1808 – Professional Negotiation with Todd Camp of Camp Negotiation Systems

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2:09With us right now, it's Todd Camp. Todd, you are the co-owner and chief negotiation officer with Camp Negotiation Systems. You're found on the web at campnegotiations.com. Todd, it's great to have you. Yes, Josh. Thanks for having me. All right. Yeah. Please give us an overview of the work that you do with Camp. Absolutely. So we have a system of negotiation that essentially helps teams of negotiators, executives, startup, co-founders, CEOs, really whoever negotiates for a living. it gives them a methodical process to help them prepare, execute, debrief throughout the life of the negotiation, or in some cases, business relationships.

2:53Because once you have a deal, a lot of times, right, you have to execute and work with the other party for quite some time. So anytime someone is asking you to make a decision, or they're asking you to make a decision, we actually think of that as a negotiation. So you can apply our system in any of those environments. Yeah. So when we think about negotiation, like the skills of negotiation, would you consider negotiation be more art, more science, 50-50? Great question. So I think more science in terms of how the human brain makes decisions, how people make decisions. You know, neuroscience has proven that emotion plays a key role in every decision we make.

3:38And so understanding that and how important the emotional vision of benefit to the other side of what you're asking them to agree to is incredibly important. And there's some ways to do that. But decision making is essentially what negotiations are. If you think about agreements or contracts, they're typically nothing but hundreds, if not thousands of decisions over a collected period of time that got you to that agreement. So a lot of it, we believe, is science. In terms of what you say and how you say it, to us, that is where you become the artist. So there are behavioral tools that we teach in our process, but how each individual communicates their mannerisms, the pace of their speech, their body language, the questions they ask, the words they use, to us, that is where the artwork comes in.

4:30Yeah. You'd mentioned that negotiations are emotional decisions. What if someone says, well, listen, we're just dealing with the government. There's no emotions. It's all completely binary, completely logical, no emotions involved in the decision-making process. Well, if someone said that, I would accept that statement, but understand that we have the right to disagree. No reason to call them out that they don't make emotional decisions. I'm sure there's some way that they benefit from negotiating that contract on behalf of the government. They're graded in certain ways and rewarded in certain ways.

5:11So there's absolutely still emotion involved. So unless you're a robot, it's kind of hard to turn that off. But I get the point. A lot of procurement teams try and make this all about the numbers, trying to control costs, get costs down. But those procurement teams, no matter whether they operate within Walmart or Apple, they still are rewarded and kind of, I don't want to say graded, but their performance improvement plans or their performance is graded on how well they do saving the company money. And so I can assure you they're still making emotional decisions. Yeah. Well, let's bring this down maybe to kind of like a local level.

5:58Let's say that it's a agency owner or a consultant and they're at the helm of an SMB and they're in a conversation and this is a sales conversation. What is a good like mindset or frame that we should put ourselves when we think about the dynamic of there's me who is a service provider and then there's this other person that is a potential customer, but they have some considerations of their own. Absolutely. We often ask our clients, whose world does the other party make decisions in, yours or their own? Especially when you're on the sales side, you have to keep in mind, they're going to make decisions in their own world.

6:42So everything we do very early on is trying to figure out exactly what it is we can provide the other party that's 100 % in their world to their benefit. And how do we think they want us to provide that? So we spend the vast majority of our time very early in relationships, getting to know the other party, really digging in on what their challenges are or what opportunities, you know, your product or service helps them secure that they can't secure on their own. So we want to have conversations really that gets to the heart of the matter in terms of what they're trying to, you know, what they're trying to solve for and also understanding how can we help them in that effort.

7:25Because once you have that, in our system, we call it mission and purpose. But once you have that, you almost always want to recite back what you think you've heard the other party's looking for from you. And you want to hear them say something like, that's correct, or that's right. That's exactly why we're talking to you. Or they may tune you up a little bit and say, well, yeah, those things are important, but there's also this piece that's important. Okay, great. Let's talk about that. What is it about that that has you concerned? Or what is it about that that's critical that you work on? And so we spend a lot of time in the other party's world trying to uncover what it is we can do for them.

8:08Wow. So it sounds like asking great questions is a great way to kind of enter into this, right? Because if we're just going into this, I mean, I think the opposite of that would just be railroading with everything that we want without stopping to say, listen, what is the greatest value I can provide here? And, you know, truly the way to discover that is just to ask really good questions. Would you recommend that folks, I mean, at least to kind of get the momentum on going down on this road to do this a little bit better, maybe jotting these questions down, how do we come up with really good questions to ask?

8:44Yeah, so I think this will be helpful. You know, we constantly do this exercise with our clients, especially if they're on the sell side. We believe that there's four reasons why people reject. why and how people can say no to you. The first is they lack the emotional vision of benefit associated with a yes. Second is they lack the data to support that emotional vision. Third is they don't have the authority. And fourth is they're using no as a tactic to bluff, hoping to drive concessions. So that first reason why people reject lack of vision of benefit, you've got to spend a lot of time there asking very good what we call interrogative or open-ended questions that start with what and how.

9:30What is it about X that is challenging you and your business? Let them answer that question. Follow it with how are you currently trying to solve for that? What have you done in the past to solve for that? And how did it work out? Or what was it lacking? So you want to ask good open-ended questions to get them to talk about how they see things. And sometimes you want to ask them what may appear to be pretty challenging questions to force them to think about it. Yeah. That, you know, when people are talking, they're forced to think about how do I think about this? How do I see it? Versus a lot of people we see go straight in with their PowerPoint, you know, their slide deck.

10:14They start pitching all the features and benefits and all the data they've collected over the years on how great they are. And they skip that first step of really creating vision on what it is you have that you can provide. You want people to pull from you the data. You want people to ask you how much it costs. When you start with those things, usually you create objections because they're not ready to hear it or see it. And that's a big mistake a lot of people, unfortunately, you know, trap themselves into. You know, I feel like I would be, I ask some questions, right? And I don't, some of the questions that like you're talking about, or I'm kind of like thinking about that I'd like to be asking, I'm nervous about asking those questions because it feels like I'm being, I don't want them to say, well, you're being nosy.

11:04That's none of your business. Yes. So there's a couple of things we do to relax that feeling of being uncomfortable or feeling of appearing to be pushy. One thing we do very early, once we get the meeting set, is we set kind of an agenda before the meeting. And we ask for permission, especially if it makes you uncomfortable. You have to find a way to put it on the table. Something like, you know, listen, I'm looking forward to our meeting. I'm not quite sure how much we can help you or even if we can. There will come a time when I'm happy to give you a proposal or really fill you in on exactly how we work and how we execute with our clients.

11:48But before that, it's important that I understand exactly what you're up against or what you're trying to solve for. For that reason, I'd like to start by asking some questions. How comfortable are you with that? and so you put your baggage what we call baggage or your concerns right on the table say you know i'd like to start by asking some questions that i'm hoping aren't too sensitive are you okay if i ask you those and most human beings will say yes of course go ahead yeah you're right it's my own hang-up right that's a lot of what we do it's funny our people joke we want you to become comfortable being uncomfortable.

12:29Yeah. Because our system and our method, our mindset is pretty contrarian to most negotiation methodologies out there. So being comfortable, being uncomfortable is kind of a, you know, a key requirement for the people that we work with. Because a lot of our work is coaching our clients and real deals. And so if you're not willing to be uncomfortable, and if you're not coachable, you know, we're probably not going to be that effective with you. So there is a very, very popular, probably the most popular book ever written on negotiation. And it's called Start With No. And it's written by someone named Jim Camp.

13:12I think you know him. Absolutely. In fact, I started working with him shortly after that book was published, I believe back in 2001. Up until that point before he wrote the book, he was known as a boutique negotiation coach in Silicon Valley. A lot of his clients were semiconductor executives and C-suites. He wrote that book and he had so much traffic and interest come in kind of organically through that where people were inquiring, how do I get trained in this? How do I get coaching for me or my team. And so both me and my brother, Jim, actually started working with my dad, Jim, back then. And we worked up with him until he passed in 2014.

13:58Wow. So Todd, share just a bit about the work you do today with camp negotiations, like how you engage, how you work with leaders. Yeah. So most people reach out to us thinking that they need training. and what we've discovered and we have a pretty strong belief is that training in itself is not enough so what we are known as and what we take a lot of pride in is working there is a training component we are going to train you to get you academically in a place where you understand why we're recommending you do what you do but more than that we like to take responsibility for our work. So we work alongside our client as much as they need us.

14:40People think of us as an on-demand business and we help them in each critical conversation they have with the other party. We help them prepare for that. We help them script out exactly what they want to say and how they want to say it. Sometimes we'll even do some role-playing with them on objections or things they might get pushed back on. And then we, after that, we help them debrief. And the way we debrief will actually help them identify what the next agenda should be. And then we'll do it all over again, help them prepare, execute, and debrief using our method. But we do it with pretty intense coaching.

15:16We make ourselves available, I don't want to say 24-7, 365, but pretty close to it. And because we find on-the-job training is always the best. So in order to change habits, in order for this to stick, we believe coaching very thoroughly and often is required. So our business model is we work with less people and we go very deep and we stay very long with them till as long as it takes and they feel like they got it on their own. Yeah. Your website is campnegotiations.com to our friend that's been listening to our conversation and they want more. What would you recommend they do after this interview?

15:54Yeah, so we, depending if they're an individual, You know, we do have online training, self-paced. They can go, you know, get in there and learn the system from an academic, you know, standpoint. But then we also provide, we do workshops where we come on site to our clients. We don't do public workshops, but if it's a company that wants us to come in for them and their teams, we'll absolutely travel to them and put a day or two day workshops on. And then people who, you know, their hair is on fire and they want to talk to someone right now. We do have, you know, an urgent help sign up on our website where they fill that in.

16:32And then, you know, I have a team of five coaches. So we'll, depending on who's available, we'll get to them, you know, within that day. And we'll, we'll have them describe what they're working on, who's on the other side of the table, give us a backdrop of how things got to where they are. Yeah. And then we'll be able to help them identify, you know, what's what the next step should be. So there's a whole, you can also buy the book, you know, there's self-help things that are available, but all the way up to coaching engagement, where we're going to work with you for as long as you need us. Yeah.

17:08On your website, you've got online training programs, workshops. Certainly there's the book, Start With No by Your Dad Jim, which is also an audio book. I mean, It's a classic. If you look on Amazon, it's pretty much like the, I think that and Chris Voss, which I know you've done some collaborations with Chris as well. Yeah, that's correct. The Black Swan Group, they do a heck of a job. I think Jim coached Chris and a lot of the team that he was working with at the FBI back in the early 2000s. And we've had a close relationship ever since. We have a slightly different business model than Chris because we do go very deep into the trenches of real negotiations all the time, all day, every day.

17:53But yeah, his book is outstanding. In fact, we tell a lot of people, if you're interested in our system, start with no, start there. And then if you want more, read Chris's book and you'll see more synergies between what we do and what he does probably than any other two camps, no pun intended, in the negotiation training world. There's just a lot of similarities. So, yeah, campnegotiations.com to our friend that's listening to us. There's the website in your podcast app. Just click around, click the information, click the cover art. You'll find the direct link to that. And again, you'll see everything from the book, online learning, personal coaching opportunities, and even the urgent help, which if we had more time, boy, I bet that evokes some good stories every once in a while.

18:40Never know what comes through that door. Yeah, it's pretty intense. people ask us quite a bit how can you be so calm you know our we're getting ready to run out of money in three weeks and critical negotiations happening but you seem very calm and I'm it's pretty simple number one yeah we have a system that keeps us safe and we've used it so many times that keeps us calm but number two is we've seen this situation many many times over the course of the last 20 years. So just focusing on what to say and how to say it in the next conversation is really what you need to do. So you have to find a way to block out that extreme intense pressure you feel.

19:22Excellent. All right. Again, Todd Camp, thank you so much, Chief Negotiating Officer at campnegotiations.com. Todd, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

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