An example of starting with no

- So this is the principle of giving the person to opportunity to say no or inviting a no is coupled with something that I call tactical vulnerability, the willingness for us to be hurt by the other person to just kind of put myself out there. So there was this deal where my client's customer was not happy with them. They were delivering parts that were not meeting quality standards, they were failing in the field, and it was going to cost them tens of thousands of dollars for these parts to be returned and that was just the beginning of it. With all the parts that were in the field, it could cost millions of hundreds of millions to kind of retool and bring it back and ship it back and remake and deliver again. So when I got the email, it was, "we saw your mission and purpose about delivering quality parts, this is laughable." I'm like, oh, this is not good. Usually when I get the emails that I'm copied on, it's never good. I'm like, okay, all right. So let me do some research. Come to find out this part by my client's customer they attempted to have that made offshore, they couldn't make it. They came to my client years ago to have this made, but along the way, different people have started managing it and they'd had no idea that my client was doing them a favor by making these parts. So that one little nugget I had a whole conference table, maybe about 15 20 foot long, laid out with all the communication I'm just reading through them and just kind of found out one little nugget. So we use that one little nugget and we talked to them and I called them and I just say, look, it looks like we've completely failed you and were completely incompetent in making these parts good for you and out of a hundred parts, we're getting about 40% that are unusable and they're failing in the field. I noticed that I know that our promise is about like half of a percent to 1% defect rate, but to 40% is unacceptable. No wonder you're yelling at us and I'm surprised that you are not cursing on me right now. And he's like, ah, no, I'll never curse at you, Alan. I'm like, oh, if I were in your spot I would. This goes into deescalation. But so finally I said, well, we have tried to make these parts and it's very difficult. I don't know that there's anyone else in the country or in this world that can make this really well. But maybe we don't know, why don't you just tell me where you want us to ship this patterns and his tooling and we'll go ahead and do that as soon as possible for you? The customer immediately said, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that is the last thing we want to hear from you. See at first they were just kind of threatening that they're doing not happy with us, our mission purpose was laughable, they don't want to give any more business to us to when we were able to help them see that, "ah, yeah, we shouldn't have taken this project, is very difficult, I don't know how anyone could have done it well, 40% is unacceptable to us, so you just tell us where to ship this to and we'll do it." And it's like, we were basically calling the bluff and becoming very vulnerable. So at that point, the whole game turned around and they said, can you please continue to make this for us, we're going to put in a system that will test these parts before we mount them and that will be on us and we'll take care of that, blah, blah, blah, but at end of the day, my client didn't have to compromise. But prior to that, the cost of tearing down and shipping things back and remaking it, the first batch was just going to be like 30,000. And the first reaction from the account manager of my client was like, "ah, how about we compromise and just come to an agreement admit in the middle and see how much they're willing to take instead of 30,000 let's say 15,000 or they owe us money for shipping these other parts, how about we just say, forget about that invoice?" But the problem Kwame is, when we do that we are going to accept every single failure that happens in the field that will cost millions in the future. So there was no way we could do that. So it took a little bit of time to look through all the notes. So one of the steps in a good negotiation strategy is just doing research. So I had to go and print out all the communications for the last couple of years, laying on the table, go through all the emails back and forth, just to find out that when we agreed to take on this project they could not get it made anywhere else. So essentially I was inviting them to tell me, no. - This is a really interesting approach. And again, like I said, it's scary, but the term you used strategic vulnerability, it's very clear how that comes into play here. And so first step you did was research and then after that, it seems where the deviation is between where you decided to take the negotiation and where your client initially wanted it to go was that their first move was going to be compromise immediately before you're doing anything else they were going to compromise and it's a great example of an unnecessary compromise because you didn't need to do that. And what you did first, instead of trying to find that yes, was you started with no, just like you said, you gave them the opportunity to say no. And it's almost like one of those judo type of situations, they're attacking you and they assume that you're going to meet their force with force or just concede and what you do instead is the exact opposite of what they anticipate, you invite them to say, no