How keeping quiet saved our startup $225K | Hacker News Reader

How keeping quiet saved our startup $225K

techcrunch.com

20 pointsSteliE7 comments

Really interesting post. I actually worked with a guy that would just get really quiet when someone wasn't saying what he wanted them to say, or would throw in short questions like "why?" or "how's that?" to incite some sort of need for approval in the other person.

I gotta say, it's manipulation at its finest.

The real protip here is to know a board member with enough pull so somehow a clear cut contract can be magically renegotiated. The price is just a matter of chit-chat afterwards.

Knowing the name of a board member is probably all the knowing that's required. Then a phone call to do the work. The board member is in a position to acknowledge that there's little to be gained by trying to enforce the sales contract in such circumstances...and that the sales representative can easily waste enough time and energy on trying to enforce it to more than offset any possible gain.

John, the guy at the other end of the negotiation, probably got a pretty good deal too. He got $25000, which was probably more than it cost his company to provide the service. His alternatives would have been to either (1) walk away from the contract and get nothing or (2) sue a startup company that had negligible assets and get almost nothing (or even lose money on the legal fees).

Sounds like it was a bad decision to get into this contract in the first place.

Glad for you, but 1 case is not enough for statistics :)

Isn't this just good advice overall? The key insight in the article is in the title and repeated toward the end:

   All I did was shut the fuck up
   and let it play out in front of me.

Aren't many of us often a little too eager to jump in to add our two cents, even when speaking is redundant or unnecessary? I know that it's a foible of mine!

PS I hope this post itself isn't "redundant". :) I'm trying to make the larger point that the article's advice should be viewed more generally than just for sales negotiations.

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