I don’t mind negotiating. I actually like it.
When I was in Las Vegas recently with my girlfriend, we stayed at a Hilton Grand Vacations property. If you’ve never been through one of their presentations, it’s their version of a timeshare pitch. They start by showing you beautiful properties, talking about flexibility, and making it sound like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I’ll admit that, at first, it looked good. If we could have paid cash, I think it might have been worth it. But then they shifted gears and instead of talking about the actual value, they asked, “What can you afford each month?” That’s when the red flags started waving. What they were really selling was financing your vacations at 15 percent interest over ten years. By the time you were done paying, the cost would be way beyond the original price.
If we’d had more time, which they clearly didn’t want us to take, we would have done a complete cost-benefit analysis. I wanted to compare their packages with simply booking our own trips out of pocket. My gut told me their numbers wouldn’t hold up.
Then came the “handoff” tactic. We’d been talking to one guy the whole time, but suddenly he brought in his boss to “finalize” the deal. I asked why we couldn’t just keep talking to the first guy. The answer was vague and unsatisfying, which told me all I needed to know.
The first salesman was actually a really nice guy. He mentioned his daughter plays drums and might be interested in lessons. But once the big boss stepped in and I started piecing together the complete picture of the deal, it became clear it wasn’t nearly as good as it sounded. The numbers didn’t add up, and the financing terms would turn something that might have been reasonable in cash into a bloated, overpriced commitment.
That’s when I decided to flip the script and make the absurdity obvious. I told him, “Sure, I’ll give your daughter lessons. But only if she buys a drum set I own and finances it with me at 15 percent interest over ten years for thirty grand.” If you think about it, that’s exactly what they were offering us — just swap the drum set for vacation points. On paper, it’s technically possible. In reality, once you run the numbers, the total cost is so far beyond the real value that it becomes laughable.
The more I thought about it, the more it drove home the point: a deal that looks good at first glance can fall apart completely once you slow down, look past the sales pitch, and calculate the true cost. My “drum set deal” would make no sense for anyone with a calculator. Neither did theirs.
That’s the thing about negotiation: if you don’t slow down, ask the right questions, and run the numbers, you can easily get talked into a bad deal. And this applies just as much to the music business as it does to vacation packages.
A big turning point for me came last year when a bandleader recommended a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, has compiled a book full of tactics that work just as well in the entertainment industry as they do in high-stakes negotiations. Reading it was like the Spinal Tap amp that goes to 11.
My skills have become sharper, more structured, and more effective.
Here are a few things I pulled from Voss that changed the way I negotiate:
