Negotiation Tactic #14 – Facts and Statistics

Summary: Using statistics to support an offer or a point of view.

Anytime you can incorporate Facts and Statistics into your presentation, you have a tool that your counterpart will find difficult to handle. Reliable facts can add a tremendous amount of power and credibility to your case. But be careful—if you quote statistics incorrectly and your counterpart proves you wrong, you lose your credibility. Once this happens, you have to fight twice as hard to gain any deal point.

Example

An employee goes to his boss with a recently published salary survey documenting that the employee’s salary is significantly below market. The employee has pulled Facts and Statistics that examine salary levels by industry, position, and geographic location to demonstrate the discrepancy.

Counter

First, the boss could question the validity of the employee’s Facts and Statistics. Who participated in the salary survey? Who collected the information? Are the salary statistics valid for someone with this employee’s experience? As a second option, the boss could delay the negotiation process to give himself time to do some research and develop his own Facts and Statistics.

Have you used or encountered this tactic in your negotiations? If so, how’d it go?

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