The Right Questions in a Negotiation

If you ask questions while negotiating, you’ll likely get a better result. And yet, only 7% of people do it. That’s just one finding from Alexandra Carter, author of “Ask For More: 10 Questions to Negotiate Anything.”

Alex is a Director of the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she is also an award-winning professor, and a world-renowned negotiation trainer for the United Nations. She speaks and appears on TV and in the media regularly.

In my book, I teach people three words that I tell them to take with them for the rest of their lives, land the plane. In my book, I teach people three words that I tell them to take with them for the rest of their lives, land the plane.

It means that when you ask your great question, when you look at somebody and say, “What do you need to get this done?”, you don’t add words on the end. You don’t keep talking, you zip it. When you allow there to be silence, that’s actually not an imposition on the other person is a gift to really consider your great question, and amazing things happen on the other end of that silence.

“I always like to ask open questions. Go in and say, what else could we– what could we do next year? What other benefit can you offer me? There are lots of different things that people can negotiate right now that come together to produce value.”