Perhaps the most lucrative few minutes of life is the salary negotiation at the job interview. Whether you have a negotiation strategy and use the right negotiation techniques will make or break your fortune. If a 22 year old entrant accepts a job offer of 25,000 euros without any salary negotiation, but another accepts it after visiting our Negotiation training up to 30,000 euros and both work until they are 65, then the one who has our Negotiation seminar attended earns a total of 360,000 euros more with a wage increase of 3 % per year. If he also invested it with 3 % interest, he finally has 568 000 euros more in his account. Not bad for a salary negotiation that may have only lasted a minute!
The golden bullet of salary negotiation
What gives you more bargaining power in a salary negotiation? A loaded gun or the offer of another employer or the concrete possibility of self-employment? Well: Your negotiating power depends on one thing above all: the BATNA. The concept of BATNA was defined in the 1980s by Roger Fisher and William Ury — who developed the Harvard Concept developed — and stands for Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement, i.e. for the best alternativethat you would have if you let the negotiation fall through, your ‘Plan B’. Knowing your BATNA means being aware of your best other negotiation option be aware. The better your negotiation alternative is, the less dependent you are on the negotiating partner and the higher is your bargaining power. Imagine you are currently in the final round of salary negotiations at the Boston Consulting Group. You are offered a starting salary of 100,000 euros, which is usually high in this industry. Your actual bargaining power is now dependent on your negotiation alternative. If you already have two offers on the table for similarly interesting jobs with salaries between 90,000 and 110,000 euros, then your BATNA is 110,000 euros. Just as there is only one best friend and no five very best ones, there is also only one BATNA, the best alternative. But what if you don’t have any offers from the two alternative jobs yet? Then you have no BATNA and your negotiating position is weak. Most negotiators untrained in negotiation set arbitrary limits and say to themselves something like, “There’s no way I’ll take less than 95,000 euros.” But only with a BATNA but have a meaningful lower limit in salary negotiation.
So what to do?
– 1st step: Always take the time, to find out your BATNA before conducting negotiations. The alternative negotiation options will not fall into your lap. So before negotiating your salary, do some research on other employers or self-employment options. And if you don’t have Negotiation alternative then you are also better prepared for the salary negotiation and know that you better not let it fall through.
– 2nd step: Increase your BATNA. Most of them first try to squeeze out as much as they can everywhere they go. “I’d really like to work at Boston Consulting Group. Let’s see what I can get out of it. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll look elsewhere. If that doesn’t work out either, I’ll move on to the next one and try my best.” Wrong! Before you go to your favored offer, whip up the alternatives. If you go into the negotiation with offers from Bain and McKinsey that are both over 100,000 euros, then you will also come in over 100,000 euros in the negotiation that is decisive for you. As Rudi Carrell once said: You can only have one Ace up the sleeve pull if you put it in before. But how do you calculate BATNA when it’s not just about price? From salary negotiations to billion-dollar takeover negotiations, it’s often a complex tangle of options. In the following article you will learn how to develop the optimal BATNA and how to enter each negotiation with a strong mind. NASHER Seminar. Sign up here on!
© Daniel Ernst
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