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Negotiation coach Alex Carter will lead two PCMA Business School sessions during Convening Leaders 2025, on Jan. 14, as well as a live coaching session afterward.
Negotiation coach Alex Carter starts off her April 2024 TEDx talk, “How to Ask for More — and Get It,” by saying the most important things she knows about negotiation she learned in a kayak. In the talk, which has more than 580,000 views at the time of this writing, she says that she had already been teaching negotiation strategies for a few years before getting in that kayak with her husband while honeymooning in Hawaii. But after the two of them flipped the boat over three times because they were each rowing their own way, their guide advised them that they would need to “negotiate” the kayak to the beach. Carter had never heard the word used that way, and she realized, she said, that she had been missing “something important.”
Many of us have misconceptions about negotiation, she said. “We’re taught that it’s a battle over money, that it involves losing. So, we either fear it or we avoid it altogether.” The idea of negotiation as a contest of wills was also flipped on its head that day. “When I negotiate my kayak toward a beach, what am I doing?” she asks. “I’m steering.” The first of five lessons she shared in her talk: Negotiation is simply any conversation in which you are steering a relationship.
Carter, a Columbia Law School professor, United Nations negotiation trainer, and author of the best-selling book, Ask for More: 10 Questions to Negotiate Anything, will lead two PCMA Business School sessions during Convening Leaders 2025, on Jan. 14: “Strategies to Ask for More and Achieve Better Negotiation Results” and a live coaching session directly afterwards. She shared with Convene how event organizers can steer relationships with their supplier partners with greater ease — and what Convening Leaders participants can expect to get out of her sessions.
How would you sum up the way you think about negotiation?
When I tell people about my negotiation approach, I say simply, “I don’t request. I recruit.” I never want to be talking to somebody across the table. I want to be figuring out, “How do I write their victory speech in the course of also writing mine?” I want to think about ways to use things like questions to pull them around to my side of the table so that we are now co-conspirators working toward a common goal.
People often talk about negotiation like you are facing off against your adversary, but in most businesses, especially in the event planning business, that “adversary” — the person who’s running the hotel, the catering person, the designers you’re contracting with to do your event — they become your partner once that negotiation is done. You’re working together to produce the best, most effective, most impactful event possible.
So my entire approach is about thinking about how I can work with the other person to produce something that’s going to simultaneously be a good deal for my company and also is going to want to make them work with me over and over and over.
I love that, especially since our industry is very relationship based. One of the things that planners bemoaned after the pandemic was the loss of relationships they had established with suppliers, due to attrition, so your approach about building long-term relationships really resonates.
I’ll say that one of the things I like to talk about is building “thick relationships” with each client, each supplier, each partner you’re working with. So thinking about how you can avoid a situation where you only know one person at the venue. How can you simultaneously get to know multiple people there and have them get to know multiple people on your side?
First of all, when you do that, it increases the odds that somebody connects, and it becomes a really fruitful partnership. But also, with so much volatility in the job market, and so many people moving from company to company or place to place, those thick, durable relationships not only mean that you might retain that current vendor as a partner, but maybe the original person you formed the relationship with likes you so much that, wherever they go next, they’re calling you to work together.
One other thing: A cardinal rule I have is never treat anybody like the pass-through. I don’t care if I’m calling a hotel and I get somebody from the front desk on the phone. Never assume the amount of power or influence somebody has. When I get a front desk clerk, when I get the assistant to somebody I’m looking to talk to, I engage that person. I form a relationship with them. Sometimes I’ll ask them how they’re doing and how I could help them at their job. I have found, more times than I can count, that that person who initially picks up the phone has tremendous influence behind the scenes, and by treating them like a real partner, not the pass-through, you can turn them into an advocate for the deal.
Can you give us a sense of what Convening Leaders participants can expect from your sessions?
I’m going to take folks on a journey of sorts. I want to show them some of the mistakes I made early on in my career. I thought about negotiations the wrong way. I went about it the wrong way. There came one moment where I realized everything I’d learned had been wrong. That moment was my honeymoon.
I learned a powerful lesson about negotiation on my honeymoon that I have carried with me for the rest of my life. This one moment led me to be in the driver’s seat, to inhabit the driver’s seat of my career in a way that I had never felt before. Since that moment, I have traveled around the world sharing with people just a few simple techniques they can use to not only feel confident and in command in any negotiation situation, but also to live according to their values.
Ask More Questions, Get More Results From Your Negotiations
In other words, we can do good in the process of doing well. We can simultaneously produce incredible events, have a thriving career, and also be the person that partners around the country and the world want to pick up the phone and do business with. We can make a lot of money and we can live in integrity.
I hope, using a combination of research and personal stories, to give people some hope, some inspiration, and some tactical tools that they can take with them and put them into practice that day. At the last event I did, somebody came up to me on the final day of the conference and said, “I want you to know I negotiated something today that more than paid for my attendance at this event. Thank you so much.” That was a conference for event planners.
This was a person who was about to undercut herself on an event. The event had grown much larger, at the client’s request, than the original budget. The event planner went with it, executed perfectly on the new plan, and then almost cut her fee at the last minute, without even going to the client first. After hearing my talk and going through my workshop, she decided to approach the client in candor and said, simply, “The plan changed. We created a beautiful new event together. Here’s the investment.” The client just said, “Okay,” and paid it. It more than paid for that person’s registration. Just one call.
My hope is that people will leave this experience with tools they can put into practice at work immediately, and also tools that will be helpful to them in their personal lives outside work, because we don’t stop negotiating when we clock out for the day. The tools I’m going to teach can be useful in any human relationship you have. I do not guarantee results on people under 18 — I have a teenager in the home and I’m still working on it. But over and over, people tell me that these tools simply make their lives better. That’s what I want to share with them. You don’t have to fear negotiation. It’s just a conversation.
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.
On the Web
Learn more about:
- Convening Leaders at conveningleaders.org
- Alex Carter at alexcarterasks.com