While I loved the sentiment, that was woefully brief and seemed to focus mostly on buying a good, such as a car or toaster. Here's a larger guide.<p><i>If you think you're close in price, the first person to name a price usually loses</i><p>For example, if you want to hire someone to do recruiting for you, if they say they charge X% of a candidates salary, you might find out that X% is less than what you were willing to pay. Win! (Assuming you trust their competence).<p>This isn't always true, though. If you think someone is willing to offer 25K on a contract and you start our with 75K (even though you'd settle for 40K), you <i>might</i> radically readjust their thinking of the value. Car salesmen do this all the time when they tell you that $5,000 car is selling for $13,000.<p><i>Isolate the other side's true objections to completing the deal, not the irrelevant fluff (this is hard)</i><p>If someone says "I don't know, your software doesn't implement X", they might be using this as a negotiating ploy and not as a real objection. Your response might be "so you're saying that if we implement X, you'll sign the contract?" If they say "yes", you have a real objection to work on. Otherwise, you may have to do more digging.<p><i>Most people won't agree until you've asked them several times, usually in different ways.</i><p>People rarely say "yes" the first time, but you can't just repeat "will you buy this now?" five times. Instead, when they don't say "yes", you need to spend time isolating their objections or trying to build more rapport.<p><i>Only budge in small amounts</i><p>I've seen this kill so many deals. If you're selling a project for 10K and you're suddenly willing to drop to 6K, the other side will very reasonably start questioning the actual value. If they're stuck on price (really bad!), and you say well, what if I can get management to agree to 9.8K? That's setting up expectations of not having much wiggle room in price and that perhaps the price is actually fair.<p><i>Compromise</i><p>This can be hard if you're just selling a toaster, but if there are several aspects to a deal, try to balance them. For example, if your customer insists upon only paying 7K for that 10K product, but you also offer support for three years, try saying "what if I can get you 9.1K, but as a compromise, you allow the support contract to only run for a year?"<p>Notice that you're still not dropping your price much (keeping them in the realm of "we have real value in this product"), but you're trying to meet their immediate need (price) and they help you out by letting you lower some other costs.<p><i>Sell on value, not price</i><p>Critical! There's a reason people still pay for Microsoft Office rather than simply adopting the free alternatives: for many people's needs, MS Office is simply a better <i>value</i>. Once you convince someone of the <i>value</i> of something, everything else is much, much easier. If your business plan revolves around "cheaper than all of our competitors", you've already lost. It's often OK if you're cheaper than your competitors ... your clients will discover this ... but they won't buy if they're not sold on value.<p>In fact, many have discovered that higher prices often convince people of higher value even though it's not manifestly true. I know of one person (who I am obviously not going to name) whose business was dying, even though he offered a very competitive product. He got frustrated one day and jacked his prices through the roof. Sales increased magnificently and now he has a large staff and is developing multiple products.