Bad guy gets on the phone, Susan, and calls, here’s what happens; bad guy calls and says, “I’ve got a gun to this lady’s head, I’m going to kill her in two minutes if you don’t get a car to me and help me escape.” Time’s running; what does the agent say to the bad guy? And here’s what they came up with after we worked through this: “My name is Agent Smith. You know, my whole job is to get everybody out of that building safely, including you. How can I get your help to do that?” So it started with a purpose statement in their world, to their benefit, with a visionary question, “How can I get your help?” That worked so well, you know, it was just amazing what they were able to do with that. So it’s all about driving the vision of the other party where their decision lies in the emotions.

Susan Bratton: How do you get customers who don’t have a vision to tell you a vision so you can help create a great agreement? 

Jim Camp: Well one of the things you can do is, I don’t know what the customer buys or I don’t know, you know, service agreement or what…

Susan Bratton: Doesn’t matter.

Jim Camp: No it doesn’t really as long as you know the features and benefits of what it is, right? So then you can say look, I like to teach what I call a light strip line. I like to start in the negative. I like to say things like, you know, “This probably is not going to be a fit for you, but let me ask you, what system of negotiation do you employ everyday to get the very best agreements? What system do you have?”

Susan Bratton: And they’ll say something like, “My system is to grind the life out of you and get everything for myself and leave you with nothing.”

Jim Camp: Exactly. How’s that working for you?

Susan Bratton: It’s working well for me ‘cause I have all the budget and you want my money and I don’t want to give it to you, and so I’m going to grind you down to a nub and make you miserable.

Jim Camp: You probably shouldn’t give it to me. I mean it’s probably not a fit. But lets just ask you something here. How do you measure results in a negotiation?

Susan Bratton: By how much I get and how little you get.

Jim Camp: How much are you over target each time?

Susan Bratton: I don’t know.

Jim Camp: Really?

Susan Bratton: It’s different every time.

Jim Camp: Well see, we average 20% over target every time. The buyers try to commoditize them. It’s very interesting to me about that.

Susan Bratton: That’s what happens.

Jim Camp: Yeah, but it doesn’t work.

Susan Bratton: That’s their strategy.

Jim Camp: Yeah but see, it doesn’t work because it’s not a commodity. There are features and benefits in that advertising, that advertising is not a commodity. Now maybe in the talent of the advertising firm, it may be where it’s placed, but there’s always a feature and benefit to everything. And I love it when someone says ‘commodity’ because that just opens the door for creating the vision of the features and benefits, the value of what the advertiser’s delivering.

Susan Bratton: That’s when you start asking your visioning questions and your nurturing questions and you understand…

Jim Camp: That’s when we go into mission and purpose, that’s right.

Susan Bratton: Then you understand what their mission and purpose is.

Jim Camp: Sure. But they don’t usually have a mission and purpose, they don’t even think in that concept. They think in terms of what they want.  So it’s much easier to create vision in someone who doesn’t think in terms of mission and purpose, ‘cause if they think in terms of mission and purpose they have a vision. And most of the time they don’t already have a vision of what they want. It’s, you know, a please me world, right?

Susan Bratton: Definitely.

Jim Camp: I want a discount so I feel like I won.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Jim Camp: Right?

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Jim Camp: So that’s a pervasive thing out there, and that’s really pretty easy to overcome.

Susan Bratton: How do you overcome that, because that’s kind of like the collective bargaining? You have to give a little to get a little. You always have to give them something, make them feel good. How do you get around that?

Jim Camp: Well the bottom line is that we spread the decision process to the real decision makers. You see nine times out of ten the person who demands the discount isn’t really the person that can make the decision to embrace whatever it is you’re offering. So we have to go around, we have to engage CEO’s with CEO’s, stakeholders like the person responsible for the PNL of that product line, not just the buyer. You know, the engineer whose designed the product and desperately wants it to be successful. You know, that chip is not a commodity; that chip is a highly integrated very well engineered piece to the puzzle. For example, what happens if that chip fails in your part, Mr. Engineer? How important is it you have engineering work with you to be sure that that chip does exactly what it’s supposed to do and contribute to your product. So we spread the negotiation process in the organization; we just don’t deal with the buyer. The buyer is actually probably the last person we deal with.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. I think this all really speaks to the fact that you have to go after your big clients and you have to have a team of people willing to go after those larger deals, and you have to focus on across the organization agreement creation.

Jim Camp: You absolutely do because, you know Susan, so many times I’ve come into a situation where I’ve said, “Well gee, how will this decision be made?”

Susan Bratton: And nobody knows.

Jim Camp: And nobody knows.

Susan Bratton: Right.

Jim Camp: And the other thing, you know, when you have a team and everybody’s on the same page, the same sheet of music if you will, with the same empowerment from the system, it’s really, it gets to be a lot of fun. It gets to be a lot of fun, because, you know, you feel like you’re forming at the very top of the game.

Susan Bratton: Right, that’s the thing. That’s the key here. The key here is not to wallow in little tiny programs and projects, but instead to get strategic, set your sites on a few big targets and then pull in all of your resources in putting those deals into place, learning how to be an effective negotiator, understanding the mistakes that are made, getting out of the collective bargaining mentality, the fixed pie mentality, the BATNA mentality, all of these things that are still being taught in school and learning how to be a negotiator that starts with mission and purpose and asks for vision and nurturing questions and coming at it with a group of people, maybe you’re the leader in the negotiation giving people their roles and their scripts and their responsibilities so you can pull in a couple of really big deals your company can do well in over the years, right?

Jim Camp: Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, that’s exactly what we’re doing here in our coaching work, and you know, I’ve opened my new university with our mastery courses, all these things we’re doing we’re now providing. We hired arguably one of the world’s leading neuroscientists of learning who has patented artificial intelligence technology, and we’re doing all this online, and it’s really exciting because you can see the client go from no understanding of mission and purpose to actually ownership of mission and purpose just by working with this technology. And what it does, it customizes the learning process for the individual and how their brain learns and how their brain forgets. But you watch this growth and then you see them start to apply it; it’s like lightbulbs are going off. You know, I get phone calls, “Jim, you’re not going to believe what happened. You know, I said this, I asked this question, I did exactly what you coached me to do on the checklist, my mission and purpose was there and you’re not going to believe it.” And it actually starts to bubble over and they become real students so they’re paying close attention to their performance on a daily basis. You know what I mean Susan? So they’re really growing, and it’s really great to watch.

Susan Bratton: I appreciate that. I appreciate that we were able to get to the bigger vision of how learning to be an negotiator can really cement your career and give you the level of success that anyone who begins to master a skillset deserves.

Jim Camp: Well I’ll tell you, you’ve hit it on the head…

Susan Bratton: Thank you.

Jim Camp: The mastery, you know, just like riding a bicycle, you never forget. And as long as you’re actively riding that bicycle you try to get better at it, and it’s just an amazing thing when people become students of the event, I call it the human performance event, that we do everyday. And unfortunately too often we take it for granted, and so we just wing it.

Susan Bratton: Right, no more winging. So if you would like to get Jim Camp’s bestseller, Start With No: The Negotiating Tools That Pros Don’t Want You To Know, absolutely free, all you have to do is go to startwithno.com, it’s on Jim’s homepage. You can download the digital audio book right now and take your negotiation skills, and maybe your life, to the next level. How’s that?

Jim Camp: I hope they’ll do that.

Susan Bratton: I think they will.

Jim Camp: I hope they will and I hope that they’re really serious about negotiation and take a look at our university. It could really help them I think.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. Jim, thank you so much. I just want to also note that you and I met through LinkdIn. Somebody, Robert Harrison I think, told me, “If you want a good person on your show you should give Jim a call.” I hope it was Robert. I know it was somebody. And I came to LinkdIn and I asked to connect with you in the network and you did and a week later you’re on the show, and I’m just really appreciative of the, you know, the fact that with things like LinkdIn now we can connect with each other, and I think you also, you started a new LinkdIn group, right, so people can…

Jim Camp: Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing, and I…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Jim Camp: I’m an old guy but this social media’s pretty amazing.

Susan Bratton: Isn’t it?

Jim Camp: Wow! It’s off the charts. I never dreamed…

Susan Bratton: I know, it’s fantastic.

Jim Camp: I never dreamed I’d be able to sit in my office and…

Susan Bratton: Talk to 10,000 people and…

Jim Camp: Yeah, it’s crazy.

Susan Bratton: have a good conversation with a cute girl.

Jim Camp: It’s crazy. Yeah you are, I saw your picture.

Susan Bratton: You’re so funny. All right dear, well thank you so much for being on the show.

Jim Camp: Susan, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Susan Bratton: My pleasure. I’m glad to know that I’ve been doing everything wrong and I need to start over Jim.

Jim Camp: Well I know better than that, you know better than that.

Susan Bratton: All right, you got to meet Jim Camp with Camp Negotiation Systems. You can go get his free bestseller, Start With No, at startwithno.com. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Thanks for listening to DishyMix today and I hope to connect with you next week. Have a great day. Bye-bye.