Chapter 5
Bracketing
In Chapter 4, I taught you why you should always ask for more than you expect to get. The next question has to be: If you're asking for more than you expect to get, how much more than you expect to get should you ask for? The answer is that you should bracket your objective. Your initial proposal should be an equal distance on the other side of your objective as their proposal.
Let me give you a simple example of that. The buyer is offering you $1.60 for your widgets. You can live with $1.70. Bracketing tells you that you should start at $1.80. Then if you end up in the middle, you'll still make your objective.
Of course it's not always true that you'll end up in the middle, but that is a good assumption to make if you don't ...
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