Never Negotiate Piecemeal. →
“Mark, you need to stop negotiating point-by-point.
Our goal here isn’t to have a negotiation line-by-line. We want to know what all of their issues are first. You’re compromising on each point and that makes no sense.
Let’s get all of their issues on the table. Let’s then convene privately and rank the issues we care about and which we don’t.
Let’s be very flexible on the issues that are at the bottom of our rank and they might really care about. Let’s dig in our heels on the issues we care most about. We can trade compromises on issues that aren’t as important to us in exchange for not budging at all on our most important points.
If you negotiate piecemeal you end up compromising on everything. That’s not very smart.”
By negotiating each point up front (without knowing what all the issues are) its harder to strategise which issues you should concede on and which you should holdfast on. There will always be things that are important to you - but things which are only nice-to-haves in any negotiation.
It’s also harder to make a case for the things you really care about - you can’t really point to issues you’ve already conceded on because they were negotiated separately.
