Not a guide you read once. Open it before a conversation, during it, and after — every time.
First name. It stays on this phone — nothing gets sent anywhere.
of qualified deals are lost to no decision — not to a competitor. You're not losing to the other guy. You're losing to the version of your buyer who does nothing.
Dixon & McKenna, The Jolt Effect — HBR, 2022Gong analysed 519,000 conversations. Winners ask 11–14 questions and spread them across the whole thing — average performers fire them all at the start like a checklist, then pitch. Tick these as you get them, in any order.
Gong Labs — 519,000 B2B conversations. Schweitzer & Croson (1999): when asked a direct question about problems, 61% of people disclose unfavourable information they would otherwise have left out.
This is the most heavily researched part of selling, and most of what gets repeated about it is wrong in one direction or another. Three things hold up.
When sellers make the first offer, final prices land significantly higher. The number spoken first pulls everything after it toward itself, and the other side never adjusts far enough away.
Galinsky & Mussweiler (2001) — the anchoring effect in negotiation, replicated many times since.The exception that matters: if they know the market far better than you do, going first hands them information. When you're the one in the dark, let them open.
€4,850 anchors harder than €5,000. Precise figures read as calculated rather than plucked from the air, so the other side assumes you have a reason — and concedes in smaller steps.
Loschelder et al. — precision of first offers and counterpart concession behaviour.Across 26 million real negotiations, more ambitious openings do pull the final price up — but past a point they stop working and start killing the deal outright. The relationship isn't a straight line.
Analysis of 26 million eBay negotiations, PNAS.What to do with this: decide your number before you walk in, make it precise, and say it first unless they know the market better than you. Then stop talking.
You already know the answer. The problem is retrieving it while you're also reading the room and staying composed — there's no spare bandwidth. So don't remember. Look it up.
Roughly 44% of no-decision losses are people who genuinely prefer things as they are. The other 56% aren't comfortable at all — they're afraid of choosing wrong. Same silence, opposite cause. Push urgency on the second one and you freeze them harder.
Dixon & McKenna, The Jolt Effect (HBR, 2022) — the indecision split and why urgency backfires on it.
Not a diary. Four fields. Reviewing what actually happened beats rehearsing what might — this is the part that compounds.
Two green metrics are things you control today. The grey one is the scoreboard — it only tells you what already happened.