I have a friend who has a standing agreement with his wife that he has the right to portray her as the sweetest or the devil without her consent during everyday negotiations depending what he is negotiating and who he is negotiating with. For instance when he is negotiating something with someone he starts to bring his wife into the picture, he talks about how tight fisted she is and how these terms will never meet her approval except may be if you knocked down an additional five percent off or something.
In business he has an accountant whom he blames for all his tough decisions, he often accuses him of being tight fisted and paints him as a ruthless numbers man who is impossible to deal with. In both these scenarios he portrays himself as the good guy and his wife and accountant as bad guys who the other guys wouldn’t want to deal with.
It is the oldest trick in the book of negotiation gimmicks but what I find most interesting is that people are not aware of these things. How it is often used against you is that often you find people saying that it is company policy or that it is my manager who won’t let me do this. Your approach should be to talk to powers that be so that you get the best deal. In some cases people may pretend it’s impossible to talk to authority figures but with a little more pressure and polite persistence you can get through to them.
So it is in your own best interest that you invent a bad guy who you can blame for your tough decisions that is if you don’t already have one. This polarity positions you as the sensible level headed person to talk to while your partner is viewed somewhat as evil and irrational. As a result people are most likely to like you as opposed to your evil partner, and this increases your chances of closing the deal.
The truth is that there are many ways in which you can use polarity in everyday persuasion scenarios. Let’s take for instance the good deal/bad deal type of approach. In this particular instance you go to a vendor and propose ridiculous terms. You can present them as coming from you or as coming from your evil tight fisted wife or partner.┬á They must be terms that you are sure will be rejected, but when they are rejected don’t just accept the rejection, instead fight it out and try to seal the deal. After going back and forth haggling introduce the good deal as your revised offer. While you are doing this don’t forget to keep mentioning under your breath things like “I don’t know why I am doing this, she is going to kill me or I am going to lose my job.” To add a little drama and to be more credible you must appear as if you are talking to yourself even though you are doing it for their own benefit. That way you will appear as if you are putting yourself on the line for the best interests of the people you are negotiating with.
Chances are high that your second offer will be accepted without a hassle, or that your terms will be preferred as opposed to those proposed by the bad guys. However, unknown to your opponent this would have been the deal that you wanted accepted anyway. The first offer was just a smokescreen.
It is called the rejection and retreat strategy and the reason why it works is because with every rejection you create a feeling of indebtedness but also in contrast to what you where initially asking, your second offer may seem a lot more reasonable and therefore much more acceptable. The number one mistake that most people make in most negotiation settings is that they ask for what they think they can get. The key thing is to ask for the unreasonable because chances are that if you don’t get it then you are in better position to negotiate something better than average than if you opened the bidding with average terms.
Some people like to pass moral judgment on the use of these tactics, so let them. But the question remains, are you going to use them for good or bad, are you going to learn how to defend yourself against them or are you going to judge them? When you suspect it’s being used against you don’t expose it, just play along and insist that you would rather talk to the evil partner, or see the manager or a copy of company policy.
