Most of us have experience of some form of negotiation, but how do you go about persuading the other party round to your position?

In this episode of The Persuasion Game podcast, we meet Dan Hughes, founder of the negotiation training consultancy Bridge Ability, to explore the art of negotiation.

Dan has more than 20 years of experience training negotiators across industries – from Premier League football clubs to major corporations.

We cover the common misconceptions that derail negotiations, why focusing on the other party’s perspective is more powerful than any argument, and the art of preconditioning – setting the stage for success before the real negotiation begins.

Dan also shares practical techniques for course-correcting when conversations go wrong and explains why listening beats talking every time.

​​Learn more about Bridge Ability at bridge-ability.com

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates.

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Want to know more about us? Visit our website here: thisistheforge.com

This is an 18Sixty production for The Forge.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:19) Power Dynamics in Negotiations

(06:27) Cultural Influences on Negotiation

(11:49) Common Negotiation Traps and Misconceptions

(18:50) The Art of Preconditioning

The Persuasion Game is available on all your favourite podcast apps: https://link.chtbl.com/PersuasionGame

Episode transcript:

Dan: The mistake people make is they think that the other party’s walkaway point or break point is determined by the market and it’s never, I mean never is. If that sales person’s behind target, that’s all that matters.

Adam: Good morning, Laura.

Laura: Hello. How are you?

Adam: I’m brilliant. Thank you. I’m enjoying my summer holidays. How about you?

Laura: Yes, very much looking forward to a few weeks off soon, and we thought this would be the perfect moment to maybe share something rather different today.

Adam: True to the name of The Persuasion game, we thought we’d bring on a master persuader, someone that can help us understand how to win in negotiations.

Laura: And today we’ll be talking to Dan Hughes, who is the founder of Bridge Ability, which focuses specifically on helping people understand their own strengths and how to improve the areas of weakness in the fine art of negotiation. Fun fact: He does quite a lot of work with the Football Association. I mean, obviously we had so much to talk about.

Adam: You couldn’t help yourself could you, bringing on a football expert!

Laura: Just all about the beautiful game?

Adam: Yeah but no, but seriously, he has advised some of the top Premier League clubs on transfer negotiations, and as we go into the transfer window in September, I think, you know, we should be paying attention to what Dan has been saying because we’ll be able to see some of the tips and tactics and tricks that we learn about in this interview

Laura: And use them for our own nefarious ends as well.

Adam: Of course!

Laura: Now this is an interview that Simon and I led a couple of months back, and so you’ll hear Adam no more. But don’t worry, he’ll be back at the end.

Adam: And just before we hear from our guest, a quick ask from us, we’d love it if you can tell one person about this podcast in the office or on a call today, or leave us a five star review in a rating wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, here’s the interview.

Laura: Dan, great to have you on board.

Dan: Thanks very much, Laura. Real pleasure to be here.

Laura: Let’s just start with understanding a little bit more about what your job is and how you got into it. It’s such a fascinating world.

Dan: The job’s quite simple, I suppose to explain because it is very niche. It’s negotiation, which falls into two categories. One, and most of what we do at Bridge Ability is training. And the most part of that is behavioral training. So it’s the tactical side of things. It’s what those individuals do. We work with both sides of the fence, whether they’re buyers or sellers, whatever their job title may be.

And then the other side of what we do is more on the consulting side. So that’s not about the skills of the people that would be helping our client to achieve their objectives in a negotiation. So we’re not mediators, we don’t work for the negotiators, we work for our clients. We help them get what they want to get.

Laura: And you’ve done that for some quite interesting people. So you mentioned you also did it for the FA as much as you’ve done it for businesses.

Dan: Yeah. The FA is one of our longstanding clients, really through the FA we work with their clients who are all of the clubs, predominantly Premier League clubs. We’ve trained their people in talent ID, so recruiting of players. So that’s that side. It’s not really the commercial, it’s not sponsorship deals and those kinds of things. Although we have got involved in that, it’s more around the buying and selling of players, which is the more interesting bit of the business anyway.

Yeah. So again, both sides,training the individuals, but also working on some of those deals to make sure that they get those good outcomes.

Laura: What are some of the misconceptions or traps that you see as a kind of common thread when people are dealing with negotiation?

Dan: People tend to underestimate the power that they’ve got in a negotiation. You know, one of the things that we always ask people before they come on any of our programs is where is the power? Just a really high level general question, where’s the power in your negotiations?

The vast majority of people answer that it’s either with the other party or they might say it’s more or less even. They very rarely say that it’s with them. People always see it from their own perspective. People tend, in fact, to underplay it. They almost look for the power the other party’s got. It’s subconscious. But I think it’s because if you think about it, if you go to your boss and say, listen, boss, we’ve got all the power in this negotiation. We’ve got all the power over this other party. You’ve just really raised the expectations in terms of what you should be delivering as a result.

You know, I had a conversation with one of the senior people involved in player recruitment for Manchester City straight after the takeover, in the aftermath of the big famous takeover that they had there, which propelled them to probably the richest club in the world. You talk to anybody in the football world who has the power in the transfer market, they’ll all tell you Manchester City, but not this guy. When I went to talk to him, first thing he said to me before my backside had even hit the chair, he said the problem I’ve got Dan is I don’t have any power anymore in my negotiations. And when I asked him about that, he said, well, I go to buy a player now I’ve still got budgets, and all they see is the Sheikh’s checkbook behind me. And they add a zero or double it, and he’s probably got a point, he can’t go and claim poverty anymore.

And it’s how it translates across, they think of it as power or a lack of power. So it’s one of the first things. It’s very rare that we’ve had people say…An interesting couple who have, one of the manufacturers of baby food, and that that branding is so strong. A parent, if they don’t have the right brand in the shop, they’ll leave the trolley in the middle of the aisle, metaphorically perhaps, and run to the next supermarket. And they recognised, they said, yeah, we’ve got loads of power.

We also worked with the maker of Grand Theft Auto when they launched, I think it was GTA 5 a few years ago now, and they said, no, no, no, we’ve got all the power here. But those are the two that always stick out in my mind because they’re so uncommon.

Laura: What did that do in terms of their manner, their way of going into things? If you feel powerful well, does it change anything in terms of how you act?

Dan: Definitely. I mean, if you talk to anybody else in any market, if you get them to describe the player in their market that’s got power they’ll be described as probably arrogant, short term focused. That’s what everyone else sees is an arrogance and a focus on the short term.

Internally, it’ll be different. It’ll be that, well, we’ve got more options. We can say no more. And as an organisation that they’re probably less worried about being described as arrogant by other people in their market than they are about not delivering on the power that they do recognise they’ve got.

But the flip side, confidence. It leads to confidence and ability to walk away from a deal. That’s, that’s what it all boils down to.

Laura: A very tangential question, but it is marginally related to football. I was just thinking of José Mourinho saying I think I am a special one.

Dan: Yeah.

Laura: And that kind of feeling of like, what? And I was wondering if that sort of lack of confidence or that fear of sort of being seen as arrogant is peculiarly British maybe?

Dan: Yeah, I think so. I think you wouldn’t get many British…There’s probably a famous exception to that where Brian Clough wasn’t shy of a bit of self-promotion is one way of putting it, I think. But that’s probably why it stands out even more. It’s ’cause it’s not a British trait I don’t think, is it? You know, if we go to the stereotypes, that self-effacing kind of approach is much more British, isn’t it? Yeah. So it stands out more when people do it that obvious kind of confidence.

Laura: Do you think we disadvantage ourselves with that? Or is that just a nuance you have to work around?

Dan: You can almost use it as an advantage. When it comes to negotiation, especially, I think it can even be an advantage. I think those who go throwing their weight around more don’t necessarily get the best results. Those who are able almost to park their ego a little bit more, will tend to get better results in negotiation.

Simon: That leads me on to a really sort of related point that I wanted to explore, which is perceptions of negotiation within popular culture. We’ve been through a sort of period where big focus on sort of emotional intelligence, that was really sort of key. Obviously we’re in a political time of the rise of the strong man leader, the strong man negotiation, and I’m just interested in how you see those play out and your view on the kind of influence of popular culture on successful negotiation.

Dan:  The interesting thing with power as a dynamic is that as you use power, well you, that’s exactly what you’ve done. You start to use it up. You can’t keep making threats. You can only make a threat once. Then you either carry it out or you back down. If you carry it out, you probably can’t do it again, and if you back down, then you’ve lost any power that you had in the first place.

So it’s one thing, having power is quite another thing how you use it and what you do with it, and an implied threat is usually way more powerful than an expressed threat.

Simon: So that’s very interesting, Dan because the way you’re talking there, you’re almost sort of talking as if power is a finite resource, like emotional or physical energy that if you draw down on, or if you are unintentional about, you can suddenly find it’s all gone and it’s not, there’s nothing left in the well.

Dan: Yeah completely. So often when we’re consulting with a client for example, we don’t tell them what they should or shouldn’t do. It’s about thinking about the consequences of what they do. So you’ve always got options open to you. There’s always some, in any interaction, there’s always something you can do, even if you feel you’ve got no power at all.

So it’s a bit like a game of chess. You know, there’s a number of ways you can go at any position to get to the end result. So that’s very much the approach we’ll take is it’s up to our client whether they choose to make a threat, for example or not. We’ll typically advise against making threats, by the way. But if they do, we’ll say, okay, here’s what’s likely to happen if you do, and then here’s what you can do. So I think that that’s one side to it.

I think the other thing that’s really interesting with things like power as you put it, that there are things you can do to your phrase of emptying the well or what have you. But the other thing that’s always really interesting is that things just change. I think especially at the moment. You know, I’ve been doing this 20 years or so, and when I was first doing this kind of job I’d be saying to people, look, have a think about the other party since you last negotiated with them a year ago or two years ago, their circumstances have probably changed a bit. What we’re saying to people now is their circumstances have probably changed in the last quarter, maybe even the last month.

Really since the big crash of, was it ‘08, and then everything that’s happened since then, the rise of certain forms of technology, pandemics, wars in Europe. It’s the rate of change now and it’s partly the cyclical nature. It’s how consumer habits have changed very obviously. It just shifts the balance of power because their circumstances, whoever they are, will almost certainly have changed probably quite a lot in the last year.

Simon: And therefore that has a big knock on implication about the need to, yes, have a plan and a strategy, but also be flexible and adaptable within the negotiation itself?

Dan: Completely. Yeah because things are gonna change, you know, if it’s a quick negotiation, they might not change very much during that time. But yeah, most negotiations would take weeks or months, probably from real inception to finish.

Things will have changed, even if it hasn’t changed for them. Maybe one of their competitors might have gone bust, or two of their competitors might have merged. Or the same for you. Something will have changed in your market or theirs during that time, in all likelihood.

Or if not, for the individual, you know, if they’ve dropped behind their target or whatever. That’s the trick is keeping ahead of that, knowing what’s happening, what’s changing in terms of circumstance, because you’ll be very aware of your change in circumstance, obviously, but what about them, what’s changed for them?

Simon: Dan, can I just ask you sort of then, as a sort of slightly related point, just when you think about are there particular themes of the different types of traps or barriers that different types of people experience that might be related to age, to gender, to ethnicity, to kind of job role, are there certain kind of consistent themes that you start to see across different audiences?

Dan: Yeah. One of the things that we get asked a lot, typically by younger people, is around how to deal with people more senior, more experienced. They’ll often use words like intimidated. And I’m very conscious, by the way, I’m answering this as a, people can’t see me here, but I’m a white, middle-aged guy, so I will, couch my answer with that. So I don’t face any of those perceived disadvantages. And people will talk to us about it.

Young people who are perhaps new to their job and they’re dealing with somebody older, more experienced. Buyers will say they’re new on the category and they’re dealing with an account manager who’s worked in it their whole career. And same the other way around. You get someone in sales who’s dealing with a buyer and they can often get intimidated in that kind of situation. And the first thing that we do is we’ll kind of see it from their perspective. Because just because you’re dealing with somebody who’s more senior, more experienced, and probably therefore more empowered, does not necessarily mean that they’re any better a negotiator.

You know, those factors don’t necessarily lead to effective negotiation. You’ve, you’ve probably had these situations in the past in your corporate life where you’ve brought your boss into a negotiation or they invited themselves into one of your negotiations and they didn’t necessarily add an awful lot of value. You may have regretted it. Because people who are more senior and have more empowerment, they have a habit of giving things away. Things that you’ve been trying to protect for the previous weeks and months, and they just give it away because they can. And it doesn’t mean quite as much to them. And they make mistakes in negotiation without even realising it.

And who’s gonna tell them? Who’s gonna tell them in their own organisation that they’ve just messed up a negotiation and given away a load of value. So they continue in blissful ignorance. So I would see it that way when you’re dealing with somebody who’s more senior, more empowered- they’re not necessarily any better.

We talked a little bit earlier with some of these individuals in the public eye, people with big egos. If you are prepared to work with their ego rather than taking them on, you can get fantastic results. Rather than being intimidated by them, see the pressure they’re under. People normally only throw their weight around, not just in a negotiation, in any interaction, when those people do that, they’re actually doing it because they feel in a weak position. Most people when they’re in a strong position, can afford to underplay these things. All the bluff and bluster that you get, it’s normally covering something up.

So you just very much encourage people to see it for what it is. But nevertheless, those are the sorts of things that we’ll hear about. Certainly younger people, almost play your disempowerment. It’s a really effective tactic to use rather than the big ego, and I make all the decisions around here and well, if they know that I make all the decisions and all the pressure’s gonna come onto me. If I’m more junior, if my ego allows me, I can always play dumb a little bit. So, I don’t know, let me find out. I’ll get back to you – it creates space thinking time. And you can do it with credibility. So I’ll often say to people when they’re new on the category or the role, I’ll say, you can ask things now that are gonna be much more difficult for you to ask in two years when you should know the answer.

So play to your strengths.

Laura: What are some of the other mistakes that people might make or misconceptions that they might have about their role in negotiation?

Dan: One of the biggest single mistakes that we see, this is really from anyone of any position in any role. Back down to human nature, people tend to go into negotiations thinking about their own circumstance or their own pressures. They go in there, whether it’s their target or their whatever, that’s what they focus on. And it could be a positive thing or a negative thing, but they think about their problems or their opportunities, and if that’s what they do, then almost certainly they’re going to fall victim to it, they’re gonna pay for it.

One of the simplest ideas, but one of the most difficult things to do in a negotiation is to park all of that, put that to one side, and focus everything on the other party. If you can unlock their pressures and circumstances, again, positive or negative, if you can focus on their problems or their opportunities, that will really change the way your negotiations proceed.

Simon: We keep coming back to of that importance of being eyes up and just looking at the other party and making sure that we are not just obsessed with us and what we want and what we need, but actually we’re just being super mindful and outward antennae focused on the other party to find the right opportunity.

Dan: Exactly right. And again, if we go back and use the football example, there’s so many stats these days, that whole industry is full of stats about players and then they have a market value as a result. But it’s not that, it’s never about that. It’s down to how much Manchester United need a striker right now.

In a negotiation, you should know what your walkaway position is, and that that’s a mistake that people make. They often don’t even set their own walkaway position very consciously before they go into a negotiation. So therefore, if you can calculate what their walkaway position is, that’s where you need to be aiming for in a negotiation.

But the mistake people make is they think that the other party’s walkaway point or break point is determined by the market. And it’s never, I mean, never is. Because your break point in any negotiation is determined by how much you need it. Your break point will be different to your competitor’s break point. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it’s driven by stats and data and market share, and it’s not. It’s that if that sales person’s behind target that’s all that matters.

The other one that I’d mention is that a big mistake we see is that people go into these kind of interactions just trying to almost convince people trying to win the argument. The misconception is that it’s a bit like sales. You know, those with the gift of the gab are gonna do better at the job, and that might help a bit in sales, I suppose, sometimes, but it’s not really about that. Especially not in negotiation, it’s actually about saying less, listening, more say less. Understand it from their perspective. You’ll never win the argument. I’m yet to meet anyone who likes to lose an argument. The chance of beating someone in an argument is highly unlikely. So it’s not about winning arguments, it’s not about trying to convince them of things. It’s about seeing it from their perspective and using a bit more listening and a bit more silence.

Laura: I love all of these. I’m just thinking about your point that people are perhaps going in and thinking it’s about them, but actually thinking about the context is key. It’s a bit like, you know, Don Corleone, it’s not personal, it’s just business.

Dan: That’s it.

Laura: I’m thinking about that. That context is so important to keeping a cool head with it all.

Dan: Exactly, exactly right. Yep.

Laura: However, I have heard on the grapevine that you are quite the expert at creating preconditioning, which is, I guess I’d love to hear it in your own words, but as I’ve understood it, creating the ambiance with which to begin negotiations and how important that is?

Dan: Well, the best way I’d think about negotiations at the very highest level, you’ve got two types of negotiation.

One is where one party wants to change the status quo, which the other one wants to stay with. Price increase is perhaps the best example to think of there. They may even wanna go in the other direction. You may have them wanting to reduce prices. So there’s a straight conflict of interest. One party has to be proactive. If you are the one wanting to change the status quo, you are gonna have to initiate it and do all of the groundwork. They’re gonna stall, differ, et cetera.

The other sort of negotiation is where both parties want the change, but we still need to negotiate the term. So it could be a merger, it could be a player transfer, assuming both parties want it to happen.

Preconditioning would be especially common in the first type where one party wants to change the status quo. So preconditioning does two things. It’s designed to reduce any anticipated resistance that you think you’re gonna get from the other party. So what can we do now, which is gonna reduce that anticipated resistance? And/or it helps to increase your perceived power. So you can still use it in those kind of common interest negotiations and should do. But especially in those ones where you are trying to change the status quo, use it, or even if you are the one trying to keep the status quo, be alert to their preconditioning.

So it’s what can I do now? Because when you receive bad news, when you have something unwelcome, whether it’s in a negotiation or in other areas of your life. You go through those reactions. It may not be as strong as grief, but the stages of grief where it’s shock, denial, anger to begin with, and after a period of time you get to acceptance. You may not like it, but we think, right, if this is gonna happen this how I need to accommodate it. So if you go and hit them with it, whatever it is, you are gonna get a strong reaction and that’s what you want to avoid.

I had a great example of this a little while ago, when all of this inflation started a couple of years ago now. We did a bit of a masterclass for buyers around fending off price increases, defending, minimising price increases where possible. It was a Zoom session. We had 50 people from different companies on there, and we started talking about preconditioning and I said, look, has anyone got any examples? And this young lady, she was a veg buyer for one of the big grocery retailers, and she said that she’d received an email just the week before from one of her suppliers and on the email was a picture, no words, just a photograph. And it was a photograph of a flooded field from one of her potato suppliers. Because he knew that she knew that a flooded field meant that the crop had to be got out of the ground early. So the yield was gonna be lower, the potatoes would be smaller. They were gonna have to be stored to stop them rotting. It was all gonna cost more money. It meant a price increase. So that when he delivered the price increase, presumably a couple of weeks later, she was already expecting it. Her resistance would be less.

That’s how preconditioning works and we get preconditioned as consumers all the time, whether it be at interest rate increases or rising fuel at the petrol pump. We know about it before, even if we can’t do anything about those things, we’re just more accepting when it happens because we knew it was coming. So preconditioning, it doesn’t have to be subtle. It’s great when it is subtle, but even blunt, preconditioning, it still works. So whether it be in your private life about who’s doing the washing up at Christmas, or whether it be a price increase or a valuation of a business in a merger or the, or the price of a player or the fact a player wants to leave a club and they agitate how unhappy they are, and then when the transfer request comes in, that was already expected. Preconditioning happens all the time in every aspect of our life, and people can use it, or if they don’t wanna use it, they need to be alert to when it’s being used on them.

Laura: Of course, many of us are not masters of preconditioning and we’ve all experienced that horrible moment where perhaps we think we’re having a conversation that’s quite straightforward. Be it a negotiation personally or professionally, and perhaps the response hasn’t been as we liked, it’s been poorly received, and there’s a kind of need to course correct in that conversation. Do you have any hints or tips for people in that boat?

Dan: Yeah and probably we could look at it either way round as well, but if you are, as your question is, if you are the one delivering it and it hasn’t been received in the way that you would’ve wanted or it’s gone down badly, is that’s okay.

And in fact, it may not be exactly what you’re getting at, but do you know if you get a no from someone? If you get a rejection or a no. I would just reframe the whole thing of that. It’s a good thing. If you never hear the word no, if they always are very amenable to everything you suggest, it means you’re not getting enough. You should walk away from all your negotiations if it’s just been nice and easy and simple. If there’s been no conflict, if it’s all been very comfortable and cosy, I’d almost worry a little bit more about that.

So a bit of conflict is okay, within reason. Of course, I’m not talking about the extremes here. But you know, there is a conflict of interest in most negotiations because often it comes down to money and then we’re into a straight distributor, as we call it, win-lose situation there. So there’s gonna be some conflict and it’s okay. But if it’s really going south, if things are going badly, the one thing you can always do is take an adjournment. You know, take a time out.

And just the other thing, it was interesting when you said the question, because it also made me think, you know, when things are poorly received and you recognise that they are, that’s one of the huge advantages that you’ve got when you’ve negotiating either face-to-face in a room with someone or via video call because you can gauge their reaction. And we are doing that all the time. If you ever find yourself having to say, oh, that was a joke, by the way, which I find myself having to say quite a lot is because you can gauge their reaction. And you know when a joke has landed well or badly, don’t you?

If you are negotiating via email, you gotta be really careful because you have no idea how something’s landed. So be really careful with written communication. Don’t try humour and jokes. There’s a time and a place for it and an email negotiation isn’t one of those times because you just never know. So you should be judging it. You should be gauging it. You should be assessing their body language. And if you’re trying to create a positive collaborative tone and style, then you do something to change it. Whether it’s take a time out or change the cast or whatever.

And if it’s the other way around, by the way, if they’ve delivered something you don’t like, it’s okay to, within reason, it’s okay to get angry. It’s okay to say no. It’s okay to tell them that you thought that the relationship was beyond that or whatever. However you may choose to phrase it. We don’t have to, we talked earlier about the very British thing of put a brave face on it and don’t tell them that they’ve just upset us. It’s okay to do that, sometimes we need to do that and should do it.

Simon: Dan, thank you so much. It’s been an unbelievably fascinating conversation.

I don’t know about Laura, but I certainly feel like I could keep talking to you for many more hours. But, to round things off, if you were to give our audience sort of two or three things that when they’re next in negotiation to either think very consciously of doing, or perhaps equally think very consciously of not doing and avoiding what, what sort of two or three last tips would you leave our audience with?

Dan: Sure. The phrase we use at Bridge Ability is to be in control and that covers everything. Controlling yourself, controlling the environment, controlling them. To whatever extent. And that comes from things like going first, get your proposals out first, get them reacting to your position. You don’t wanna be reacting to theirs. If you consider that the outcome of any negotiation is only ever a version of the proposals that are made. So you want it to be your proposals.

Be prepared to adapt your personal style. We use a tool called the negotiation thermometer, which has got cold, cool, and warm areas. Cold negotiations are a bit more distributive, bit more win-lose, which will require a certain approach than a warm negotiation, which is more collaborative.

And then the third one, this is something we’ve talked about is see it from their perspective and park your pressures if you can, and focus on theirs. And if people can just do those three areas that make a big difference in terms of the outcomes of their, not just negotiations, but interactions more broadly.

Laura: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much, Dan. I’ve learned so much today.

Dan: Not at all. Absolute pleasure.

Adam: Laura, what an interview! I mean, I’m so jealous I wasn’t there. He seemed like a really interesting person to talk to.

Laura: Super interesting. And, you know, he was recommended to me as someone that had managed to persuade people to part with, luckily hypothetical, vast amounts of money, so he is a very good person to learn from.

The thing that was super striking to me was everyone in the world goes into any kind of negotiation, whether that’s, you know, about finances or about any kind of high stakes situation with the perception that they are the one on the back foot.

Adam: Yes. Guilty.

Laura: Even the ones that are the most, you know, successful or sort of seem the most dominant, will somehow find a way to see that as a disadvantage.

Adam: Yeah. The fear of loss is real, isn’t it? You go into, you’re looking to buy a house and you’re like, but what if someone else buys it? So I need to put all my money down on the table right now just so it’s mine. Yeah, absolutely. That’s me.

I also really liked the point about preconditioning and that actually a long time ahead of the negotiation you are already seeding the playing field in which the negotiation will take place. So how much money you have or how much time you have, it’s all been like laid out before you get in there so there’s no surprises.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully everyone can take this and go forth with progressing their own agendas.

Adam: Absolutely. If you’re lying on a sun lounger right now and you are now planning, you know how you’re gonna come back with a bang in September, hopefully this has given you all the tools that you need for the next negotiation you have.

Laura: See you next time.