Negotiate Without Fear

9Leave Yourself Room to Concede to Close the Deal

Leaving yourself room to concede is a great way to alleviate your fear in negotiating. The very act of conceding makes you look flexible and cooperative, and it increases the likelihood that you will settle an agreement (Pruitt, 1981). As you make your first offer, you should plan to concede. In fact, I would suggest that you want to make adjustments to your starting point. When you concede, the other side thinks they are winning; they become more satisfied with the deal, are more likely to settle, and are more inclined to want to do a deal with you again in the future (Hughes & Ertel, 2020). Research also reveals that people are actually happier to pay more when the other side is seen to concede than they are paying less in a negotiation that concludes with no concessions (Galinksy, Mussweiler, & Medvec, 2002). In order to give the other side the feeling of winning, you need to plan and purposely give yourself ample room to adjust. You want your counterparty to feel like they won while you got everything you wanted, so you should plan to concede.

I recommend that you develop your concession plan before you make your first offer. It is not that you will concede if you have to or concede if they make you; but rather, I encourage my clients to recognize that they want to concede. If you make a first offer that is immediately accepted, you should consider it a very bad day; if it was that easy for the other side to accept, you ...