If you are a seller:

If you thought about this, you probably came up with some good reasons to ask for more than you bargained for. The obvious answer is that it gives you some room for negotiation. If you are selling, it can always go down, but it can never go up in price. If you are buying, you can always go up, but never go down. What you should ask for is your MPP, your maximum plausible position. This is the most you can ask for and that the other party sees some plausibility in your position.

The less you know about the other side, the higher your starting position should be, for two reasons:

1. You may be wrong in your assumptions. If you don’t know the other person or their needs well, you may be willing to pay more than you think. If you are selling, you may be willing to accept a lot less than you think.

2. If it is a new relationship, it will seem much more cooperative if you can make bigger concessions. The better you get to know the other person and their needs, the more you can change your position. On the contrary, if the other party does not know you, your initial demands can be more scandalous.

If you are asking for much more than your plausible maximum position, put in some flexibility. If your starting position seems outrageous to the other person and your attitude is “take it or leave it”, you may not even start the negotiations. The other person’s response may simply be, “Then we have nothing to talk about.” You can get away with an outrageous opening position if it involves some flexibility.

If you’re buying real estate directly from the seller, you might say, “I realize you’re asking $ 200,000 for the property, and based on all you know, it may seem like a fair price to you. So maybe you know something that I don’t know, but based on all the research I’ve done, it seems to me that we should be talking about something closer to $ 160,000. ” At that, the seller may be thinking, “That’s ridiculous. I will never sell it for that, but it seems to be sincere, so what do I have to lose if I spend some time negotiating with him, just to see how high? let him go? “

If you are a seller, you can say to the buyer: “We may be able to modify this position once we know your needs more precisely, but based on what we know so far about the quantities you would order, the quality of the packaging and without the need for With just-in-time inventory, our best price would be in the region of $ 2.25 per widget. ” At that, the other person is probably thinking, “That’s outrageous, but there seems to be some flexibility there, so I think I’ll spend some time negotiating with her and seeing how low I can get it to go.”

Unless you are already an experienced negotiator, this is the problem you will have with this. Your actual MPP is probably much higher than you think. We are all afraid of being ridiculed by the other. Therefore, we are all reluctant to adopt a position that makes the other person laugh at us or belittle us. Because of this intimidation, you will probably want to modify your MPP to the point where you are asking for less than the maximum amount that the other person would consider plausible.

Another reason for asking for more than you hope to get will be obvious to you if you are a positive thinker – you just might get it. You don’t know how the universe is aligned that day. Maybe your patron saint is leaning over a cloud looking at you and thinking, “Wow, look at that good person. He’s been working so hard for so long, let’s give him a break.” So you may get what you ask for and the only way to find out is by asking for it.

Also, asking for more than you expect to get increases the perceived value of what you are offering. If you are applying for a job and asking for more money than you expect to make, implant in the personal manager’s mind the thought that you are worth so much. If you sell a car and ask for more than you expect to get, the buyer believes the car is worth more.

Another advantage of asking for more than you expect to get is that it prevents the negotiation from getting stuck. Take a look at the Persian Gulf War. What were we asking Saddam Hussein to do? (Maybe ask isn’t exactly the right word.) President George Bush, in his State of the Union address, used a beautiful alliteration, probably written by Peggy Noonan, to describe our initial negotiating position. He said, “I’m not bragging, I’m not bragging, and I’m not bullying. There are three things this man has to do. He has to get out of Kuwait. He has to restore the legitimate government of Kuwait (don’t do what the Soviets did in Afghanistan and install a puppet government.) That was a very clear and precise initial negotiating position. The problem was, this was also our bottom line. It was also the least we were willing to settle for. No wonder the situation got stuck It had to come to a standstill because we didn’t give Saddam Hussein room to win.

If we had said, “Okay. We want you and all your cronies to go into exile. We want a neutral non-Arab government to be installed in Baghdad. We want the United Nations to oversee the removal of all military equipment. Also, we want it to be from Kuwait, the legitimate Kuwaiti government restored reparations for the damages you did. ” Then we could have gotten what we wanted and still give Saddam Hussein a victory.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Roger, Saddam Hussein wasn’t on my Christmas card list last year. He’s not the type of person I want to give a victory to.” I agree with that. However, it creates a problem in the negotiation. Create deadlocks.

From the Persian Gulf scenario, you could draw one of two conclusions. The first (and this is what Ross Perot might say) is that our State Department negotiators are complete, blinding idiots. What is the second possibility? Right. That this was a situation where we wanted to create a stalemate, because it served our purpose. We had absolutely no intention of settling just for the three things George Bush demanded in his State of the Union address. General Schwarzkopf in his biography It Doesn’t Take a Hero said: “The moment we got there, we understood that anything less than a military victory was a defeat for America.” We could not allow Saddam Hussein to withdraw 600,000 soldiers across the border, leaving us wondering when he would choose to do so again. We had to have a reason to go in and take care of him militarily.

So that was a situation where it served our purpose to create a stalemate. What worries me is that when you are involved in a negotiation, you are inadvertently creating deadlocks, because you do not have the courage to ask for more than you hope to get.

One final reason, and it’s the reason power negotiators say you should ask for more than you expect to get, is that it is the only way you can create a climate where the other person feels they won. If you go with your best offer up front, there is no way you can negotiate with the other party and leave them feeling like they won.

Power negotiators know the value of asking for more than you expect to get. It is the only way to create a climate in which the other party feels that they have won.

Let’s recap the five reasons to ask for more than you hope to get:

1. I may get it.

2. It gives you room to negotiate.

3. Increase the perceived value of what you are offering.

4. Prevent the negotiation from stalling.

5. Create a climate in which the other party feels they won.

In highly publicized negotiations, such as when soccer players or airline pilots go on strike, the initial demands from both parties are utterly outlandish. I remember being involved in a union negotiation where the initial lawsuits were incredibly scandalous. The union’s demand was to triple the salaries of employees. The opening of the company was to turn it into an open store, in other words, a voluntary union that would effectively destroy the union’s power there. Power negotiators know that the initial demands in these types of negotiations are always extreme, yet they don’t let that bother them.

Power negotiators know that as the negotiations progress, they will work their way to the middle, where they will find a solution that both parties can accept. Then both of you can call a press conference and announce that they won in the negotiations.

A lawyer friend of mine, John Broadfoot of Amarillo, Texas, tested this theory for me. He was representing a real estate buyer, and although he had a good deal, he thought, “I’ll see how Roger’s rule of ‘Ask for more than you expect to get’ works.” So, he dreamed of 23 paragraphs of requests to make to the seller. Some of them were absolutely ridiculous. He was sure that at least half of them would be discarded immediately. To his amazement, he found that the seller of the property vigorously objected to only one of the sentences in one of the paragraphs.

Even then John, as he had been taught, did not give up immediately. He held out for a couple of days before he finally grudgingly conceded. Although he had only yielded one sentence in 23 request paragraphs, the seller still felt he had won in the bargain. So always leave some room for the other person to win. Power negotiators always ask for more than they hope to get.