Christopher Voss

When you expect to get into a negotiation, you expect to be faced by a guy that's going to attack you, a guy or gal that's going to attack or that they're going to try to get the best of you. Two-thirds of us, that makes us very defensive.

Price doesn't make deals, and salary doesn't control your career.

There are three kinds of yeses. There's commitment, confirmation, and counterfeit. People are most used to giving the counterfeit yes because they've been trapped by the confirmation yes so many times. So the way you master no is understanding what really happens when somebody says 'no.' When yes is commitment, no is protection.

The sweetest two words in any negotiation are actually, 'That's right.' Before you convince them to see what you're trying to accomplish, you have to say the things to them that will get them to say, 'That's right.'

The secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is to give the other side the illusion of control. Don't try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Ask questions, that begin with 'How?' or 'What?' so your opponent uses mental energy to figure out the answer.

Very few negotiations are begun and concluded in the same sitting. It's really rare. In fact, If you sit down and actually complete your negotiation in one sitting, you left stuff on the table.

The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don't know you're in.

What you want to do is put people in a position where they feel connected enough to you that they're willing to collaborate with you; they're willing to show you the things that they were scared to tell you about before.

As a negotiator, you should strive for a reputation of being fair. Your reputation precedes you. Let it precede you in a way that paves success.

People who are lying are, understandably, more worried about being believed, so they work harder - too hard, as it were - at being believable.

The sooner you cut off negotiations with someone you shouldn't be dealing with, it gives you the chance to move on to a more profitable deal.

If you're going to play the bargaining game, you just need to make the other side mad. You want them to get a little annoyed. Then you know that you've come in with a good price.

There are a lot of negotiators that really will give in on a deal because being understood is more important than getting what they want. And there's a particular type in particular, the assertive negotiator: being understood is actually more important to them than actually making the deal.

Emotions aren't the obstacles to a successful negotiation; they are the means.

In reality, every single negotiation involves another commodity that's far more important to us, which is time - minutes, hours, our investment in time. So even if you're talking about dollars, the commodity of time is always there because there has to be a discussion about how the commodity of dollars is moved.

Salary negotiations are particularly important because people are testing you as both a co-worker and an ambassador. They really don't want you to be a pushover, and they don't want you to be a jerk.