Book Summary: Never Split the Difference

In this episode Erik talks about a book he just finished listening to called Never Split the Difference. It was written by Chris Voss, a retired FBI hostage negotiator. Erik has been listening to more audiobooks as he has been working out a lot. He likes exercising and learning something new at the same time. There were two main takeaways from this particular book:

First, when negotiating a deal with someone, and they are asking for more than you are willing to give, let them know the problem they are causing for you and ask them how to solve it.  An example would be you are trying to sell someone a website for $10,000. They want you to do it for $5,000. Instead of going back and forth ask them, “How do you expect me to do that? How do you expect me to be able to pay my people”, etc.?  This puts the problem solving in their lap. They may offer suggestions but you keep asking them how you can do that.

The second takeaway is when someone asks you to do something you repeat back the last couple of words they said in the form of a question. An example is someone asks you to build a website cheap. You reply with the question, “cheap”?  This does two things: iit acknowledges what they said and then forces them to elaborate on what they mean by cheap, in this case.

Overall, this book was a good read.  In fact Erik listened to it twice to really soak up the information.  He highly recommends it.