“Still, I wanted to bring this opportunity to you before I
took it to someone else,” I said.
Suddenly, their call wasn’t about being cut from $2,000
to $500 but how not to lose $500 to some other guy.
Every single one of them took the deal. No
counteroffers, no complaints. Now, if I hadn’t anchored
their emotions low, their perception of $500 would have
been totally different. If I’d just called and said, “I can give
you $500 per day. What do you think?” they’d have taken it
as an insult and slammed down the phone.
- LET THE OTHER GUY GO FIRST . . . MOST OF
THE TIME.
Now, it’s clear that the benefits of anchoring emotions are
great when it comes to bending your counterpart’s reality.
But going first is not necessarily the best thing when it
comes to negotiating price.
When the famous film director Billy Wilder went to hire
the famous detective novelist Raymond Chandler to write
the 1944 classic Double Indemnity, Chandler was new to
Hollywood. But he came ready to negotiate, and in his
meeting with Wilder and the movie’s producer, Chandler
made the first salary offer: he bluffly demanded $150 per
week and warned Wilder that it might take him three weeks
to finish the project.
Wilder and the producer could barely stop from
laughing, because they had been planning to pay Chandler
$750 per week and they knew that movie scripts took
months to write. Lucky for Chandler, Wilder and the