Negotiation

The “Attractionist” lure for weak negotiators

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My sophomore year in college, I had a girlfriend who loved me so well she ran off to live in Japan.

I bought a plane ticket to visit her during Christmas vacation. But I was careless with my travel arrangements. I booked my flight for the day before the final exam of one of my computer science classes.

The ticket was nonrefundable. And expensive.

My only option was to go talk to the professor. Maybe I could convince him to let me take the exam early.

As I said, this was a computer science class.

The professor teaching it was a beady-eyed automaton who thought in C code and expressed himself with the preciseness of a computer printout. At one point, there was an entire website, created by current and former students, dedicated to the man’s inhuman, Terminator-like nature.

I mustered all my courage and showed up to his office one day.

He was in there, wearing the same short-sleeve button-up shirt he always wore. It had seen so many washes that it had become faded and paper-thin. His nipples regularly poked through during lectures in the cold engineering building.

“Professor Terminator?” I said from the door to his office.

He swiveled around in his chair and focused on me with his cold and fishy gaze.

I explained my nonrefundable ticket predicament. Would there be any chance to take the exam early? Or late? Or anything?

Without saying a word, he swiveled back towards his computer and started typing and clicking. He pulled up the course syllabus.

“The syllabus clearly states the final is scheduled for December 6!” He faced me again. Through his expressionless mask, I sensed he was furious that I would approach him with such a disturbing and illogical request.

I explained that in that case, I would have to miss the final and probably fail the class. He threw up his arms — how was this his problem?

So I tucked my tail between my legs, thanked him for his time, and left. My heart was beating at around 200 BPM. I felt defeated and ashamed.

Throughout my life, I’ve had a few wins like this. They made me think this is how negotiations and sales always go. And I wanted no part of it.

I bet there are a bunch of people out there just like me. Because if you look around, you will see a growing number of copywriting and marketing gurus catering exactly to weak and feckless negotiators.

I call these gurus “Attractionists”. They promise that you can create your freelance copywriting business without ever needing to sell. All you need to do is “attract leads by giving value,” “be human,” “know your worth.”

I’m sure people can get to the point where they are so in demand that they never have to negotiate. But my feeling is, you’re unlikely to jump from zero to total success, and completely bypass the phase where you need to do some selling. As Mark Ford wrote in Ready Fire Aim:

“To be a truly effective entrepreneur, you must become your business’s first and foremost expert at selling. There is only one way to do this: Invest most of your time, attention, and energy in the selling process. The ratio of time, creativity, and money spent on selling as opposed to other aspects of business should be something like 80/20, with 80 percent going towards selling and only 20 percent toward everything else.”

Now here are some good news:

As you go through life, you don’t have to be in hopeless negotiation situations like I was above, where your only hope is for the other side to take pity on you.

You don’t have to be powerless.

And you don’t have to be afraid of facing disagreement or having a conflict of interests with the other side.

Negotiation, persuasion, and yes, sales, can all be learned. I’ve done it. And I’m an anti-natural.

If you too are naturally reluctant to negotiate or sell, then I recommend Jim Camp’s book Start with No. For one thing, it’s an effective system, particularly if you are looking for long-term success rather than quick “wins”. For another, being accommodating and non-confrontational by nature can actually be an asset to you if you use this system.

One final point. Once you learn the basics of how to negotiate, you can choose to make it less of a daily concern in your specific business. But in my opinion, it makes sense to do that from a position of power, and not out of fear.

Anyways, if you want to check out Jim Camp’s book, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/start-with-no

Outrage with stupidity to milk info out of cagey or indifferent adversaries

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[Dear reader, in Hungary or elsewhere: In spite of saying I would quit it, I’m back posting my daily newsletters to this blog. I have two reasons. One, I never got going creating bigger articles out of these newsletters the way I planned. Two, I don’t want to kowtow to Google — they prefer fewer, longer articles — and I would rather write specifically for people like you. Thanks for reading. And now onto this inflammatory post:]

Two days ago, the president of the UFC, Dana White, got trolled into revealing a highly guarded secret. A bit of background:

The UFC hosts mixed martial arts fights, and on April 18 they were supposed to host the biggest and most anticipated fight in their history, between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson. These two fighters are both on 12-fight win streaks in the UFC, and they were scheduled to fight four times already. Each time, the fight was cancelled at the last minute for some reason.

This time around, as sports organizations around the world cancelled events because of corona, my man Dana White refused to give in. “We’re going ahead with the fight!”

The only problem was they couldn’t figure out where to host it. It was originally supposed to be in Brooklyn, but that was now out. In fact, any other location in the US also became untenable.

“The fight is still on, guys!” White would repeat whenever asked, though he wouldn’t give any more details. So over the past month, speculation kept increasing. Fans were alternating between getting resigned to the inevitable fifth cancellation… and hyped when some new possible location for the fight surfaced. Meanwhile, even Tony and Khabib, the fighters who were supposed to be fighting on the 18th, didn’t know for sure if the fight was still on.

So that’s the background. The update from two days ago is that somebody created a fake Twitter account, mimicking a well-known MMA journalist, and tweeted:

“#BREAKING: Dana White and Vladimir Putin have reached an agreement on travel arrangements for UFC Lightweight Champion Khabib Nurmagomedov to come to the United States. He will fight Tony Ferguson. It’s happening folks. #UFC249 will go on as scheduled April 18.”

To which Dana White, big goof that he is, immediately blasted out a Tweet saying that it ain’t so, that Khabib is not fighting on April 18, and then to prove it, he finally revealed the whole card that’s scheduled for this corona-infested bout.

Which brings us to the present day, and something called Cunningham’s law:

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

The sad fact is that in business, in love, and on online forums, there are many times when people are unwilling to answer your questions. Maybe the person you’re talking to is indifferent, or cagey, or hurt, or they just don’t like the implied power dynamics that come with you asking and them answering.

So if you ever find yourself in this situation, swallow your pride, and publicly make a dumb, completely wrong assumption about the right answer. If Cunningham is right, and I suspect he’s at least a little bit right, then an outraged somebody will jump in and say, “No! You’re so wrong! Let me tell you how it really is…”

But I think this Cunningham and his law go even farther. If you just swap out “right answer” and you swap in “response,” you get a good recipe for how to get yourself publicity and an audience online.

Of course, unless you want to be just a troll, you’ll have to figure out a reasonable argument to justify a seemingly “wrong” opinion that you use to attract attention. But it can be done, and guys like Matt Stone and Ben Settle prove it. Outrage and reason are a powerful combination. Aloe vera on its own is pretty bland and slimy, but it sure feels good once you burn your hand on the stove.

Simple price negotiation with long-term clients

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Yesterday I talked to a previous client about a possible new job. He offered me to handle emails for one of his businesses on a straight-up commission basis.

At this point, a lot of copywriters would start running and screaming “Red flag!” But I got no muss with getting paid all on commission, at least with this client. I’ve worked with him already… he’s legit… and his business is making money and growing.

At issue is how much commission I would get paid. The client wrote:

“What’s the minimum amount you’d want to be making for the volume of emails that I’m proposing?”

Hmmm. That’s not a question I have a good answer to. So I thought for a minute. And I responded using a strategy that I saw described on Mark Ford’s blog.

Mark says he saw his client/partner BB (I assume Bill Bonner, the billionaire founder of Agora) using this strategy throughout his career.

It’s a way of negotiating that’s very simple, but effective if your main goal is a long-term relationship and a fair outcome for everyone involved.

I think Mark’s post explains it very well, so I won’t rehash it here. It’s worth reading if you find yourself negotiating prices with clients, and you hope to do business with them again. Here’s the link if you’re interested:

https://www.markford.net/2019/10/23/11059/?doing_wp_cron=1576003704.1623599529266357421875

Marketing devil-inspired price negotiation tactics

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A girl I met this summer wrote me yesterday to ask for advice on pricing a copywriting project:

“Wassup busy bee? 🙂 i need professional advice. How much should i ask to write anarchist articles for commercial purposes (meaning to sell t-shirts) :))? Is 100 dollars per 500+ words too much or fair? How much would u ask for?”

Anarchist articles?

To sell t-shirts?

At $100 for 500 words?

That’s not the pond that I play in.

Because I made a deal with the marketing devil a long time ago.

Yes, I sold my soul to him. In exchange, I get a series of ever-higher-paying contracts, working on ever-more interesting projects.

So the particular rates I would charge at this moment are really no use to this girl, or to you in case you’re wondering what you should be charging for your work.

But I told her something that the marketing devil taught me. And you might find it useful as well.

It’s a super simple price negotiation tactic. It works 100% of the time to get you an outcome you can be happy with. And it goes like this:

1. Ask yourself, “How much would it take to honestly make this worthwhile for me?”
2. Make your potential client this offer.
3. If it works for them, great. If not, or if they try to haggle with you, tell them, “Thanks, but it’s not right for me.”

But maybe I hear you complaining, “This isn’t negotiation at all!”

And it’s certainly not the kind of nickel-and-diming, car-lot tactics you can read about in hundreds of Medium listicles. But like legendary copywriter and entrepreneur Mark Ford wrote recently:

“The difference depends on understanding that in business there are two fundamentally different kinds of negotiation: transactional and relational.”

In other words, if you use my simple devil-inspired price negotiation tactic, and you end up doing business with this client, you’re on good footing to form a long-term relationship that both sides are happy with.

And if you don’t end up doing business with them, for whatever reason (they can’t afford you, or they don’t value you enough, or they are simply lowballing jackasses), then you don’t really have a negotiation problem.

You have a lead generation problem. Which is another topic, for another day. For today, let me just say I solved my lead generation problem in the beginning by going where everybody says you shouldn’t go.

And that’s Upwork.

In case you want to see how I made very good money by dealing with quality clients that I actually landed on Upwork, then check out the following:

https://bejakovic.com/150-dollar-per-hour-freelancer

An important reminder for clingy copywriters

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A few days ago, I got carried away.

A potential new client contacted me. “Would you like to write daily emails for us?” he asked.

“Sure I would,” I said. “And I’d like to do more than that for you.”

Then I threw in a kitchen-sinkful of copywriting and marketing services I could provide along with the daily emails. The problem was that at this early stage, I didn’t really know what this client’s actual needs are. In other words, I was pitching instead of selling, as Ben Settle puts it.

Normally, I don’t get this needy or clingy.

But sometimes, it gets away from me.

A few days after this happened, I read something related by direct response copywriter Jason Leister.

I think it’s an important reminder for all copywriters, including myself, who can get carried away when a great new opportunity appears on the horizon. Jason writes:

“Over the years, I’ve come to hire clients very slowly. If you work with clients, consider hiring them SLOWLY. (You are hiring them, remember that. You’re in the driver’s seat of your business, not anyone else. They’ve got the “money” but you have the thing for which they are willing to part with that money. Money is everywhere, YOU are not.)”

Jason then describes what this means practically in his business.

I think it’s worthwhile reading for all freelance copywriters.

If you want to read Jason’s complete email including the practical bits, simply write me and I can forward it to you. Or you can head over to Jason’s site, where he publishes his daily emails with a few days’ delay. Here’s the link:

https://incomparableexpert.org/dailyjournal/

A lesson from Widows: How to tell you’re winning a negotiation

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I just saw the surprisingly good Widows.

There are many scenes in this movie that would make for good email — or blog — fodder.

One that sticks out is the following:

Jamal Manning is a former crime boss who’s looking to get respectable, so he’s running for alderman in Chicago’s 16th district.

And in this scene, he visits the reverend of the largest congregation in his district, trying to get support.

The reverend speaks first:

“Election’s in less than a month. If I was a doctor, I’d be telling you to get your affairs in order. Three weeks from now, you won’t need a doctor. You’ll be asking someone like me to give you last rites.”

Manning is getting impatient. He thinks the reverend has already decided to endorse his opponent.

“I didn’t say that,” says the good reverend.

He then suggests he’s still keeping his options open.

Finally, Manning can’t take any more. He blurts out:

“I’m gonna cut to the chase here, reverend. I’m in the driver’s seat. I just don’t have a set of wheels. All I need is your endorsement and your contribution to help me get across the finish line.”

And there it is.

The phrase that tells you you’ve been negotiating right, and are near to crossing the finish line.

Did you catch it?

“I’m gonna cut to the chase.”

That’s not my wisdom.

Instead, it’s straight from the late negotiation expert Jim Camp, who said his students always love to hear that phrase. “Cut to the chase” means the other side is getting worn out and they are ready to agree to just about anything.

So how do you get to that point?

Well, you do what the good reverend did.

Which is something that doesn’t just apply to local politics or crime movies.

In fact, it’s another tenet of Camp’s negotiating method.

And it’s even something that’s been adapted to writing more effective sales emails by that devoted Camp disciple, Ben Settle.

You can try to glean what I’m talking about by closely reading the script above.

Or you can get a copy of my upcoming book when it comes out, where I will cover this topic in much more detail, and give several examples of emails where I’ve used this same strategy.

The choice is yours. If you want the second option, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/