INKED

1Sales Negotiation as a Discipline

It was a dark night. No stars. Black. Cold. Snow was falling. The only connection we had to the gunman inside the small mobile home was a cell phone. He was holding three hostages and threatening to kill them all.

Earlier in the day he’d lost his temper, and in a fit of rage, shot his wife. As the police arrived, responding to the 911 call, he’d taken her parents and his stepdaughter hostage.

It was another sad case of domestic violence. Every attempt to negotiate a peaceful solution had been stonewalled.

By the time I arrived, things were getting desperate. The gunman had become extremely agitated and fired several rounds at the SWAT team crouched in the snowy woods. He was surrounded with nowhere to go. A violent man with nothing to lose.

Somehow, I had to convince him to back down and let the hostages go. It was a negotiation situation I’d found myself in many times before…

Reality Check

OK, stop! This story is total BS. I’m a sales professional, not a hostage negotiator. No one in their right mind would allow me to get near a situation like this. Don’t get me wrong. I negotiate almost every day for a living. But not like this. In the sales profession, it’s never life or death (though at times it can feel that way).

Yet this is exactly how so many books on negotiation begin. Their tense narratives include epic boardroom negotiations, dealing with terrorists, negotiating hostage situations, pulling off game-changing mergers, settling massive ...