Business Of Copy

Cross-dressing for negotiation success

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“No, I wear men’s suits. I got this out of a bin.”
— Michael Scott, Dunder Mifflin Inc.

Here’s an inadvertent but brilliant negotiation lesson from the TV show The Office:

Michael Scott, the regional manager, is about to have a salary negotiation with one of his employees, Darryl. Michael is dreading the negotiation, and he’s preparing with some awful negotiation tactics he got from Wikipedia. But when the actual negotiation starts, it all falls apart quickly.

Darryl states his demands.

Michael lamely tries to refuse, and then:

Darryl notices that Michael is wearing “lady clothes.”

Could it really be that Michael is dressed in a Hillary-like women’s pant suit?

Let’s see.

The buttons are on the wrong side.

There are no pockets on the pants.

And the label inside the jacket reveals it’s made by the MISSterious label.

The thing is, though unintentional, this is straight out of the book of expert negotiation coach Jim Camp.

One of Camp’s tenets was:

In a negotiation, only one person can feel unokay, and that person is you.

In other words, contrary to conventional wisdom, you don’t want to dominate or lord over the other person when you negotiate. Not if you want a negotiation outcome that sticks. Instead, you want to make the other person feel okay — with themselves, and with the interaction.

One way to do this is to be unokay yourself.

For example, by accidentally dropping your papers all over the floor.

Or forgetting your briefcase at home and asking for a pen and paper.

Or, as Michael did, by inadvertently dressing in a women’s pant suit.

Does it work?

Camp used to swear by it. And by the end of the The Office episode, Michael winds up getting a raise for both himself and Darryl. As he says, “win-win-win.”

Personally, I haven’t tried these unokay gambits myself. But the underlying message — make the other person feel okay — is something I regularly use when talking to potential Upwork clients, and it’s served me well.

If you want to know more about my Upwork strategy, including how I got to be a top-rated sales copywriter on the site and how I get paid $150/hr, then sign up below. I’m currently putting together a book about my Upwork experience,  and if you sign up, I’ll let you know when the book is out. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

How Slack got too big to racially profile

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A few days ago, an Iranian guy studying in Canada gut kicked off messaging platform Slack.

U.S. companies are not allowed to do business with people from Iran, and somehow, Slack picked this guy out even though he was based in Canada.

Who cares?

Everybody. Slack is valued at over $7 billion, and the story of the Iranian guy quickly went viral and made the front pages of news aggregators, under accusations of racial profiling.

That’s incredible, when you think about the history of the company.

Slack started as an offshoot of a failed game company run by a guy named Stewart Butterfield.

Glitch, the game they were developing, never went anywhere. But they took their internal messaging platform and turned it into a multi-billion dollar business.

And this isn’t the first time Butterfield has done this. He had another failed game before Glitch, and another side-project that emerged from that game which became a successful company. You might have even used it yourself — it’s Flickr, the photo sharing platform.

So what’s the point?

Well, it’s simply the attitude of pivoting to what the market actually needs.

As it is for tech entrepreneurs like Stewart Butterfield, so it is for copywriters, or even information marketers.

For example, when I got started on Upwork as a copywriter, I was trying to focus on writing autoresponder sequences. I think the title on my Upwork profile read “Email copywriter for soap opera sequences.”

There wasn’t that much demand. However, people started hiring me to write cold emails, even though I didn’t even know what the hell those are. So I become a “Cold email specialist.”

I eventually moved on from cold emails (I don’t believe they work well, and when they do, you don’t need a copywriter). But then lots of clients started hiring me for advertorials and writing Ben Settle-style daily emails, so I pivoted again. I’m currently selling “Hype-free sale copy (Emails, Advertorials, and Sales Letters).”

What does this mean for you?

If you’re looking to build up your freelancing career on Upwork, get going now. The market will quickly tell you which services you should offer, which ones you should drop, and which skills you should develop.

And if you’re looking to maximize your Upwork success, from a guy who gets paid $150/hr and has a 100% job satisfaction rating, check out my upcoming book. It won’t make you a Slack-like success. But with the info inside and with a little dedication and work, you will soon be an Upwork force to reckon with.

For more info, check out the following:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/