A Client's Experience Negotiating with the Vise Gambit

A client recently called me up after a Secrets of Power Negotiating seminar that I had conducted for their managers and told me,

"I thought you might like to know that we just made $14,000 using one of the gambits that you taught us. We are having new equipment put into our head office. Our standard procedure has been to get bids from three qualified vendors and then take the lowest bid. So I was sitting here going over the bids and was just about to okay the one I'd decided to accept. Then I remembered what you taught me about the Vise technique. So I thought, 'What have I got to lose?' and scrawled across it, 'You'll have to do better than this,' and mailed it back to them. Soon their counterproposal came back $14,000 less than the proposal that I was prepared to accept."

You may be thinking, "You didn't tell me whether that was a $50,000 proposal, in which case it would have been a huge concession, or a multimillion-dollar proposal, in which case it wouldn't have been that big a deal." Don't fall into the trap of negotiating percentages when you should be negotiating dollars.

The point was that he made $14,000 in the two minutes that it took him to scrawl that counterproposal across the bid. This meant that while he was doing it, he was generating $420,000 per hour of bottom-line profits.

That's pretty good money, isn't it?