Ignite Psychology: How to Win High-Stakes Negotiations and Close Better Deals with Alex Adamo | Ep292

Speaker A: What is the single most expensive word in any negotiation?

Speaker B: So it's yes because it's always said too early and to the detriment of no, whereas no is where a negotiation begins. And, uh, it's perfectly normal to say so if you say it in the right way. You do not arm relationships. In fact, you gain respect in commercial relationships when you're able to say no in a understandable manner. So it is something that people should own more. And they're afraid of the no because they're afraid of the consequences. That amygdala activates and they say yes too much and too fast.

Speaker A: Everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today we are delighted to have Alex Adamo on the mic. He negotiates for a living and not the kind you do over a used car. He's the chief negotiator behind the Commercializer, a London based firm that gets parachuted into Fortune 500 companies to handle multiple billion dollar deals. Thanks for coming on, Alex.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me, Brian. Very happy to be here.

Speaker A: Well, I'd love to start with your origin story. What's your background?

Speaker B: So it depends what sort of how long you would like the story to be, because sometimes it can be several minutes long. So I'm going to try and keep it, uh, at an executive summary length if I can, that tell me if I'm going too long.

Speaker A: Give us the three minute version.

Speaker B: Yeah, three minutes. Thank you for giving me the times because, you know, I, I do my workshops that sometimes they last for four days, 16 hours a day, so I could talk on and on without figuring out. And sometimes I, I scrape my introductions to be 15 minutes and they last an hour and a half. And my team hates me because then we are out of schedule and, and you know, we just need to run behind the right schedule and everything else. So please give me the pointers in terms of time. So in terms of the 3 minutes version, let me try and summarize everything. But I've always been passionate about human behavior. Since I was 12 years old, I was studying books about human behavior and body language and I was using that with my friends at school or, you know, to try to impress girls, you know, you know, trying to, trying to get a date, you know, with other girls. And ever since I was hooked in terms of the power of understanding human behavior. So then for some reason, and I didn't know this because my family doesn't come from any commercial background and you know, my mom is a housewife and my dad works, uh, worked as a civil Servant. I just had this vision to be the guy that at some point in the future, uh, would be the person closing the biggest corporate deals and would also help cease war. So do like peace agreements or war negotiations, these kind of things. And I just then jumped fully into my passion and fast forward a few years and now I'm um, that guy. I'm just doing the corporate side and the private side in terms of negotiations. So I only do big deals. I'm still not on the war zone side. I did support diplomatic negotiations, but commercially as a business, we've always decided to work in private deals and large deals with large enterprises because that's how you build the business. But you know, maybe someday if I can use negotiations to help world peace, then I would really love that because I think the world needs it.

Speaker A: When did you first know you wanted to study human behavior in the way that you do?

Speaker B: And so again, when. When a friend of my dad who's a psychologist gave me a book on psychology. And I was just studying it and I went almost cover to cover in one night. And then I read the rest of the book the day after. And you know, I was learning about how the brain works and why people say the things they do. I was obsessed. And then. So I just knew that that's what I wanted.

Speaker A: Do you remember what book it was?

Speaker B: No, no, it was like a generic book on psychology. I do remember that immediately after that, which was, I think it from someone called Anna, uh, and uh, John Barbera, something like that in terms of names. And it's called the Manual on Body Language. Or I can put in the comments. Maybe we can put it when we find it. Let me see.

Speaker A: I'll put it in the show notes.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, let me Google it. It was called, I think, yes, the definitive book, Book of Body Language from Alan and Barbara Pease. And that was a very older version, like 20 years ago or so many, no more than that. And that's what they made, a wonderful introduction about body language. And now, you know, with all my specialism in evolutionary anthropology and microfacial expressions and neuroscience as well, it pretty much they say that body language, and it's just again, a small piece of human behavior. It helps, you know, just when you wake up in the middle of the night that you need to go get a glass of water in the kitchen, for example, and you can just see just about with your eyes to avoid the furniture in front of you or, you know, not to slam your face onto the wall or the door, for example. You can Just see a little bit. Well, this is the same when you can read human behavior and body language. You won't see everything clearly as you see, you know, during daylight, but you will see things as if you're in the middle of the night. And you can at least recognize what things are. And you can avoid stumbling upon yourself or upon things in front of you. And people that do not study human behavior or body language, they are a bit blind on these things. And they do not get the same advantage neither in personal life nor in business.

Speaker A: So tell me about the business that you actually do. So you run workshops, obviously, but you also get called in, uh, to big accounts, big Fortune 500 companies. They're like, hey, we're negotiating a huge deal and we want you working on it. Tell us about what you do.

Speaker B: We used to have two business units. Now we have three with AI. So the first one is what we call negotiation asset management, where we currently manage or advise on $6.5 billion of negotiations. Uh, then the second business unit is trainings, live trainings to executives where we share everything that we learn on the field or when we support those executives on the large negotiations between 50 million and $500 million in size. Then everything we learned there we share during our workshops, which can be Alpha day, two days, four days long. And they're highly experiential and they're a lot of fun for me, at least for people that, you know, puts them a lot, uh, out of their comfort zone. Obviously we get great reviews, but for me and the team, they're a lot of fun because, you know, you teach a lot to people. And uh, I've trained tens of thousands of people now in my career, but I also learned a lot from them. And it gives me massive, massive, like personal satisfaction in terms of seeing how you can benefit someone's life and um, obviously their own commercial results, which goes beyond the ebit that you can produce for your business or the businesses that you support when you advise on large deals. So the first part is negotiation asset management, then negotiation trainings. And the third one that we just introduced is AI powered tools. So with the advance of cloud capabilities and AI capabilities at the end of 2025, we finally, finally this company has started to become a little bit more scalable because we were able to partially clone myself by a system we call idamo, and then also to create negotiation capability systems which allow people to do regular role plays, understand their capabilities, they help the company understand how they behave during negotiations and with the same level and skill that Hybrid that we get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for to assess people life during negotiations. We get the AI to do so, uh, and to give people a score, which large enterprises are finding highly valuable. So in a sentence quite shortly, these are the three business units that we spearhead.

Speaker A: That's really fascinating. So you can actually use AI now and take all those learnings from all the workshops and negotiations that you've done professionally and, uh, kind of distill it into an AI model. An AI experience that scores and teaches people negotiation.

Speaker B: That's right. That's right. BO advises it. So we have the advisor Idamo, which you can speak with and you can ask questions about what would, uh, chief negotiator, based on Alex Adamo's experience, do during negotiations? How you should prepare for a negotiation, how, uh, you should deal with stress, how you can calm down when things are stressful. What should your next proposal be? How do you make a threat? How do you change the power balance? How do you use the dominance gauge? How do you create an understanded SOPA breakdown? How do you do conditional trading? You know, all these matters that negotiations experts of course know about. But with our twist in terms of our IP on how we do things, because it is a download of my brain, I'm interested on that also from a personal and transcendence perspective. You know, if I die tomorrow or in two weeks, my daughter at least can see something that resembles that. So, uh, I love that in terms of leaving a small legacy with the technology based on what the technology allows us to do instead, then we have the other system that allows companies to score their sales force of 50, 100 or 200, 300 people, so that then everyone gets an objective assessment of where they are. And then they get what we call the negotiation gym, where they can keep exercising themselves, which again, it's a lot more scalable for us, uh, a lot more accessible for the companies that we work with, because it's a lot less expensive than the premium negotiation workshops that we run in person instead. So we're very excited about it because first time I feel I'm not only a chief negotiator, I'm m also CEO of a business that, uh, it's growing, so it's exciting.

Speaker A: Yeah. Instead of just selling your time and doing one off negotiations or classes, workshops, trainings, you can actually build a platform that can be scalable and help a lot of people all at once. And that's the power of software and AI is now it's eating negotiation as well. It sounds like, uh, what's fascinating here, I think if you put yourself five or 10 years into the future, do you feel like AI will be the first stop in arbitration negotiation? And we'll be living in a world where AI is, you know, sitting there on our shoulders and it's super intelligent, but it's super intelligent. And the way that you're super intelligent on this, on this one area negotiation. Right. And so you can like make this AI sit on my shoulder and really guide me through a, uh, really tough negotiation. So it's, it's like I have Alex sitting there just on my shoulder, right over my shoulder, helping me.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's even less than 10 years from now. Uh, and it is something that we're developing in our laboratory in terms of, we've got tools that we call awareness where we want to, we want people to understand and life basis their behaviors and in terms of the emotions that they're displaying and reading the emotions of the counterparty, of course, based on what you can capture, based, if it's a video call or whether you're wearing glasses with, with, with video capabilities. But then you go into a lot of, at the moment, you go into a lot of legal implications of whether that's appropriate to do or whether that's allowable to do for large corporations. But that's where we're naturally going ourselves. Someone that guides your negotiation live. But if you ask me 10 years from now, I would see a lot of humans. There is two competing theories there, but I would see a lot of humans to be replaced because negotiation is like AI is not necessarily a lot smarter than me now, but it will be if you keep this improvement of, of maximal learning with the, with the speed that is happening and with the predictions that we see. You know, when you, when you, when you read the prediction and the development of AI, I think companies will be replacing negotiators and they will only keep the decision makers behind the scenes on whether they should accept or not accept the deal. A vision I have is potentially to have robo negotiators just negotiating with each other and then only if they don't achieve a deal, then perhaps it would escalate to humans. But I can see a lot of negotiations being replaced by artificial intelligence and robotics together.

Speaker A: I'd love for you to take a crack at trying to define what negotiation is. How would you define negotiation?

Speaker B: That's a great point. Let me think creatively, like instead of giving you the textbook definition so we can talk about something more interesting today. So I Think negotiation. Well, from a commercial perspective, let me go into the normal standard definition and then we can go more philosophical. From a commercial perspective is when you have two entities or two people or two parties that want to make a deal and then the two parties need to agree on the terms of that deal, on how you achieve a deal. So negotiation happens when both the, uh, for example the buyer and the seller are ready to make the transaction. This is when you're negotiating instead. A common misconception that you'll see, Brian, in the market is a lot of founders here listening. They will see this. If there is a lot of founders from companies and startups listening. If you don't have, if you're not a professional negotiator and very few people are, you will tend to confuse the word negotiation with the uh, word sale or buying. Right? So people think it's all one thing. The convincing, the arguments that you need to make, how do you make the counterparty interested in your product or service? This is selling, that is persuasion. And it's very different. There are very different roles for selling than there are for negotiators. So the first thing that one needs to understand is the difference between persuading, buying or selling and negotiating. Negotiating is when two parties need to make a deal and they need to figure out how that deal is going to work together. So that alone, if one learns to understand what the difference is, then you already added a lot of skill to all the founders viewing here.

Speaker A: And so yeah, this very much is um, a startup and VC podcast. So what do you think most VCs and startup founders get wrong about negotiation?

Speaker B: A lot of them, uh, they don't prepare enough obviously because, you know, if you're a founder, especially on the founder side and entrepreneur side, they prepare the deal, but they don't necessarily prepare the negotiation. They just try and go in. And secondly, which is a subset of that, a lot of people, whether they're founders or C level executives or large enterprises, they mistake experience, accrued experience in business with negotiation capability, which is also a very different thing that you don't want to focus, you don't want to give for granted that uh, because you have 15 years of commercial experience, then you're going to be a good negotiator, although people will think they are, which is a massive error. And it's, that alone leaves money on the table. And then the third point that I see founders and C level executives do, or national account managers of category managers or cheap procurement officers is, and this is the biggest one People do not focus necessarily, especially when the deal is incredibly important to them, as you can imagine, to be a raise, for example, or to be an acquisition. They don't focus on maximizing the deal, they focus on closing the deal. And the negotiator comes on board to maximize the deal, not to close the deal. Closing the deal is the worst case scenario for us as negotiators. It's my breakpoint. What I care about is maximizing the deal. Otherwise I'm useless for the company that is calling us on board. So if they focus on this.

Speaker A: And yet what does that mean to maximize a deal?

Speaker B: So let's say that uh, you work with a, uh, you're a SaaS founder and you're working with, you're selling your, your, your software. You're finally starting to work with a large enterprise, let's say Amazon on the other side, right? And you meet the procurement team and in fact, uh, you're already working with them. Let's say you're already, you've already been working with them for a couple of years. But this year costs have been piling up and have been increasing. So you know that Your breakpoint is 5% in terms of price increase and you focus on achieve. But you could you do some research and when you do some research you see that you can probably achieve 7, 8 or 9% in terms of price increase. A lot of them, a lot of the companies would focus on just achieving the bare minimum 5%. There is a lot of companies that have even ruined their P and ls. And I'm not talking about startups, I'm talking about very large enterprises that have ruined their P&Ls in order not to even push a price increase because they were afraid of it and they were afraid of the no that the counterparty would give them. So they've, they've ruined their margins because they didn't have the courage or the strength from a negotiation, uh, perspective, not power, uh, in terms of being prepared and wanting to maximize, to be able to do, to put forward a negotiation. So someone who is. There is two kind of personalities in negotiation. One is a satisfier and the other one is a maximizer. A satisfier wants to get whatever allows them to get by, whatever allows them to make sure that the status quo is acceptable. The maximizer will not relent until they get the very best they can. And your founders, they are generally maximizers, but they don't necessarily apply it in the negotiation because they feel the fear, they feel the pain. They see the risk. So sometimes they justify from a commercial perspective, oh, uh, you know, better. Three and a half, we'll lose one and a half, but we'll keep the client. But they say that from how the first meeting went. Instead, we, as professional negotiators, we know that these meetings can take five to 12 weeks or six months even to close this kind of deals. So it's perfectly fine for the customer to say no and for you to be waiting there and then doing your next move so that you can maximize your deal. Did that, did that, did that answer your question, Brian?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I guess one of the questions that came up as we talked about maximizing the deal is how do you balance kind of the short term deal, like getting that 9% or whatever it is, versus kind of the long term relationship where, you know, some, some negotiations are like a single turn. Right? A deal's done and we walk away and we never talk again. Right. Like selling a house is a lot like that versus like a multi turn, like I'm talking to Amazon and I have to keep talking to their procurement team over and over again for, for years and years. How do you kind of balance the long term with the short term?

Speaker B: Well, that is more of a matter of a. There is a couple of areas that, that is more of a matter of your commercial strategy. So when you decide nine versus five, are you becoming unsustainable for the client? Are you positioning yourself, you know, are you pricing yourself out of the market? So these are commercial decisions which must be done right and this is how you decide to run your business. But then you have the negotiator there that if you decide that the market can absorb 9%, then you must achieve 9%. Then where do you keep the long term? Or instead of five, which is, you know, what merely keeps you afloat, let's say. So the market could take nine. Then you tell your negotiators in the team and you tell yourself, we achieved nine. That is the minimum. This is how we work with this company. Then the second part of that is how you achieve the negotiation and how you pursue that process. If you pursue that process on a yearly basis. And we, uh, by the way, just to clarify, we only tend to work with these companies that work on a yearly basis together when they are forced to achieve an agreement. Imagine large beverage providers with massive retailers on billion dollar negotiations. They must keep working together the year after and the year after. So the point in terms of how you defend the relationship is how you behave at the negotiation TABLE Are you going to use threats, are you going to retaliate or are you going to try approach it in a more partnership led manner? Are you going to try and be a bit more transparent for example? So based on your behavior, then you decide whether you protect the relationship or not. But then there is the other scenario, Ryan, which is the one I actually work in, where people must protect the relationship and they still threaten each other daily, even at a personal perspective. They do, they do. They see each other every single year. They've been knowing each other for 15 years and every year they need to go to war. I mean sometimes, obviously the people in the teams change and, and you have new people and we inject new people on purpose sometimes. Sometimes we decide at the level of the corporate, the procurement side and the uh, sales side. We decide based on who we are supporting. We decided our side will try not to build a relationship with the counterparty because if you retain distance with the counterparty, it is easier to structure a win lose environment which might be more conducive of the result that we want to achieve. So they decide not to discuss personal matters, they decide to just talk very formally to each other. For example, they decide to wear a tie all the time. So we play with those things because sometimes the relationship, you know, as long as the company works commercially and they work well together, sometimes the relationship at the negotiators level, it's not the most important thing sadly so. Because I would have thought before starting this career that it would have been the opposite.

Speaker A: Really fascinating. So the whole canon and getting to yes is a batna, a win win. Where do you think kind of the textbook is wrong and uh, where it actually just costs people more money.

Speaker B: So I think that's a great question. It's a fantastic question. And so uh, win win is how you want business to be, how you want capitalism to be about. You want someone to find opportunities, low cost to me, high value to you. And you want them to find something that is low cost to them and high value to me. And we want to be open, we want to build trust with each other. We want to be transparent. You know, I'm going to use the same words as Yuri on the get into yes, you want to be tough on the issues but warm on the people and you want to build trust to get to that deal that's maximizing for both parties. I give you as much as I can give you the low cost stuff and you give me as much as you can give me of the high value stuff. For you, uh, high value stuff for me and low cost to you. So this is what business should be about. However, it's a misrepresentation of reality in many, many occasions because sometimes there isn't a win win deal to be made. There aren't variables that can magically be found that create value. Sometimes I'm on deals, Brian, where they're negotiating a billion dollar of goods and there's only one variable in it, which is price inflation. You know, how much inflation are they going to give, how much inflation are they going to get? That's it, there's nothing else. And then beyond that, if things go wrong, then there is retaliation where the retailer starts removing all the products of the supplier, for example. So now you can have all the elements of a win win relationship, which is long term relationship, reciprocal trust that they should be there between the parties, a high complexity in the deal. But if you only have one variable, you're going to go and negotiate into a win lose context where you have two people that are against each other, two companies that are against each other, but one wants to advocate a 9% price increase and the counterparty wants a minus 5% deflation. Now that Brian, I find that to be a lot, you know, very sophisticated game because for the founders it's a lot more about win win. You know, you want to find deals that work for your employees, and this is how I deal as a founder myself. You want to find deals that work for your employees, that work for your suppliers, that work for your client. You want to apply creativity, you want to maximize the deal and that should be good for everyone, even at the cost of sometimes leaving a little bit, a little bit of money on the table because that's money you're investing towards a more fruitful relationship in future. So this is how it is usually when you create partnerships, but when you're embedded in a large corporate negotiation and you only got that one variable that you need to play with, you're in an adversarial win lose context. Now what comes then into this particular negotiation, which is what we get paid to do? Because at the hardest negotiations, if you think about it, is how do you read the counterparty's breakpoint? So what is their actual minimum? When they say minus 5%, how do I read their behavior, that their actual minimum might be 5, a good 10 points difference on the billion dollar deal, which is 100 million difference. My job is to read that. What is the minimum? 5, maybe even 11, maybe even more than my opening position, maybe the F budget. Why? Because last year there was example, let's say like one of the raw materials that went up over the last few years. Cocoa and coffee. Right? If cocoa goes up 40%, 50%, 100%, 300% in terms of price, it went from $2,000. You know that buyers will be in a position where they need to spend the money. They'll tell you my deflation and they'll tell you 0% or 2%. You know that if they still want to work with you, they've created a budget for them to spend the money to accept your proposal or to work within your proposal. Some of them don't even prepare themselves. They anchor themselves to the first opening proposal that we put on the table. If you're the more negotiated, the more sophisticated counterparty. So uh, you go into a place where reading the counterparties, breakpoint matters, where doing things like power shift really matters, as in how are you perceived? Because there is a lot of market leaders that are perceived as uh, followers at the negotiation table. They do not bring the power of their brand. And I wrote an article as well about David and Goliath at the table. You know, when smaller uh, companies, startups, they work with larger enterprises, that is a matter of power shift to bring this to the audience as well. So how do you carry yourself when you're at the table? How are you carrying the executive authority, the gravitas that it requires when you go and deal with a chief procurement officer or with the head buyer or with the GM M of this large S&P 500 company that might mean the future for your business? Or are you carrying yourself with the creativity and excitement that you typically are as a founder? Both are important. You need to decide when you're the founder, you know, that makes the jokes, makes things happen, gets the team excited. And when you are Alex the negotiator, who is there to maximize a deal, and large corporates will recognize those behaviors. So it's very important that uh, again you look at the breakpoint of the counterparties. You use things as in how you're perceived in terms of power. And you do power shifts if necessary. So you must decide in your planning how do you want to be perceived. You want to be perceived as more dominant, as neutral, as submissive. And when we have large teams that we follow, we create a corporate message, just like you would do for public relations crisis management. We do it for our teams that we follow. So everyone must speak in a certain way, must write emails in a certain way, which if necessary give you more or less assertiveness. And I'm not saying you always need to be more dominant. Not at all. Some negotiations to strategies to be submissive because that's what we want. You know, sometimes that's what we decide, as long as you decide it. So power shift again in those negotiations, incredibly important. I'm writing a book on this by the way, on, on all the negotiation strategies called uh, the Negotiation Strategy Playbook. Then the other key things is how do you make threats? Threats are so important in these negotiations. Like you know, we see Donald Trump making them all the time. He makes them so often that people don't believe him very much anymore because he makes them and then calls them off. Right. So he's building our reputation for that. Uses a lot of textbook commercial negotiation moves in those things. So uh, you want to know how do you make threats and how do you receive threats? People must think, when I receive a threat, what do I do? They just say thank you, I'll let you know. Or do you count the threat immediately or do you tell them, uh, that they can't talk to you that way and they're unable. That a threat to your company will mean operational disruption for everybody, which will cost you the good part of $125 million if we do not follow through a process which is constructive and that works for both parties. So we prepare those things in advance. So how do you make threats? How do you receive those threats? And, and how do you carry the different steps of your negotiation? Also if it's a long term negotiation or if it's a negotiation that it happens in a few meetings, how do you structure your tactical flow in terms of uh, how do you embed, how do you know when you make your first proposal which already know is going to be rejected, when you're going to make your concessions, when are you going to make your threats? When are you going to actually retaliate instead in terms of removing budget, when are you going to, after you make the threat, Very important. How are you going to activate it at the table? So I'm making you a threat about I'm going to remove 25 million of budgets from this and that promotion. Yeah, it's a threat until it's a threat. But then sometimes the companies that we support, sometimes we decide to go and have a fight with one of the key clients because they need to be re educated. So these clients, this particular client, they get the uh, threat that actually gets executed because then they remember and then the following year they'll follow through. They'll Jump when we say jump, for example. So lots of things that must be, must be planned and prepared during these negotiations. And also, how do you leave, how do you give at the end of the negotiation, how do you start preconditioning and positioning the following negotiation when you'll start it again?

Speaker A: The fascinating things about learning about negotiation are the cognitive biases that humans have. What are some of your favorite biases to talk about?

Speaker B: It's actually an exercise we do in our trainings, in our workshops. So we give them the top 24 biases and we ask people, what have you seen them? You know, where, how did they happen in your, in your life and in your personal and professional life? For example, one of the biggest biases that is textbook negotiation and people don't even know about it is anchoring, which is typically in a negotiation. In fact, I'm gonna ask you, Brian, if you're in a negotiation, what you think is best? Is it best that, uh, you put your proposal on the T first, or you would ask the counterparty to put the proposal on the table first? Let's say you're in a price increase negotiation, you're representing a, uh, SaaS company, and you need to announce your price increase. What would you do? You would put yours, or you would ask the counterparty what do they think is best to do this year?

Speaker A: I think it probably depends on the power between the two parties, how big the price increase is. You know, if, if you can have a big anchoring bias, right, where it is a big price increase, let's say it's a 10% price increase.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You might want to anchor at 20 and then concede to 10 or something like that. But yeah, I mean, you're the master.

Speaker B: You tell us, just, you know, to get the audience thinking as well. So they're going to ask themselves the same question. Right. So the question is, regardless, what you said now is very open, right? So you open a 20 to then land at 10, for example. But the point is, do we want to anchor with our number or ask the counterparty to anchor themselves? So what we recommend is when you know the market and you know what the numbers are, it is worth that you put your number on the table first because that will anchor, uh, your counterparty to that number. Just this morning, actually, in a real estate negotiation for a large enterprise, where they acquire stores for their retail, uh, their retail shops. And they had to, they received a few weeks back or a few months back. No, I think it was just a few weeks back. They told me they received a significant message from one of the owners of one of the retail stores. Uh, that said, this year we're gonna have to significantly increase your rent. Right. So now the entire company was crumbling to find how do we increase the rent, where do we find the budgets and everything else? So that is the power of anchoring expectations. And that's what we do instead once we actually support the company, because the company called us because they didn't have a plan in place. And what I told them is, well, you should have anchored them before they anchored you and told them these are, your prices are going to decrease and we're going to have challenges. If you come to us with price increases, you're going to have a problem. So now the people that were going to increase their prices, they were going to come with instead of say 10% to just make a number, they might have come with five because they were, well, you know, they already told us that they're going to struggle with a price increase. Let's go with five, let's send with three. And interestingly, these large corporates, they're going to maybe then put their budgets on people that did not want them equally, you know, so they're going to, they're going to ask someone else 15 to make up for your shortfall with U of 5. So our job sometimes is also to contend those things. And one big heuristic bias is anchoring. So who starts speaking first? How do you anchor your numbers which then they become the leading of your narrative in those negotiations.

Speaker A: Another big one is lead with your number. Try to, try to anchor the other party basically, if you can.

Speaker B: Where if you can.

Speaker A: Are there any other biases that are your favorites?

Speaker B: Yes, there is another one which is the uh, context bias, which is, uh, how do you manipulate the context that you're in? And sometimes, unfortunately, wind loose negotiation is used in an uncomfortable manner. So it's about how people dress. It's about, you know, creating a distance, like someone looking more formal than the counterparty. Or sometimes they use aircon to make that room very cold, for example. Or they put the sun in people's eyes to make them uncomfortable during that negotiation. They use buildings as well and furniture so that then it can give a certain message to the person that is walking in about who's in charge. So all these things is context creation. People create a context so that then people respond to that and you see that, you know, for example, in financial services is, it is massive building, there's massive banks. It happened to me when I was Selling in Europe, I was selling to French banks and you go to this massive area called La Defense and you get into these banks that are like massive high floors, you know, like I had to actually get on the steps to get to the CEO's desk. So you feel like you're meeting a head of state really. And I was only a salesperson at the time, merely selling strategy consulting. So uh, the moment you actually walk in, into this, into these places, they're already anchoring your perception of the importance of that deal or your counterparty, which is something that you can use in your favor if you want to structure it. And you must decide, if you want to control your brain, you must decide how to make sure it does not anchor you.

Speaker A: Tell me about a negotiation you got badly wrong.

Speaker B: So you know, like they always ask me about, about these ones and there is one where I look back and I can't pinpoint one where it went like completely wrong. Because when I'm an advisor I tend to be quite clear with uh, the companies that we support. But I'm like, look, there is this thing, there is this 500 million deal. If you push, there is a, ah, 40% chance that we're going to make 5 more million. If you don't push, there is a 100% chance that we're not going to make them. If we go somewhere in between, there is a 30% chance that uh, we could make somewhere in between 1 and 3 million. Right. And also there is a stake that we're going to lose X, Y and Z. So for me, when I give this advice and I give people the options to choose for from, you know, CEO commercial directors, national account managers, then ultimately it's their commercial decision in terms of taking the risk because I can quite read the different percentages and options. So I can't tell myself I got it wrong because I never go with, I mean sometimes I do and I tend to get it right when I'm like, look, this is a 95% chance confidence, go for it, otherwise you're leaving money on the table. But there is one negotiation that I should have read my client better where we were supporting a large family owned business and it's about a 400 million company and I was directly supporting the CEO who is now a very good friend of mine, and we were recommending them to go to war with their most important client. In fact it was their founding client. And I've given them all the script on how to do so. I've given them the tactics, I've Given them the tactical flow, I've given them the four or five different strategies enough to make that happen. And that would have required a lot of very tense and frightful and uncomfortable meetings with the uh, counterparty CEO. So he had to behave that way. And he did. And he started doing so in the first few weeks of the negotiation. But then things got really tense as I was expecting and we were starting to get retaliation back and we were starting to actually risk the business, which was uh, totally normal within my plan. And then what I did, Brian, is all of a sudden, because he didn't have the confidence of the board to go as hard as I would have wanted them to, then he started making massive concessions in the midst of the tension that we had created. So now there's nothing worse than you creating fear and tension and commercial pressure. And then all of a sudden you capitulate because now you capitulate when you start getting some threats from the counterparty. Because now you're teaching the counterparty that every time they will raise their voice on, every time they'll threaten you, you'll do what I tell you to do, especially after you created all this mess. So unfortunately, uh, the CEO had to capitulate because the board didn't follow him on that. He was like, also he was like 60% in, 40% out. He didn't really want to do it. So then that actually didn't lead to a good result. So I should have read the board better. I should have read that the CEO did not have the full decision making power because we led them, um, onto a path that they did not have the risk appetite to get through. And that cost them money. They kept the client, but it cost them in reputation and it cost them in the money that they needed to concede. And I think we left money on the table. I think we had, if we proceed, if we pursued that strategy, we would have had the cards to actually make a significant re education of that client. But that didn't work. And I should have read it better at the beginning and not recommend such an approach.

Speaker A: Let's um, let's wrap up with some rapid fire questions which I've prepared and are negotiation related. So they'll be fun. You ready?

Speaker B: Yes, I'm ready.

Speaker A: What is the single most expensive word in any negotiation?

Speaker B: Let me think. Because I rarely think in absolutisms or, you know, always and always. There's always that. Let me think. I think yes. So it's yes because it's always said too early and to the detriment of no. Whereas no is where a negotiation begins. And um, it's perfectly normal to say so if you say it in the right way. You do not arm relationships. In fact, you gain respect in commercial relationships when you're able to say no in a understandable manner. Uh, so it is something that people should own more. And they're afraid of the no because they're afraid of the consequences that amygdalactivates and they say yes too much and too fast and too fast. You know, so they should use it a lot less.

Speaker A: What's a tell physical or verbal? That means the other side is about to fold.

Speaker B: Massive one is, uh, you know, when you see people nodding a little bit like, can you see this light nod in my, my head as I'm nodding slightly, almost imperceptibly.

Speaker A: That's, that's a light nod.

Speaker B: So you're mentioning a figure, you're mentioning a concession. Let's say you wear on 9%. And you mentioned seven, right? And then you see out of the three, four negotiators on the other side, someone starts nodding slightly. So on these negotiations, I stop. I told my team, I said we stopped. We do not make any more concessions. And we had, we had enough, 20 million to concede. We were like, no, we don't move now. We go hard and we wait. Because I know that some of these people, they consider this deal acceptable with a 70% confidence. You know, like, but when you see it in one person, then, then you hear the nod vocally on the phone like m. You know that people are starting to consider that deal. Could you hear mhm like that, you know they're listening to you when you instead making unacceptable proposals, people reject it immediately or they stay in silence. Or you can see they get angry on their micro facial expressions instead. When people start finding it acceptable, you know you're into your zone, or at least you can bet you're on your zone of potential agreement. So that gives you a lot of behavioral evidence for me to tell my team to stop making concessions and save a lot of money.

Speaker A: What is the most overrated tactic taught in every negotiation seminar?

Speaker B: Win win. Win, win. Win win. Negotiation.

Speaker A: Win win. Okay, gotcha.

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, we've talked about it. I was saying it's win win because people come out of a lot of negotiation workshops thinking they can do win win all the time. It's important to know, it's important to own it. But it's also important to understand when it's not a win win. There's no Win, win. And you just don't do win, win, you just go and lose.

Speaker A: So you read micro expressions for a living. So the last person who lied to your face in a deal, did you call it in the room or did you bank it?

Speaker B: No, you never call it. You don't want people to know, you know, you know, it's like if you're playing poker, right, and I understand you got nothing. I'm not going to tell you I know you got nothing un rattle the counterparty, but that's poker, right? I want people to experience the freedom of being right without knowing they're being read. That is a lot more sophisticated. If you call it like some negotiators, Brian, they're in and they're like, I know you're wrong. I know you don't have the cards to do the deal. I know you're more powerful than. You never do that in a negotiation. Never. Because what you're going to do in that case is you're going to put an animal, a wounded animal against the corner. And in evolutionary biology, whenever you put. There's nothing more deadly and threatening than a wounded animal in a corner. You're going to make people lose face when you do that. And they're going to give you everything they got in order for them to protect themselves or their reputation or for them not to lose face. So you always get to give people a golden bridge. It's called the negotiation. For them to go back on their steps. Instead, if you blame people, you know, if you, if you finger point people and you're like, I know you're lying. I know, I know, I know you don't have the cards. People will, you know, I've seen people even deciding to self destruct their company rather than conceding. Because now you're hurting the reputation and you don't want to hurt, you don't want to insult people. You want them to even feel at the end of a negotiation that they won. But the best thing you do, once you get information, you keep it in your head, you write it down and you use that to inform your next negotiation steps on, um, that fill in the blanks.

Speaker A: Founders chronically over negotiate blank and undernegotiate

Speaker B: blank salaries and support flyers negotiations.

Speaker A: Highest leverage sentence to say when you have zero leverage.

Speaker B: It's very specific. So I wouldn't, I can't recommend a specific sentence that you do that or that you use. It's not as simple. But one approach that you can do is to use sentences that make you look bigger than you are. So it's, it's called the, uh, what's, what's that fish called? The bullfish strategy. You know, when you like puffer fish,

Speaker A: you puff yourself up.

Speaker B: Yeah, you puff yourself up. It's called the puff. So you create, it's actually, it's actually a thing. So you create a narrative around if that's a power shift around trying to look bigger. But it's never a sentence, you know, it's a narrative across different people in your team, across news releases and public relations, communication. So you got to use the media, everything else. So it makes you look bigger than you actually are and that gives you a shred of leverage. Another thing that you can do at the opposite is to admit you've got no leverage whatsoever. So, you know, to just look like, you know, you got nothing and hope on the counterparties than mercy or willingness to do a deal with you. It's not a great strategy to go with, but sometimes that's, that's what wins when you actually, if you actually technically have zero leverage. It is used by, you know, biology that you just look dead on the, on the floor and then hopefully people won't kill you. Then they will let you live hoping that you will reciprocate in future for their kindness.

Speaker A: Is there a country or a culture, uh, that out negotiates everyone else?

Speaker B: When I supported Middle east negotiators. They're quite good, they're quite naturally good at uh, negotiations. They've got it embedded in them, uh, the concessions proposals. They want that even it's not culturally frowned upon as it might be in the US or in Europe where you negotiate. That is a, ah, cultural trait that you're expected to do. So I've seen them. They're at a level where it's less hard to impart in them the software of negotiation in their brain than it is with culture that consider that it's wrong to make proposals and concessions and say no and so on and so forth. Because now you're dealing in the west and uh, in the US and Europe with preconceived notions that I'm not supposed to make concessions or say no to people.

Speaker A: Yeah, that is a kind of a Western European, American kind of thing where there's a sense of like, justice maybe, where uh, you just give me your highest and best offer and I'll give you my, my highest and best offer, you know, and we'll just meet in the middle and like, call it, call it a day. It's not in our culture to sort of haggle back and forth. It's almost like rude in a way.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah it is. And you know, I can see how that is the case Brian. For again, you must understand the context you're in. Are you in a binary supplier client negotiation where things must be negotiated or are you, you know, at a uh, founder event where you're, you know, you need to show your status. Sometimes negotiating too much in certain situations can actually lower your status. But to those listening, don't use this as an excuse not to negotiate. You know, people must negotiate for their most important deals. And if you can negotiate well in terms of uggling and in uh, a win lose context, then you can have the respect that it's required. When you must make complex deals, you've got to be in a position where you're able to flawlessly and elegantly and respectfully say no to people. And people that say no for a living, like negotiators, they are able to say someone without offending them. We can't do this. What we can do is this without conflict. Instead, those that cannot do it because they're bound to the social society, standard society norms and rules, they will feel stressed when they do it. They will activate their amygdala, uh, that stress, that nervous system activation of sympathetic reaction will then give, you know, will be contagious to the counterparty, the counterparty will have their amygdala activated and it'll be a train crash and it'll be painful and weird. Watch. So that's why as an experienced negotiator that allows you to do the very best, most sophisticated win win deal. Because you own the know, uh, you own the structure of the deal and you can do it with your very best intention. When, when you're able to say that

Speaker A: put a real number on the most value you've personally created in a single

Speaker B: negotiation, probably about 20, 20, $22 million.

Speaker A: And that's the power of negotiation is creating. You can create tens of millions of dollars of value in one go.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it took six months to make it happen. And it was a billion dollar deal. So it was a small percentage on a large deal. But you know what, like that's what I tell the CEOs and um, the companies that we work with because we take a percentage on those savings as well. Depending on the deal that we have. Is that a fixed fee or uh, a mix of fixed plus performance on the savings that we make or the ebit that we generate. And I tell CEOs when I said look, when I walk into your building, when I walk into your company, I don't want you to see an expensive boutique consultancy. I want you to see millions of EBIT generated for you. I want you to look at Alex and say, this guy is a person that walks in and is worth 5 million of EBIT for my business. And yes, you must give us a percentage of that and we're going to take it, otherwise we're not going to do the work. But you get to see the ebit. And it's very lucky, Brian, um, to work in my line of business. If you enjoy this line of business and if you're good at it and if you're competitive, confident, because like you said, uh, it's easy to demonstrate the value you give when you work in marketing. I mean marketing, you can do the value, you know, you create, you know, lead gen or so when you work in sales as well. But there is a lot of other profession like leadership or, you know, soft skills or many other things that it's a lot harder to show your roi. It's a lot harder.

Speaker A: I enjoyed the conversation. Alex, we've been wanting to do the podcast for a while, so I appreciate you taking the time on a, uh, on an evening and uh, in Europe, where can folks find you online?

Speaker B: So they can find us@thecommercializer.com with an S for the American friends and um, alexadamo.com if you want to talk directly to me and you can you just put the box there and then the team or I will reach out. We got Instagram handle as well. Alexadamo underscore and you can find my book as well if they're interested, which we just wrote on. I personally, we didn't talk about this Brian, but as you know, I in the past personally developed panic attacks and anxiety due to not being a negotiator but being an entrepreneur with a company that was growing and growing, I didn't have the tools to deal with growing demands and growing stress. So I developed anxiety, panic attacks. And I went into this journey about discovering what is the nervous system, how does our brain work under stress and under pressure. And I've put together the pillars of the negotiator's mindset to help people that, ah, you know, they have less resources than me than traveling around the world, going on to all the big gurus and understand, you know, what's meditation, what's exercise, the importance of sleep, the importance of cold therapy. I met Wim Hof and I went to all these other ones there. So it's an interesting book that can allow you to maximize performance under pressure. Uh, and we now made it the pillar as well of our. Of our approach, because we believe that, you know, you can know all the methodology in the world and the execution, and you can be really good at these things. But if your hands are shaking at the table and you cannot stay calm, then you can't maximize the deal. You must be able to actually deactivate your amygdala, activate your prefrontal cortex at will. And this is what excites me nowadays. You know, the biology of, uh, the brain and then connecting it to tech things to then make it very scalable. And I forgot to say the name of the box. The negotiator's mindset from myself, Alex. Adam. But Brian, thank you so much for having me today. It was an absolute pleasure to talk to each other. It's so good.

Speaker A: Likewise. Thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thank you. Bye. Bye.