Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

gives them too much time to think and re-center themselves
to avoid revealing too much.
In addition, email doesn’t allow for tone-of-voice effects,
and it doesn’t let you read the nonverbal parts of your
counterpart’s response (remember 7-38-55).
Let’s return now to the tale of my client who was trying
to get Coca-Cola as a client, only to learn that his contact at
the company had been pushed aside.
I realized that the only way my client was going to get a
deal with Coca-Cola was by getting his contact to admit that
he was useless for the situation and pass my client on to the
correct executive. But there was no way this guy wanted to
do that, because he still imagined that he could be
important.
So I told my client to get his contact out of the Coca-
Cola complex. “You got to get him to dinner. You’re going
to say, ‘Would it be a bad idea for me to take you to your
favorite steak house and we just have a few laughs, and we
don’t talk business?’”
The idea was that no matter the reason—whether the
contact was embarrassed, or didn’t like my client, or just
didn’t want to discuss the situation—the only way the
process was going to move forward was through direct
human interaction.
So my client got this guy out for dinner and as promised
he didn’t bring up business. But there was no way not to
talk about it, and just because my client created personal,
face-to-face interaction, the contact admitted he was the