How to Trade Your Way to a Better Deal Without Moving Your Price | Ep 977
6/9/202611 min
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Most people negotiate with two variables: price and a prayer. Alex uses 80. In this episode, he breaks down three street-tested negotiation tactics he's used to acquire and scale multiple businesses. He explains why negotiation is never zero-sum, how to trade small concessions for massive wins, and the framing trick that turns a cost into a free investment.
In this episode
00:00 The 3 contexts where negotiation skills apply
00:57 Tactic #1: Multiple equivalent simultaneous offers (MESOs)
02:33 MESO examples and counters
03:46 Tactic #2: Reciprocity and culture
05:05 Trading variables for value
08:00 Tactic #3: Framing offers as investments
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAlex Hormozi· Host0:00
Over my career acquiring and scaling businesses for acquisitions now com, I've done a lot of deals. A lot of these things I didn't actually learn from books. I learned them from mentors and actually seeing them do it and learning it, like, in the streets, in the real world. Most itty-bitty tactics, like, don't actually drive the needle. There's three contexts that you're gonna use each of these skills with. The first is with employees, and this goes both ways. If you're an employee trying to negotiate with an employer, then that applies. The second is gonna be vendors. Now, this also applies if you're a vendor who's dealing with customers. And then third, you've got what I would consider partners. This is when you do deals, M&A, things like that, investment. So these are kind of the three big vectors that all of this stuff applies to. So if you're like, "I'm not sure if this will work for me," you for sure, even if you don't have a business, you are an employee. And if you are an employee and you don't wanna use that, you certainly have vendors that come to your house and do things for you. Like, this is the fruit of life. You have to negotiate, and you get what you negotiate, not what you deserve. That may sound not fair, but it's also the truth. I learned this from a different mentor. They call it MESOs, but basically multiple equivalent simultaneous offers. So what does that mean? That means that I present offer A, offer B, and offer C, or just offer A and B. It doesn't really matter. You can have two offers, you can have three offers, and each of these have different prices and terms associated with them. And so what happens is when you make multiple equivalent offers, it's like embedding reciprocity. It's like, "Hey, I'm trying to be reasonable. I just wanna figure out what works best for you, 'cause all three of these work for me, but which one's better?" This is a way of actually teasing out what someone else's priorities