It’s Officially Negotiation Season—This is What Works

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The decision to negotiate even once creates an economic ripple effect in your life that researchers found means retirement up to eight years sooner. Listen in on this negotiation masterclass featuring an expert-turned-friend of mine, Kathryn Valentine of Worthmore Strategies. Start hair-spraying your combovers, people, because we’re talking about #TheArtOfTheDeal.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Worthmore Strategies’ Negotiation Calculator

• 2007 Harvard study on negotiation from Hannah Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Lei Lai

• Study on the “Feminized Society” from Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media

• Children’s gender gap in negotiation, from Sophie Arnold and Katherine McAuliffe

• Gender pay gap with stock options, from JJ McCorvey and Julia Carpenter

• Women negotiate just as much as men now (2023), from Laura Kray, Jessica Kennedy, and Margaret Lee

• Victoria Medvac’s book, Negotiate Without Fear

• 75 things you can negotiate, courtesy of Kathryn Valentine

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Kathryn:

What the research says is that choosing to negotiate is worth an additional million dollars over lifetime earnings. So that’s Linda Babcock. Margaret Neale at Stanford looked at that number and said, well, that’s probably true, but it’s highly sensitive to how old you are when you start and how much you make and all these other things. So she ran a time analysis that showed that choosing to negotiate was equivalent to being able to retire eight years earlier. The way that she phrased it was choosing not to negotiate is the same as choosing to work eight additional years. So we actually created this customized negotiation calculator that I was playing with earlier when I was listening to those incredible stats that you released about your audience. So I think I heard average single earner was 31 and earning about $110,000. Is that right?

Katie:

Yeah.

Kathryn:

So for that person, if they were to negotiate an additional 3% and never negotiate again, that’s worth $200,000 over their career.

When I was coaching, 3% was quite minimal. On average, people were earning about 24% more and that would be equivalent to about $1.6 million before your average listener retired. The other thing about those numbers though is those assume you only negotiate once. And what we see is once people build this muscle, they do it all the time. So the idea that you could build into multiple millions of dollars is actually not that farfetched. We’re not talking about taking on another side hustle. We’re not talking about working two jobs. We’re talking about how can you do the same work you’re already doing but get credit and resources such that you’ve maximized the economic benefits of the work you’re already doing.

Katie:

Oh, beautiful. Smarter, not harder.

In a Harvard study published in 2007, authors, Hannah Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Lei Lai found that sometimes it does hurt to ask, that is if you’re a woman asking for more money. They ran four different experiments to understand why men and women have different outcomes when they negotiate and found troubling results. In the first two experiments, they asked participants to evaluate written accounts of male and female candidates who did or did not initiate negotiations for higher compensation. When they asked for a raise, evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates. In the third experiment, the participants were asked to evaluate videos of candidates who accepted compensation offers or initiated negotiations. The men penalized the female candidates more than the male candidates for initiating negotiations, and the women who were evaluating the videos penalized all candidates for initiating negotiations. Perceptions of niceness and demandingness explained resistance to female negotiators, and in the fourth and final experiment, participants were asked to put themselves in the candidate’s shoes and determine whether they themselves would negotiate.

Women reported being less likely to negotiate when the decision maker was a man, whereas there was no gender difference in likelihood to negotiate when the evaluator was a woman. That breakdown does feel a little like a brain teaser, but it highlights an unfortunate reality that my guest today, Kathryn Valentine is all too familiar with. Because we socialize men and women differently, we expect them to exhibit different behavioral traits. This means that when a woman applies the commonly advised traditionally masculine negotiation tactics, she’s actually less likely to achieve the same outcome. And if the Harvard study is any indication, more likely to be judged harshly for doing so. And for the record, I think this is total horsesh*t, but BS or not, there’s more interesting data to back up this disparity in perception because we regard women who are nice compliant and undemanding as good taking up space or God forbid, asking for more of it, violates our unconscious bias.

Dale Spender, an Australian feminist scholar, studied how this impacts language. Her findings, which were replicated by others, found that in mixed gender conversations, people perceived women to be talking more, that is taking up more airtime and space than they actually were. Moreover, the Geena Davis Institute for Gender and Media found that men perceived scenes as a 50/50 gender split when only 17% of the people shown were women, and if the scene had 33% women, the men perceived it as being majority women in the room. I mean, I know our beauty in splendor is just overwhelming, but come on. Basically if you’re taking up any space, it’s too much. With that said, welcome back to the place where I am taking up the airwaves, The Money with Katie Show. I’m your host Katie Gatti Tassin, and today I’m exploring what it means to negotiate like a woman. We’ll get right back to it after a quick break.

I’ll be honest, my first reaction to some of this data was a strong aversion to the idea that women should need to behaviorally shapeshift in order to get ahead in the business world. Such contorting seem to suggest that the default is a man’s world that women need to learn how to navigate by saying the right combination of magic words while batting their and performing gratitude so effusive that they wouldn’t be considered a greedy B word. And I said as much to Kathryn the first time we met. Does it ever annoy you that women have to jump through these psychological hoops to get what they deserve?

Kathryn:

It’s a really interesting question because when I was working as a W-2 employee, I always wanted to do the best I could and I ended up reading this book, I don’t know if you ever saw it. It was Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, and it was basically a list of 101 things that I was doing wrong. So I spent the next few years trying not to let anyone know that I liked baking and trying to learn more about sports, which is just not, I’m not that cool. It’s not my thing, and it took so much time and effort away from the actual work that I was doing, and so I was really cognizant of that when I came across this research initially and at this point in time, the way that I feel about it is instead of psychological hoops, I think of it as an additional toolkit, which is that right now if you’re a woman trying to figure out how to negotiate and you’re Googling it or reading books about it, you are probably getting tools that were created for tested on and optimized by men. What we’re trying to do is give you a toolkit that was created for optimized by and tested on women, in which case now you just have twice as many things to choose from and you get to say, Hey, in this conversation I want to pick up this one, this one and this one. What feels good to me? Great. I just want to make sure you have options that were made for you.

Katie:

Now that’s my guest, Kathryn Valentine. She has spent many years researching women in negotiations and she’s worked with the likes of Meta, JP Morgan, and KPMG to advance high performing women in those companies. You’ll find her work in Fast company, Forbes, Business Insider, and Adweek, and she’s been on the speaker circuit at Harvard, Wharton, and Darden Business Schools. So to put it simply, she does have that institutional stamp of approval, but more importantly, I think she really gets it. When we first met, she conjured an image of how the business world used to be a chest puffing competition where directness and assertiveness and cutthroat behavior and your ability to pound whiskey at lunch was rewarded. Here we could cue either mad men or a montage of the ruthless Jack Welch style of management at places like General Electric and the hoards of other Fortune 500 CEOs that he inspired because traits like directness, assertiveness and generally being unapologetic are not valued in women the same way that they’re valued in men, which is a problem if you’re a woman reading a negotiation book designed with dudes in mind.

Kathryn:

So if you were to Google how to negotiate, a lot of things that will be recommended are some of these hardball tactics, right? So there’s this one article on the Wall Street Journal from last year that says, and I quote go in and say, I deserve to be paid more, which we know from the research is much more likely to result in backlash if you’re a woman. That’s terrible advice. I’m actually surprised that they got away with publishing it, but it happens all the time. Everyone’s giving this advice as if it’s gender neutral and it’s not. When I was getting my MBA, I had basically put a quarter of a million dollars towards this certification, and the idea is that then when I graduate, it’ll be worth it. And I was doing my internship, which is basically like a three month job interview and I did really, really well.

So they gave us a 12 week project, I finished it in four weeks and I had an opportunity to negotiate. So I spent the weekend buying all the books, underlining them, highlighting them, googling how to do it. I wrote a script, I practiced it, and then I went into the offices and our meeting was Monday at 10:00 AM By 10:06 AM, I had managed to offend the internship coordinator and by 10:10 AM, she was telling me that I wasn’t a culture fit and that I would not be getting a job at the end of the summer. The internship ended in that moment and I was walked out of the building by a security officer, so in less time than it took to get a latte, I had managed to completely derail my career because I had taken advice that didn’t say it was for men, but was very much for men.

So when I went back, had a year left getting my MBA, I went back and I met with a negotiations professor who’s a very, very famous in negotiation circles, and she pointed me to what at that point in time was just coming out, new research on gender and negotiations really led by the two people that you mentioned, Hannah Reilly Bowles and Linda Babcock, and I just went down the rabbit hole and what was very clear is that what had happened in that conversation, if my brother had read exactly the same script, it would’ve gone very differently. But because it was me and it was coming from me, it had an unintended outcome and I just don’t want that to happen to anybody else.

Katie:

Okay. What about the opposite? Do these tips, tricks, strategies, approaches that we know from the data work better for women? Do they also work for men?

Kathryn:

It’s a great question. So yes, of the three things that we’ll talk about, two of them are best practice negotiation strategies. No matter what your gender are, they’re actually used in international peace treaties. Quite often they just haven’t made their way into the mainstream and there’s extra incentive for women to get access to that information because it does. The research says virtually eliminate the risk of backlash of the other ones. The third one that I recommend men can also use. We found a lot of, and there’s not research on this, but from when I was coaching, we found a lot of men who felt like they were others using this very effectively. Maybe they were first generation American and didn’t have access to the same information or maybe whatever it may be, they were able to use this for the same. I actually just got a note last week from a man who used these strategies to negotiate an additional $4.5 million in lifetime earnings.

Katie:

The important distinction to make here I think, is that this approach to negotiation is not the correct one or the best way, it’s just the way business has traditionally been done. But women have been an increasingly dominant force in the working world for the last 40 years and we’re rewriting the rules. Do you remember the push to get women to stop using exclamation points in emails? The general idea was that women are too kind and too apologetic and demonstrative in their work communication. They should stop using the word just when making an ask, Hey, I just wanted to check in on the report and for the love of God, they needed to lose the exclamation points. This type of discourse about how we communicate with one another at work might seem silly, but what’s the white collar world, if not a delicate web of interactions and mutual favors and persuading one another to see things our way? Communication is the bedrock of productivity and it’s struck me one day amidst this damning of traditionally feminine communication styles that, Hey, wait a minute, why are we assuming that the masculine way to communicate AKA “Please fix. –Jim. Sent for my iPhone” is the superior one.

What if the way women communicate is actually more advantageous, but gender related behavior expectations as they stand now run deep. There’s even some evidence that young children demonstrate differences in their tendency to ask for more and why…

Kathryn:

At this point in time, I’ve reviewed about 13,000 pieces of research, pages of research. There are a few that really stick out. The first one was done by two researchers, Arnold and McAuliffe who invited children into their lab and gave them all coloring pages and they told the children to color and then turn it in when they were done and when the children turned it in, the researcher said the same thing to everybody because it was scripted, thank you so much for your work. How much do I owe you? And what they found is that as early as eight years old, little girls were asking for 40% less than little boys. And so the researchers then asked those children, that’s interesting. Why did you choose that number? And those little girls overwhelmingly said something like, I didn’t want to upset anybody. These children are in second grade, so before they know that the tooth fairy is not real, they know that there is something about negotiating as a female that is risky and that they need to be really thoughtful about.

That part was mind blowing to me. I study this all the time. I’m a feminist, all of those things, but it even leaks into how I view myself a lot because it’s in the water we drink, it’s how we’ve been cultivated. So that’s one study that’s always stood out to me because you’re a financial podcast. The other one is one that was done by McCorby and Carpenter who are reporters and what they found is that we all talk about the gender wage gap 20%, but the gender gap in stock options is actually closer to 80%. The gender gap in team size is anywhere from 25 to 40%. The gender gap in 401(k) matches is close to 30%. So we’re seeing these gender compensation gaps a lot of places outside of just pay, which is something that I wanted to just make your listeners aware of because we do want to talk about negotiating pay, but let’s think about all those other things around it that might be interesting to negotiate.

And then the third one, which just came out is work by Lee and Cree showing that at this point in time women are asking for raises even more often than men are, but we’re successful only half the time. The reason why we’re successful half as often as men is because before 20 years ago there was an asking gap women weren’t asking. Now we are. It’s just that we have a skill gap we are trying to ask in the same way that men are, and actually there’s a whole different way that we could be using to unlock that.

Katie:

We’ll get right back to it after a quick break.

Kathryn’s approach has a handy three-part framework that she’s going to walk us through. So the first tenet is to think holistically. When you initiate a negotiation at work over a raise or promotion, if you’re only asking for one thing, you are significantly limiting your upside. So you want to open up your aperture, you want to think about all the places you could get more value, what would allow you to deliver more impact? What would lower your stress level? What would bring you more joy? What’s sucking your energy right now that could get taken off your plate?

Kathryn:

So what I love about this is, again, people tend to default to just base salary, which is potentially something that you want to negotiate, but if you open the aperture, there are so many other things you can negotiate. And what we know from research is that if you actually wanted to maximize your financial benefits, you would negotiate career progression, not base salary. Thinking of all the people I’ve talked to who are like, well, I’m at the top of my pay band. Okay, cool, we need to talk about how to get you to another pay band. That’s actually, if you wanted to maximize the financial benefits over your career, you want to negotiate for career progression potentially even more often than just a 3% or 6% raise. So when you open that up, then the things you can negotiate for are additional education, retention, bonuses, review, timing.

I worked with a woman who negotiated fertility benefits. There’s all kinds of them. We actually put together a list of over 75 things we’ve seen people negotiate. But what I would encourage your listeners to do is ask yourself, what would help me reach my goals? That could be financial or it could be something else. We worked with somebody who just really wanted to do an Ironman, and so the things that she needed to negotiate this Ironman thing blew my mind. She needed to spend six hours training on Fridays, so she needed to negotiate something a little bit different to hit that lifetime dream of hers. So one, what would help me reach my goals? Two, what would help me deliver more impact? And three, what would help me reduce my stress? You could negotiate. I worked with a woman who negotiated for a different IT system for her team that reduced their workload by 40%, right? That was a great negotiation for her. There’s all kinds of things that we can negotiate for that we don’t necessarily default to, which is why we created that list.

Katie:

It’s interesting too, to think about things like negotiating for different tools or negotiating for access to different programs that are going to make your life easier because then you’re almost flipping that equation on its head and going, okay, well, rather than asking to be paid more, to do the same amount of work, what if I got paid the same to do less work or to do easier work?

Kathryn:

Agreed. And the other thing is sometimes we work with people who are in a situation where their company is doing layoffs, and for some people that creates opportunity. If your boss gets laid off, there’s a gap there. There’s an opportunity there. But for others, it’s this idea of, okay, so dollars are limited right now, but what can I negotiate that I can monetize later? Am I worth more if I have that certification? Am I worth more if I have presented to the board, am I worth more if I did a one month study under this person? There’s so many other things we can negotiate even when money’s tight.

Katie:

Then there’s her favorite ask relationally. Now, in order to ask relationally, you mention your past performance, you explain your vision for the future, and then crucially you stop talking. She mentioned that because women are socialized to put others at ease and prioritize other people’s comfort, they’re more likely to make an ask and then begin negotiating against themselves. Now, I will own up to this. I’m the queen of making a well-reasoned argument for why I should get something and then immediately doing all of the hard work for the other person of enumerating. The reasons why I totally understand it, that’s not going to work for them. And I get this, that and the other. This is a factor, but no, stop talking.

Kathryn:

So the research that blew this open came out about 10 years ago, and what the researchers found is that if women can demonstrate that their ask is both legitimate and beneficial, they virtually eliminate the risk of backlash. Now, what I learned when I was coaching is that we’re all so busy that figuring out how to demonstrate that it’s both legitimate and beneficial is like a level two nebulous. And so we ended up coming up with this formula, which is past performance plus future vision plus the ask and then stop talking. So if you think about as an example, I worked with a woman who wanted a promotion, and the way that she phrased that was she went to her boss, and as you know, I was able to deliver 10% over my goals last year. I think this year I can actually do 15%, but in order to get that done, I’m going to need the external credibility that comes with being a VP. Can you help make that happen? And what ended up happening is she was in sales once she was a VP, when she met with people, her conversion rate doubled because they knew that she could get done what she was telling them she could get done. Whereas before, as a manager, they kind of questioned whether or not she could pull it off. So this is a huge one for her and a huge one for the company because they just brought in significantly more sales. That’s the kind of magic that we want to happen.

Katie:

One thing that did jump out at me here, sometimes you really just want more money and applying this approach so directly feels like we’re not quite there. Hey, I think I can do a better job next quarter if I’m making $5K more. So I asked Kathryn to eloquently restate that. Ask for us, how would she apply a straight financial ask?

Kathryn:

So again, I would use that formula, right? So let’s assume that last year figure out whatever one of your wins was, right? You were able to onboard this new client, or in this case, I’m going to use sales again, the easiest one to default to. But you would say something like, as last year I delivered 10% over my annual target. I think I can hit 15% this year, which is going to have a huge impact on our ability to hit our department level goals. I recently came across this benchmarking study and was surprised to see that the average in my role is actually 10% higher than I’m currently being paid. Even though I’m a top performer, I wondered how we could close that gap. A lot of times what we advise people to do is don’t just ask for one thing because then if they say No, there’s nothing to trade against, but ask for, call it three things. Can we talk about an additional $10K? And also I’d like to present at this conference, and also I’d like to get this a certification. Right now we have three different things. They should give you the $10K, but if for any reason they can’t, budgets are locked, I need six months to get that done, whatever it may be. Now you have a couple of other things that you can pull on so that you at least walk out of there with some value.

Katie:

Interesting. So your recommendation would be to come out of the gate with that bundle of options for them as opposed to, I’m going to ask for the $10K. And then if they say, no, I follow up with these other things,

Kathryn:

I would still keep a couple other things in your pocket. But if, let’s go back to the example of this person who is very financially driven right now, then let’s give them multiple financial options, right? I’d like $10K, and then you would keep in your back pocket. Oh, you can’t get that into the budget. Well, what about a one-time retention bonus? What about a training bonus? What about a performance bonus that we tie to me hitting that 15% I told you that I could hit, right? Those all live in different budgets. And so now you’re giving your manager a little bit more flexibility on how they can meet your financial needs.

Katie:

The final tenet of her framework pertains to how you’re framing the problem and how you are positioning what you want as the solution to that problem. The collaborative approach to negotiation was proven as a best practice in negotiations 40 years ago. Kathryn told me, but it has added benefits for women who are often penalized for being too assertive.

Kathryn:

We have been cultivated our entire lives to be in tune to others. This allows us to use that strength for our own benefit, which is that I happen to be just a little bit better at understanding that something’s off or you’re looking over there differently or whatever it is. So there was this one study that was run with babies. They were 18 months old and they brought researchers into the lab and had them act in a gender non congruent way. And they noted that 18 month olds would cry longer and harder in those situations than when, say a woman came into the lab and acted in an expected way. So before we can walk, we know and have been cultivated to act a certain way. This just allows us to use that to our advantage in a negotiation.

Katie:

Rather than thinking about a negotiation as you versus them. She said, it’s us versus the problem. Now the problem is anything that prevents you from delivering the highest impact at the lowest stress level. Alright, so we’ve talked about the three part framework, but let’s get into that 501 level negotiation tactic. These are called MESOs. Okay? So if you’re really on your leveled up negotiation game, Kathryn reserves this MESOs strategy for ultra-complex deal making. Now, MESOs stands for multiple equivalent simultaneous offers. And the strategy works because you are structuring options for someone to choose from. Crucially, these options are going to feel like you’re given someone choices for how to proceed, but you would be happy with any of the outcomes. So for example, let’s use one of my friend’s real life situations. She’s a salesperson. She works for a tech company, and her boss was recently fired, so she knew her boss’s compensation structure.

She knew how it deferred from her own, and as luck would have it as luck often does in these types of forced reorgs. Her boss’s boss wanted her to fill her old boss’s role for the next six months. Now, they both knew that she was not going to do that for free, but they weren’t really sure how to proceed. So she decided to structure multiple equivalent simultaneous offers for him to choose from while we were talking out her game plan and her strategy. So we decided that offer number one was going to be, Hey, boss, you increase my base compensation to match his for the next six months, but you can keep my commission structure and bonuses the same. Now, this offer appeals to their desire to keep things straightforward and fair, just a straight base pay increase, but that’s not always the most workable solution.

So we came up with offer number two. You keep my base compensation the same. You can make that unchanged, but you’re going to give me one bonus now equivalent to three months worth of the difference between my pay and his and one at the end of the six months assuming that I hit the performance targets that we agree upon. Now, this offer begins to tie compensation changes to performance, and it might be more beneficial for the company to pay out compensation in this way as bonuses that might come from a different budget than on biweekly paychecks.

And finally, we came up with offer number three. You keep base compensation the same. You give me a smaller bonus, but you increase my commission percentage. So this offer has the largest upside potential for her and the lowest downside potential for the company. We also figured that she should probably negotiate that at the end of this six month period, if she hits the benchmarks, they agree upon that she would be offered the job more permanently. She structured her stepping up to backfill her old boss temporarily as a sort of prolonged trial period for the role. And she explained it that way to them too. Like, Hey, you’re going to get to use this as a trial period to see how I do this job, and if I exceed expectations, amazing, this will be the outcome and this is how we’ll structure comp. Here’s Kathryn on a little bit more about MESOs and why they work.

Kathryn:

So MESOs, multiple equivalent, simultaneous offers, is one of my favorite ways to do this. This is a next level strategy. So I found out about this from Victoria Medvac, who is incredibly famous in negotiation circles. She has a great book out. She did some really interesting research on it. Her concept of this is what would happen if we gave the person we’re negotiating with multiple offers, but they were all the same to me, how would that person feel? And what they found out is that the person you’re negotiating with loves that you do this because they feel like they’re getting even more out of the negotiation even though the options are the same to you. So I used this when I was buying my home. My husband and I spent months looking at different houses, and I fell in love with one house, which anyone who studied negotiation knows you never fall in love with one thing,

Katie:

Problem, problem, exactly.

Kathryn:

But eight years into study negotiation, I went and I did it. I fell in love with one house. And of course, obviously this house was out of our price range. So what we ended up doing is I thought about a story that Vicky Medvac tells about how she got her house using MESOs, and I decided we were going to try it in this situation. So I started researching the sellers what is it that I could learn about them? And what I learned is that they’d already bought a house. They’d put down 50% as a down payment on that house, and she was known as being impeccable with details, which when you walked through this house, you could tell she’d done a renovation and there are 34 hidden electric plugs in the kitchen. You don’t see a single one of them. This woman is on top of it.

And so because of those things, I made a guess that one money might not have been the most important thing to them right now. Two, they had some time pressure because they’d already bought a house. And three, I could trust that there probably wasn’t any. The roof probably wasn’t going to collapse the next week. That was a little bit of a bet, but that was what we were going to do. And so I ended up submitting two offers where we vary different things around. We’ll close as fast as you want us to. We’ll waive the inspection. We will allow you to leave behind whatever you don’t want to deal with. Like, Hey, there’s a chandelier you’ve always hated and you don’t want to figure it out. Just leave it. I’ll deal with it. You don’t want to deal with that old bed? Great. Leave it.

I’ll deal with it. And so we varied all of these different things, but on the purchase price of the house, we listed it as 20% under what they were asking in both offers because that was the tippy top of what we could do. And so they ended up loving this idea and we tweaked a few things. We did one more round of negotiations and we closed at 17% under asking, which thank God my husband and I could actually afford, and now I’m recording this podcast with you overlooking a lovely park that I spend every day in because we were able to think about what might matter to them outside of this one thing that we all assume so

Katie:

Brilliant. So just outside the box, I love it. I love that example. Thank you for sharing that.

Kathryn:

Well, and you can use it. I’ve used it to negotiate with employers. I’ve used it to negotiate with employees. I used it to buy a car. You can use it in all kinds of situations.

Katie:

The more I reflected on Kathryn’s strategies and contemplated how I could use them, the more they seemed like injecting business with common sense. I mean, obviously the old I win, you lose framework of negotiation is going to feel icky and uncomfortable. It involves being the loser or putting someone else in a compromising position. And what non sociopathic person wants that? Entering negotiations with a mindset of finding the win-win solution. In other words, how do we both get what we want most? Makes an abundance of sense. So much so that I felt a little silly forever thinking of them as antagonistic and uncomfortable. This lens is especially interesting when you consider how it impacts deal making. I thought about my book deal, for example, and how the thing I was haggling for a more advanced money could have been achieved more easily had I offered up more of what they are most interested in a tactics for how I’m going to sell this book.

Because the book advance is just that an advance of royalties. It’s not in addition to royalties on books sold, the publisher is ultimately incentivized to minimize their downside. Because if you pay me as though I’ve sold a thousand books, but I only sell 500, well now you are underwater. But if I could have outlined my brilliant marketing plan that I’m going to throw book parties across the US to drum up interest, and I’m going to hire an amazing editor, and I’m going to invest in partnerships that are going to guarantee that pre-order links hit millions of inboxes, well, that requires X dollars more to achieve. And now that higher advance makes sense because it’s an investment in the success of the book, rather than advocating for say, how deserving I am in a negotiation or trying to make the case for how hard I work. These are two things that will appeal to someone’s sense of fairness, but are ultimately subjective in nature and therefore pretty slippery grounds for getting your way. Why not try to understand what exactly their best case scenario is and engineer a solution that demonstrates that you can provide that to them. And by the way, in order to give you what you want, I’m just going to need X, Y, and Z.

Kathryn:

When we stepped back and analyzed this a few years ago, the ball’s been moving down the hill and we looked at where are the issues now? And one of the biggest ones is that there was no central list of all the things you can negotiate. It really required you knowing a guy like, oh, I know a guy who negotiated a car allowance, or, oh, I know a guy who X, Y, Z. But because information tends to travel through historical sources of power, which at this point in time still is white men, women were locked out of a lot of those informal conversations that let you know there were things you could negotiate that weren’t on the job offer or weren’t on the job description. So over the course of at this point in time, seven years, we put together a list of 75 things you can negotiate, which your listeners can download for free at worthmorestrategies.com. The second thing I would say is to any listener, if you’re part of a women’s organization who might be looking for a speaker, please reach out to me. Help us get the word out about how we can do this. Well,

Katie:

Remember, it’s not you versus the person you’re negotiating with. It’s you and that person versus the problem. And that problem is anything that is preventing you from delivering the highest impact. Engineer a win-win solution and celebrate your half of that win. That’s all for this week. I will see you next week, same time, same place on The Money with Katie Show now, go out there and get more money. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content Officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.