Book Nook: Never Split the Difference: Part 2

Excited by the super positive response received from you, my dear readers to the previous edition of Marketing Love letters, let's continue with some more good tips and my favorites from Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference.

Today's excerpt is exceptionally suited for B2B marketing where you have to interact with specific teams and people across the table. It would work equally well in other work relationships, be it with your ad agency or media agency or brand clients, etc.

• Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”).

• The trick to spotting feelings is to pay close attention to changes people undergo when they respond to external events. Most often, those events are your words.

• labels almost always begin with roughly the same words: It seems like … It sounds like … It looks like …

• Notice we said “It sounds like …” and not “I’m hearing that …” That’s because the word “I” gets people’s guard up. When you say “I,” it says you’re more interested in yourself than the other person, and it makes you take personal responsibility for the words that follow—and the offense they might cause.

• Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.

• When the day of the meeting arrived, Anna opened by acknowledging ABC’s biggest gripes. “We understand that we brought you on board with the shared goal of having you lead this work,” she said. “You may feel like we have treated you unfairly, and that we changed the deal significantly since then. We acknowledge that you believe you were promised this work.”

• “What else is there you feel is important to add to this?” By labeling the fears and asking for input, Anna was able to elicit an important fact about ABC’s fears, namely that ABC was expecting this to be a high-profit contract because it thought Anna’s firm was doing quite well from the deal.

• “It sounds like you think we are the big, bad prime contractor trying to push out the small business,” Anna said, heading off the accusation before it could be made. “No, no, we don’t think that,” Angela said, conditioned by the acknowledgment to look for common ground.

• they acknowledge ABC’s situation while simultaneously shifting the onus of offering a solution to the smaller company. “It sounds like you have a great handle on how the government contract should work,” Anna said, labeling Angela’s expertise.

• “Yes—but I know that’s not how it always goes,” Angela answered, proud to have her experience acknowledged. Anna then asked Angela how she would amend the contract so that everyone made some money, which pushed Angela to admit that she saw no way to do so without cutting ABC’s worker count.

• the beauty of going right after negativity is that it brings us to a safe zone of empathy.

That's it for today folks! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I am hoping these excerpts will tempt you to read the full book for yourself. Happy reading, dear friend!