The Way of the Wall Street Warrior

CHAPTER 23Mastering Your Sermon on the Mount: Group Selling

To this point, I've given you tips on how to negotiate one-on-one, particularly with regards to compensation, but mastering the art of selling to a group is just as important. You need to nail this skill to get employees to follow you off a cliff, bosses to anoint you worthy of premature promotion, partners to say “Yea” to your crappy deals, and boards to hire you over their cronies and progeny.

If you can't win over a group, you might as well kiss your career goodbye. No one ever gets very far unless they master this skill. So here is what to consider when convincing a group to approve your schemes or, at worst, not sabotage them:

• Do Your Recon. I told you to map the salt mine when you first started your career and I hope you didn't think it was a one-time thing. It applies at every stage, on every day, for every interaction—especially meetings. Before any internal gathering, I would buttonhole committee members and frame my pitch in a way to gain their support in the context of their self-interest. By now, your EQ should be approaching Oprah-level, so use it to determine in advance which managers might torpedo your deal. You'll have to back-channel one-on-one with every committee member to learn who might blow your suggestion out of the water and who will support it. To those who are on the fence and will be asking questions, provide the answers in advance, or promise they will be part of the pitch. This is the ...