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Business Negotiation

Salary negotiation fundamentals

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Beginner content levelBeginner

Best practices that lead to salary negotiation success

Negotiation is part of life. We regularly bargain with other people to fulfill our needs—monetary or otherwise (something with which parents are no doubt familiar). In a professional context, skillful negotiation is essential, particularly for salary negotiations. However, many people are intimidated by the thought of negotiating for higher compensation, whether for a raise at their existing job or before starting in an entirely new position. Because the stakes are high and the outcome is of intense personal interest to the negotiator, salary negotiation is one of the most difficult to conduct in a strategic, level-headed way.

Join Roy Weissman to learn negotiation best practices and fundamental skills you can use to successfully negotiate a higher salary. You'll minimize or eliminate your fear of negotiation as you explore the most important steps to build confidence in your negotiating abilities and gain hands-on experience with time-tested strategies that provide the maximum leverage to optimize negotiation outcomes. Take the first step in becoming a master salary negotiator, helping ensure better outcomes for you, your company, and your career by more effectively driving positive change in your world.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:

  • The most critical steps to building a foundation for successful salary negotiations
  • The importance of a planned and prepared salary negotiation strategy

And you’ll be able to:

  • Develop effective strategies for your salary negotiations
  • Minimize anxiety and fear while gaining more confidence and comfort in approaching salary negotiations
  • Create a strong position-of-strength document to aid you in your negotiations
  • Improve the results of your negotiations

This live event is for you because...

  • You're a project manager, product manager, developer, or professional who wants to be more effective at negotiating for your compensation.
  • You want to be more confident in salary negotiations.
  • You believe you can do better in your current negotiations and would like to learn new approaches to increase your success.

Prerequisites

Recommended preparation:

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Introduction: Lecture: Setting the Stage for Successful Salary Negotiations (15 minutes)

  • What is Negotiation?
  • Will my offer be withdrawn if I negotiate?
  • Setting Your Real Objective: Don’t Leave Home without it
  • The most valuable tool for salary negotiations: Alternatives
  • The second most valuable tool: Research
  • Determining Your Position of Strength and Why You Must Know Your POS
  • Understanding How “They” Think
  • Interests vs Positions: Importance of Asking Questions
  • Motive vs Objective
  • What is the other person’s motive?
  • What are their Interests?
  • What is their objective?
  • What is their ideal outcome?
  • Why should the other party share this information with you?
  • What is your ideal outcome?
  • Cultural Differences: trust, transparency and communication style.
  • Communication: Email vs phone vs in person: does it matter?
  • How you say it: importance of confidence, tonality, do you believe it.

Q&A: Answering questions and responding to audience emailed questions (15 minutes)

Lecture: Preparing for a Salary Negotiation for a New Job (20 minutes)

  • Determining Your (real) Objective
  • What do you want? What do you want to ask for? How to prepare.
  • What is your POS? Accomplishments, Strengths and More
  • What are Your Alternatives?
  • What are the other side’s alternatives?
  • How to Research the Company, Job and Employees? What to look for?
  • How can you use your research as a strength in negotiations?
  • Bringing up Salary: What you need to know to maximize your compensation and what not to do. What to say when asked “what is your current compensation?”
  • When not negotiating will get you the highest offer
  • What compensation can you ask for? What are the limits and the opportunities? How do I find this out?
  • How to know the answers before the questions are asked.
  • How to avoid negotiating with the wrong person.
  • What to do if your potential employer says “we don’t negotiate” or “this is our one and only offer”?
  • What if the potential employer says no and what this means for you?

Exercise: What is Your Position of Strength? (15 minutes)

  • Please download the sheet and create your Position of Strength
  • Q&A: Discussion and Questions and Answers:
  • Break 1 (10 minutes)

Lecture: Preparing for a Salary Negotiation for a Raise for Your Current Job (20 minutes)

  • Determining Your (real) Objective
  • What do you want? What do you want to ask for? How to prepare.
  • What is your POS? Accomplishments, Strengths and More
  • What are Your Alternatives?
  • What are your employer’s alternatives?
  • Should you compare your salary to your peers?
  • Why should they give you a raise?
  • Difference between annual increase and performance increases?
  • What do you research and why? What to look for.
  • Why Research is so critical and how, if used incorrectly, it could sabotage you
  • How to use your research as a strength in negotiations
  • Bringing up Salary: What you need to know to maximize your compensation and what not to do.
  • When not negotiating will get you the highest offer
  • What compensation can you ask for? What are the limits and the opportunities? How do I find this out?
  • How to know the answers before the questions are asked.
  • How to avoid negotiating with the wrong person: your manager vs HR.
  • What to say and do if you know others got a raise and your manager says no to you.
  • What to do if your manager says “we don’t negotiate” or “this is our one and only offer”?
  • What if your employer says no and what this means for you?

Exercise: Why Should Your Company give you a Raise? (15 minutes)

  • Please download the sheet and complete the information
  • Q&A: Exercise Discussion and Q&A
  • Break 2 (10 minutes)

Lecture: Summarizing Today: The key drivers of Your Success (15 minutes)

  • How not to talk yourself out of your raise or new salary
  • Collaborative or Adversarial; Why one is great and the other very bad
  • What is your objective? Do you know why?
  • Importance of Asking Questions and listening to the answers
  • Why knowing your POS well is critical
  • The importance of Alternatives
  • What do they want? What is their objective?
  • What are their Interests?
  • What is their ideal outcome?
  • What is your ideal outcome?
  • Cultural Differences: trust, transparency and communication style.

Wrap up and Q & A (15 minutes)

  • Feel free to ask about anything we talked about.

Your Instructor

  • Roy Weissman

    Roy Weissman is a strategic senior leader in business development and sustainable sales growth. Roy teaches courses on negotiation at Northeastern University and consults on business development, sales, and sales enablement for companies in the media and tech industries through his consulting business, Octopus, based in New York City. With more than 15 years of experience driving business expansion and new market penetration for both top-ranking digital media corporations and agile, leading-edge innovative startups, he has a demonstrated track record of realizing significant results in revenue, market, and channel growth by forging lucrative online partnerships and shaping core strategies for ecommerce, branding, and media outreach. As both an employee and entrepreneur, he has worked at companies such as Infoseek.com, Viacom, General Electric, Playboy, and Next New Networks (acquired by Google). In his career in the media and tech industries, Roy has initiated, negotiated, and closed hundreds of deals with companies including Amazon, Comcast, News Corp, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner. However, his toughest negotiation to date continues to be with his 2-year-old daughter, who somehow does not always respond to negotiation best practices.