60 Seconds or She Dies

“I need a car in 60 seconds or she dies.”

The entire room is silent. You can feel the tension knot up between your shoulder blades. The negotiator takes a deep breath and lets his eyes dart around the room in an attempt to drag the right sequence of words out of his brain. “I am sorry, I won’t be able to do that for you.”

This is not a high stakes hostage negotiation. This is a training being lead by Chris Voss of the Black Swan Group. Eric, the volunteer hostage negotiator with zero chance of saving the hypothetical hostage is trying to save the hypothetical woman from inevitable doom.

Chris Voss made a name for himself by being the best negotiator in a world where a bad negotiation ends in death. He has gone toe-to-toe with religious zealots, impoverished gangsters, drug dealers, and plenty of desperate people simply looking for a way out. He was with New York City’s Joint Terrorism task force, the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit, and was even the FBI’s chief international hostage negotiator from 2003 to 2007. Voss has held the phone on other “60 seconds or she is dead” scenarios where a life actually hung in the balance.

If you have not read Never Split the Difference and you do ANY level of negotiation for sales, you are doing yourself a disservice.

While there are a ton of great lessons in this book, I really recommend reading it for his take on empathy. Empathy, above all else, is the key to successful negotiation. If you are not willing to try and understand the problems the other person is having, you will never be able to successfully negotiate.

Let me be clear, empathy does not mean you agree with the other person. It just means you seek to understand.

I think of it like the Japanese “Hai”. If you have heard this before and do not speak the language, you could be excused for thinking it means “yes”. It doesn’t really. “Hai” is really Japanese shorthand for “I understand and acknowledge your point.” IT does not mean you are right, it simply means you can see where they are coming from.

This “hai” is the start of all successful negotiations. Without the empathy to acknowledge the other person’s point you will have difficulty reaching ANY common ground. That is the goal of any negotiation.

In sales, our negotiations rarely have the chance of ending in bloodshed, but empathy works on the absolute highest levels. Empathy works when life and death is on the line. If Voss was able to empathize with zealots and lunatics, you can get along and try to see the world from your prospects point of view. You will be amazed at how much easier it will make things for you.