Jim Camp - Start With No
Summary
Introduction: Win-Win Will Kill Your Deal
- The book Start With No and Jim Camp's system should be viewed as a rejection of win-win and all its kind.
- The poison that resides at the heart of the big lie that is win-win is called compromise.
- The negotiators for many of the dominant multinationals are tigers.
- Win-win and compromise are a defeatist mind-set from the first handshake. Negotiating under the banner of win-win, you'll have no way of knowing if you've made good and necessary decisions leading up to the compromise.
- You are negotiating with a respected opponent (your adversary). Employ this word to counter the mushy idea that the folks on the other side want to be your friend, and may even pretend to be your friend.
- Refute emotion-based negotiating. Consider decision-based negotiating.
- You learn to negotiate through practice, study, making good and bad decisions, correcting the bad ones, more practice, more study, more decisions, more corrections.
- Jim Camp's system teaches you how to control what you can control in a negotiation. It is pretty simple to understand in its basics, but it does take strict discipline and a great deal of practice to employ successfully.
Chapter 1: Your Greatest Weakness in Negotiation - The dangers of Neediness
- Like all predators, we humans often take advantage of the fear-racked, the distressed, the vulnerable, the needy.
- You do not need the deal, because to be needy is to lose control and make bad decisions.
- Overcome any neediness at the negotiating table.
- Tough negotiators are experts at recognizing the neediness (to sell) in their adversaries, and expert in creating it as well.
- Trained negotiators see neediness of all sorts all the time, in big ways and in little ways.
- Talking can be an overt showing of need. This is why "No Talking" is one of Jim Camp's rules.
- A cold call is just another negotiation. And do yourself a favor: treat every warm call as though it's the coldest one you ever made.
- Fear of rejection is a sign of neediness - specifically, the need to be liked. The key point is that your adversaries in a negotiation cannot reject you, because there is nothing you need from them.
- The trained negotiator has no needs, because it just doesn't matter. There are other deals.
- Urgent closing betrays neediness on your own part.
- As good negotiators, the word "want" means something we work for, strive for, plan for, but it is never confused with "need".
Chapter 2: The Columbo Effect - The Secret of Being "Not Okay"
- The wise negotiator knows that only one person in a negotiation can feel okay, and that person is the adversary.
- By letting your adversary be a little more okay, you start to bring down barriers. By allowing him to feel control, you are actually in control.
- If you can emulate Columbo's unokayness even to a small degree, in your own way, you will exponentially increase your negotiating success.
- Listen calmly, take notes, make a concerted effort to be not okay, and then ask quietly, "What would you like us to do?"
Chapter 3: Start With No - How Decisions Move Negotiations Forward
- In a negotiation, decisions are 100 percent emotional.
- Our so-called rational mind kicks in only after we've made the decision, in order to justify it after the fact.
- The negotiation really does start with "no" - not with "maybe", definitely not with "yes".
- The mere invitation for the other side to say "no" changes the dynamic of a negotiation in a very beneficial way.
- "Maybe" is the kiss of death for a successful negotiation.
- "No" gets you past emotional issues and trivial issues to essential issues.
- A good script that begins with a clam invitation to say no will generate about three good appointments for every ten calls, which is an unbelievable percentage.
- A negotiation is an agreement between two or more parties, with all parties having the right to veto.
- There can be no saving of the adversary emotionally, intellectually, financially, or on any level.
- The adversary across the table does not want to be a friend. Much more important than friendliness are effectiveness and respect.
- Unnecessary fear of a bad decision is a major stumbling block to good decisions.
- Take responsibility for the bad decision, learn from it, embrace the failure, and soldier on without fear because you are only one decision away from getting back on track.
Chapter 4: Success Comes from This Foundation - Develop Your Mission and Purpose
- Effective negotiation is effective decision making, and the foundation of effective decision making is a valid mission and purpose to guide it.
- Mission and purpose is just as important for negotiations in our private lives as in our businesses and careers.
- If you're not working on behalf of your own mission and purpose, you're working on behalf of someone else's.
- Money and power goals are set in the world of the individual building the mission and purpose. You're scorekeeping, meaning you're thinking about results over which you have no real control. This is why these goals are 100 percent invalid and worthless for any person, business and negotiation. Money and power must be the result, not the essence, of a valid mission and purpose.
- A valid mission and purpose must be set in the adversary's world. Our world must be secondary.
- As a negotiatior, you don't go anywhere without your adversary, by definition.
- You want to create a vision in the other party that will move them to take action. You may want your adversary to see and decide, from the perspective of their own world, of course.
- The mission and purpose must always be written.
- An individual or a company may have more than one mission and purpose.
- Your mission and purpose can and perhaps should change.
Chapter 5: Stop Trying to Control the Outcome - Focus on Your Behavior and Actions Instead
- What can we control in a negotiation? We can control about ourselves are behavior and activity, an action or effort to an end. You might think about everything else, including all results, as acts of God.
- What you can control is behavior and activity, what you cannot control is the result of this behavior and activity. By following your behavioral goals, you get to your objectives (results). Think behavior, forget result.
- Have a step-by-step plan.
- The negotiation never ends.
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Draw the distinction between payside and nonpayside activities:
- Payside activity is everything directly related to the negotiation, from setting valid appointments and meetings to making the final presentation.
- Nonpayside activity is stuff you have to do that isn't directly on the track of the negotiation.
- Payside activity does have potential reward, but it also holds risk, and it's hard work.
- How do you, as a student of negotiation, turn newly learned activity and behavior into habit? The daily habit of analyzing performance and correcting it is critical to success. Keep a daily record and use it to identify strengths and weaknesses.
Chapter 6: What Do You Say? - Fuels of the Camp System: Questions
- The most important behavioral goal and habit you can develop, is your ability to ask questions.
- Starting with mission and purpose and going from there, you want to inhabit the adversary's world, because that is the world about which you need information, and that is the perspective from which the adversary makes decisions.
- The adversary's answers to our questions build the vision that he needs to make decisions.
- No vision, no real decision: this is a rule of human nature.
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Asking questions is a science and an art.
- The science is in how you intellectually construct a question.
- The art is found in how you ask it: your tone of voice, your creative choice of words, your behavior and remarks before asking your question.
- Verb-led questions are often a waste of time.
- Never frame a question that seems to the adversary to be taking away the right to say "no".
- Never frame a question that appears to your adversary as an attempt to trick.
- Good questions are led by an interrogative ("who", "what", "when", "where", "why", "how", and "which"), not by a verb.
- The interrogative-led question helps your help the adversary to turn on their own vision and to paint clear pictures, so that both sides have the same picture.
- We want the "features and benefits" to your adversary to be part of our mission and purpose. Such features and benefits can also be part of your questions.
- No interrogative-led questions, no vision, no decision.
- Keep your questions short (under nine or ten words) to avoid risk of complication.
- Ask one question at a time.
Chapter 7: How Do You Say It? - More Fuels of the Camp System
- Asking good questions is the highest octane fuel we have. Four other fuels that work in direct support of our questions are called nurturing, reversing, connecting, and 3+. The sixth fuel, the strip line, is unrelated to questions.
- Nurturing means to feed emotionally, to provide moral training, to foster the mind with good and understanding and appreciative thoughts. Nurturing will keep the negotiation going through thick and thin, and it should be part of your body language.
- The way you phrase questions and statements can be either nurturing or almost the opposite. Even more important than what you say for nurturing purposes is how you say it. Nurturing requires the delicate touch.
- Delivery is everything.
- Reversing is the behavioral tactic that answers a question with a question, the answer to which will do you some good.
- The reverse should be preceded by a short nurturing statement.
- In any negotiation, the reverse assures that you're dealing with an important question for you, thereby allowing you to gather more insight and information.
- If you have to give some kind of opinion, give a no-risk answer. Don't give your adversary your agreement on an opinion.
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Use an unasked question or a provocative remark as a basis for prying out more information by employing a connector:
- "And", when asked as a question, is an excellent connector.
- Profound, silent concern on your part can also serve as a connector.
- 3+ is nothing more than the ability to remain with a question until it is answered at least three times, or to repeat a statement at least three times.
- The whole point of 3+ is to give the adversary multiple opportunities to look at their decision - to verify it, to justify it, or to change it.
- Use the strip line to keep the emotions calm, neither positive nor negative. Avoid both the strongly negative and the strongly positive emotional swings by staying in the clam neutral range, which is where we find the deals that stick.
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By stripping line you take the pressure off the adversary:
- There is no better tool around than the hard negative strip line to neutralize a negative pendulum swing and get the situation into neutral range.
- The positive strip line is a way to bring the adversary back toward a more neutral position from a position that's too positive.
Chapter 8: Quiet Your Mind, Create a Blank Slate - No Expectations, No Assumptions, No Talking
- It is through blank slating that we learn what's really going on in the negotiation. It is the key behavioral goal that you will have to practice over and over and over.
- Build positive expectations with pie-in-the-sky numbers, then start in with the ifs, ands, and buts.
- For the negotiator, even a positive attitude is dangerous. It can devolve quickly into neediness, into positive expectations.
- Neither positive nor negative expectations have a place in Jim Camp's system. You blank slate and you negotiate.
- Assumptions are just as dangerous as positive and negative expectations, and just as common. Assumptions are perhaps even more dangerous than expectations, because they're so subtle and insidious.
- Our assumptions always work against us. Their assumptions can work for us.
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Research can rid us of many assumptions and help us blank slate.
- Know every competitor for your product or service.
- Know the financial condition of those competitors.
- Know their strengths and weaknesses.
- Their negotiating strategy and success.
- The decision-making hierarchy.
- Personal details about the key decision makers.
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Taking great notes is the best single, easy-to-use, foolproof tool we have at our disposal to blank slate.
- First just listen with the most open possible mind.
- Your emotions are more easily controlled as you take your notes.
- Notes are your documentation of what was said.
- If you take notes, you're listening, which is good, and you're not talking, which is equally good.
Make sure that not you, but the other party, is spilling his beans in the lobby (mistaken revelation of information).
- Often people blatantly tell you they are about to spill vital beans.
- If you feel you cannot blank slate for any reason, you have only one option: cancel the negotiation session.
- The greater the ability to envision, the greater the potential for success. If you can't see it, you'll never be able to do it.
Chapter 9: Know their "Pain," Paint Their "Pain" - Work with Your Adversary's Real Problem
- Your adversary needs a clear vision of his or her pain in order to take action.
- Pain is whatever the negotiator sees as the current or future problem. People make decisions in order to elleviate and take away this current or future problem - this pain.
- Your vision of your adversary's pain is a tool for keeping you oriented in a positive direction.
- In the political and moral realm, you could almost define leadership as the effective painting of the pain shared by leader and people.
- In any event, you must never enter a negotiation in which you haven't seen your adversary's pain.
- Make certain that there's no hidden pain that you haven't discovered and that is subverting the entire deal.
- Discover and paint for your adversary the clearest possible picture of their pain while always nurturing.
- The clearer your adversary's vision of his pain, the easier the decision-making process.
- Forget any idea you may have about creating pain for your adversary. What you help to create is their vision of their very real pain.
- Often there is no more effective way to paint the adversary's pain than by asking them to tell you "no". When your adversary carefully considers exactly what this "no" entails, their pain becomes very clear indeed, and good things can happen for you.
- Decisions are made not with our head but with our heart and guts.
- You cannot tell anyone anything. You can only help people see for themselves.
Chapter 10: The Real Budget and How to Build It - The Importance of Time, Energy, Money and Emotion
- Unsuccessful negotiators beat themselves with invalid behavior.
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Budget breaks down in three budgets that help us account for and control the real price in a negotiation:
- time-and-energy
- money
- emotional investment
- Make certain that your investment is working for you, not against you.
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A rough-and-ready formula for calculating the overall budget for a negotiation gives the following values:
- time = 1x
- energy = 2x
- money = 3x
- emotion = 4x
- Budget is the way you keep on top of the real price to be paid in the negotiation.
- We want to keep our own budgets as low as possible while reaping the benefit of the adversary's higher budgets.
- Know and set budgets in the first place.
- Professional negotiators must carefully consider the value of our time.
- Understand that time can be used against us in many ways, especially as a way to increase the real price of a negotiation and eventually bring about a possible compromise. For the crafty negotiator, increasing the adversary's time budget is the oldest game in the book. So never chase time.
- An appointment is only valid when you have a clear picture of the adversary's pain and a firm knowledge that the adversary has the budgets in time-and-energy, money, and emotion to pay - negotiate - to have this pain taken away.
- Remember that the adversary's budget needs to be going up right along with your own.
- Time intensifies pain: as the investment of time mounts higher and higher, so does the psychological pressure.
- Jim Camp's system can be described as nothing more or less than a way to behave in negotiations, but it can also be looked at as a way to save energy.
- Be aware of personal health and stamina.
- The value of anything goes up when money is involved.
- Just as with time-and-energy, you want money to work for you and against your adversary.
- The professional negotiator engages in an ongoing assessment of the money budget at all times. Know your own budget for money and know your adversary's budget as well.
- In the end, money is the toughest business decision.
- Extreme emotions are dangerous for negotiators, because they have an extremely high value in any negotiation.
- The excitement of winning and the pain of losing, of failing, are the two key emotions for both you and your adversary.
- Stay within your system, manage your activity, manage you behavior. At the same time, build needs, expectations, fears, and egos in the adversary.
- Control your budget. Build their budget.
Chapter 11: The Shell Game - Be Sure You Know the Real Decision Makers
- Who are the real decision makers within the adversary's bureaucracy?
- As a rule, the bigger the organization the more complex and confusing the decision-making process can be.
- Have the behaviors to negotiate with the real decision makers.
- Continually ask yourself who's missing? Who's not in my loop who should be?
- Insinuate yourself into the decision-making process.
- Beware of blockers. Once you have determined who the real decision makers are, it's often hard to get to them because of the blockers standing in the way.
- Great leaders surround themselves with great blockers who love the game.
- Always show the blocker respect, even as you are circumventing her carefully guarded territory.
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You can get around your basic blocker in several ways.
- A surefire way is simply to start at the top.
- Deal with a blocker from below.
- Get a useful introduction from your blocker.
Chapter 12: Have an Agenda and Work It - Ride the Chaos Inherent in Negotiation
- Jim Camp's system is designed to help you control the chaos in a negotiation.
- The most successful people deal with the most difficult problems directly. Your ability to identify the greatest problems and then to bring them into the negotiation head-on by way of an agenda will exponentially improve your record.
- Your agenda must provide a clear path through the negotiation thicket.
- Every negotiation requires an agenda.
- In Jim Camp's system there are no hidden agendas. The only agenda that is valid for purposes of negotiation is the one that has been negotiated with an adversary.
- Have a major agenda and several mini-agendas.
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A valid (mini-)agenda has five basic categories:
- Problems
- Our baggage
- Their baggage
- What we want
- What happens next
- A problem is anything you see as a problem - imagined, or real.
- Baggage is our collected life experiences and observations that we carry around all the time.
- Have a clue about what you want at every step of the decision-making process along the way. Figuring out what we want will make you "rich" in agenda.
- Consider each want in the negotiation in terms of the decision required of the adversary in order to fulfill it.
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Avoid numbers until the time is right, because they are limitations.
- As the buyer, you do not want to know the seller's price in the first meeting.
- As the seller, you do not want to know how much the customer says he wants to pay in the first meeting.
- Learn very quickly to take care of business by carefully negotiating what happens next.
Chapter 13: Present Your Case - If You Insist - Beware the Seductions of PowerPoint
- The greatest presentation you will ever give is the one your adversary never sees.
- If you've worked through your system and implanted vision and painted your adversary's pain effectively, you have made a winning presentation.
- You don't tell anyone anything. They have to see for themselves.
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If you make a formal presentation, at least do it well:
- Be certain that you are presenting to the real decision makers.
- Have an agenda negotiated in advance of the big day.
- Always present in the world of the adversary.
- Addition by substraction: make your team better by getting red of a certain player.
- Prep-end step is the reminder that your work in this negotiating session isn't over until you've either prepared the bridge to the next one by means of "what happens next" on the agenda, or until you have prepared a means of exiting the negotiation for good - ending it by fading away into the night.
Chapter 14: Life's Greatest Lesson - The Only Assurance of Long-Term Success
- In life, including negotiation, there is a direct correlation between our self-image and our performance. We consistently perform to the level of our self-image.
- Self-esteem is absolutely required if you are to succeed.
- You must "pay forward" because you can't really pay others back, not sufficiently.
- Achievement requires self-esteem, and to build self-esteem you only need to start paying forward, to pay forward more effectively, at every opportunity, with your family and friends, in the workplace, in your community, in your house of worship, everywhere.
- We do usually get what we pay for. So pay full price, when justified, because it empowers you to ask full price, when justified.
Conclusion: Dance with The Tiger! - Thirty-three Rules to Remember
- It takes about 800 hours to adjust to Jim Camp's system.
- First you crawl, then you walk, and then... you dance.
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Get comfortable with basic principles, basic goals, basic behaviors and activities.
Then begin your first test negotiation with a five-step process:
- Make certain you have a good, strong mission and purpose that's set in the world of your adversary.
- Make sure that you know the adversary's real pain.
- Assess all the budgets involved for both you and your adversary.
- Make certain you're dealing with the real decision makers.
- Don't make a phone call, don't write an e-mail, without writing down an agenda for that phone call or e-mail.
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The Thirty-three Rules
- Every negotiation is an agreement between two or more parties with all parties having the right to veto - the right to say "no."
- Your job is not to be liked. It is to be respected and effective.
- Results are not valid goals.
- Money has nothing to do with a valid mission and purpose.
- Never, ever, spill your beans in the lobby - or anywhere else.
- Never enter a negotiation - never make a phone call - without a valid agenda.
- The only valid goals are those you can control: behavior and activity.
- Mission and purpose must be set in the adversary's world; our world must be secundary.
- Spend maximum time on payside activity and minimum time on nonpayside activity.
- You do not need it. You only want it.
- No saving. You cannot save the adversary.
- Only one person in a negotiation can feel okay. That person is the adversary.
- All action - all decision - begins with vision. Without vision, there is no action.
- Always show respect to the blocker.
- All agreements must be clarified point by point and sealed three times (using 3+).
- The clearer the picture of the pain, the easier the decision making process.
- The value of the negotiation increases by multiples as time, energy, money, and emotion are spent.
- No talking.
- Let the adversary save face at all times.
- The greatest presentation you will ever give is the one your adversary will never see.
- A negotiation is only over when we want it to be over.
- "No" is good, "yes" is bad, "maybe" is worse.
- Absolutely no closing.
- Dance with the tiger.
- Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness (Emerson).
- Paint the pain.
- Mission and purpose drive everything.
- Decisions are 100 percent emotional.
- Interrogative-led questions drive vision.
- Nurture.
- No assumptions. No expectations. Only blank slate.
- Who are the decision makers? Do you know all of them?
- Pay forward.
Posted on 18th October 2010 by Quintus Hegie
