Negotiation Is Naming the Alternatives

Negotiation is naming the alternatives. If the deal fails, what do you do tomorrow morning? The honest answer is the floor of every conversation you will ever have.

I sat with this renewing CDN terms for the mystic-bytes cover stack. The vendor’s opening number assumed we could not move. We could — slowly, with a boring origin pull and a week of cache warming. Once I wrote that alternative down with dates and costs, the quote stopped being a threat and became a comparison. I did not have to bluff. I had to know what walking away actually looked like.¹

People who have not named their BATNA accept worse terms than they should, because silence feels like flexibility. People who have rehearsed the walkaway move talk calmly. The alternative does not have to be good. It has to be real enough to price.

Before the call, write the sentence: If this fails, we will ___. The conversation improves even when that sentence never leaves your notebook.

— JV · Dark Heart Labs.

Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes (Houghton Mifflin, 1981) — on BATNA as the source of negotiating power, not rhetoric or aggression. ↩