The Art of Negotiation

For some, negotiation is torture.  It all feels like haggling and you are just exhausted by the experience.  All too often these creative business owners give away too much, negotiate against themselves and become more and more resentful of the whole process.  Then there are others who live for the deal.  Negotiation may very well be cultural, literally in the creative business owner’s DNA.  For these artists, negotiation is fun, a game to be won and is really never personal.  The presumption would be that those who love negotiating make for better business people than those that abhor it.  Bad assumption.

Those who love to negotiate for negotiations sake can sometimes miss the bigger picture.  Sometimes the better deal is to consciously NOT get as much as you can.  Conversely, those artists that loathe negotiating may create a pricing structure that is so transparent and simple that there is literally nothing to negotiate.  No packages here.

Regardless of your feelings on negotiation, you need to understand that it is a conversation, first with yourself, then with your client and then in the context of your overall business strategy.  Make no mistake though, it is never about price.  You will have lost far before the words “why are you charging me $x for this” ever comes out of your client’s mouth.  You are not selling widgets (or IPads).  A rose might be just another rose and cost $2.99, but how you put the rose with other roses is what your clients pay for.

Talking To Yourself – Why do you do what you do?  What is important for you – Recognition? Money? The chance to do the work you want?  Where is your center – where you feel happiest, proud of what it is you are doing and delivering both as an artist and creative business owner?  If you cannot figure out what you really need from your art and your creative business, you will be distracted by something other.  Yes, we all need to make a living and support our families.  But to what level and what purpose?  You must know that what it is that you are trying to achieve with your art and your creative business is the place you need to come from before you ever start a negotiation.

Listening To Your Client – What does your client really want from you and your creative business?  And how do you deliver that value?  Better question is how much time you spend trying to figure out how to identify, price and deliver that value?  The more transparent you are about what it is you deliver and how much it costs for you to deliver your art, the more you will gain your client’s trust.  If you have talked to yourself first, you know that not every client is your client.  The right client will trust you and believe in whatever business model you adopt so long as it is an intrinsic reflection of all that you stand for.  The wrong one never will.  If you listen, really listen, you will be able to tell the difference. Immediately.  For the wrong client, please do not let the door hit you on the behind as you leave.

The Bigger Picture – No deal is ever about itself in isolation.  Everything you do has to be in context of the overall strategy you have for your creative business.  Want to be in the upper-end of your market?  Do you get cheaper the bigger the project?  If your goal is to take the proverbial money and run, you will think it is insane to make less than you could.  However, if you want A LOT of this work, it might make A LOT of sense to have a model that has a cap on it and a minimum.  For instance, you can have a minimum fee of $x and a maximum fee of $y that will make you VERY expensive for a particular project, okay for some projects and very compelling for the larger projects.  And I am not for a second saying that you compromise yourself or your creative business, but simply honor your own integrity – make the money you need to, in the market you most enjoy and deliver incredible, compelling value to that market.  It is all a question of what you want for your art and your creative business.

Nothing you do exists in a vacuum and whether a deal is good or bad is only a function of why you are making it in the first place.  Mindfulness and perspective is a far better negotiation strategy than trying to figure out how to charge as much as you can or do the same thing for less.