I chose this book to brush up on sales skills and negotiation techniques. I believe I will need to get of lot of yes’s to launch my business. I’ll have to negotiate everything from salary and compensation to deals with partners. I’m also going to have to sell my idea to my team and to investors.
In a nutshell this book is about the difference between positional bargaining and principled negotiation. Most sales scenarios are more of the first type, where everyone knows what they want and there is typically a winner and a loser. Principled negotiation is more of an everybody wins approach. Instead of dividing the pie, we expand it. Bargaining over positions tends to lock the parties in, whereas treating the problem as something to be solved by both parties is much more efficient. Most of the book is examples of how this works between parties. I learned new insights into what it means to negotiate, rather than argue. It was a short book, and there is not much to say about it other than I think it is a refreshing perspective for someone that might feel stuck in a rut with in their sales career and want to try a new approach.