The oldest negotiation trick in the book is to always reject the first offer. It has a more sophisticated name, price anchoring, and there is an entire genre of negotiation literature built around it. The theory is that whoever names a number first loses, because the first number sets the psychological frame for everything that follows, and if you can get the other side to set it low enough, or high enough depending on which side you are on, you have already won before the real negotiation starts.

There is a version of this that is true and a version that will cost you deals in the Australian market.

The Performance and the Problem

In many parts of Asia, negotiation is explicitly a performance. Both sides arrive knowing the opening positions are theatre. The seller names an absurd price. The buyer reacts with theatrical offence. Both parties work toward a middle that was always roughly where the deal was going to land. The ritual is expected, respected, and efficient within its own cultural context. Nobody is offended because everyone understands the rules. I once witnesses a negotiation for an hour over five cents. When I asked why, the Taiwanese national said ‘they gave me a really good deal, so I needed to act it out’.

That is not how serious commercial negotiation works in Australia.

An Australian buyer who receives a first offer that is obviously inflated, or a counterpart who immediately rejects a reasonable opening position as a matter of principle, will not see it as sophisticated negotiation technique. They will see it as either a waste of their time or a signal that you do not understand fair market value. In a serious negotiation, either of those impressions is difficult to recover from, and some buyers will simply decide they do not want to do business with someone who plays games when real money is on the table.

Conversely Chinese people think that Australian’s are too fast in negotiation trying to rush an important decision.

Give Before You Ask

The principle that actually works, and that separates experienced negotiators from people performing negotiation, is give before you ask.

Your job in opening a negotiation is not to trick the other side into an unfavourable frame. It is to start the negotiation, progress it, and reach a result that both sides can live with. The opener matters far less than most people think. The only thing that matters is the outcome.

Being the person who puts a number on the table first is not weakness. It is leadership. It moves the conversation from positioning to substance. It signals confidence in your understanding of the deal and respect for the other party’s time. A well-reasoned opening position, one that reflects genuine knowledge of the market, the context, and what a fair result looks like, creates more trust than any amount of anchoring theatre.

Give something first. A realistic number. A clear rationale. An acknowledgement of what matters to the other side. Then negotiate from there. The deal moves faster, the relationship stays intact, and both parties arrive at an outcome without the residue of feeling manipulated.

What Actually Happens in a Real Negotiation

The variables that determine negotiation outcomes are not really about who speaks first or how aggressively the opening position is set. They are about preparation, patience, and understanding what the other side actually needs.

Preparation means knowing your walk-away point before you sit down, understanding the deal from the other side’s perspective well enough to anticipate their objections, and knowing the market well enough that your position is defensible when challenged. Most negotiation mistakes happen before the conversation starts, not during it.

Patience means being comfortable with silence. Most people are not. The instinct when a negotiation stalls is to fill the gap, to offer a concession or move the position to create momentum. Silence is almost always more powerful than that instinct. Let the other side feel the weight of the pause. More often than not they will fill it in your favour.

Understanding what the other side actually needs, as distinct from what they are asking for, is where the real leverage lives. In most negotiations there is a stated position and an underlying interest. The stated position is the number. The underlying interest is what the number represents, security, status, a board that needs to be satisfied, a budget that cannot be exceeded, a timeline that is more important than the price. Finding the underlying interest and addressing it directly is almost always more effective than fighting over the stated position.

When the First Offer Gets Accepted

There is one negotiation signal that experienced operators learn to read very carefully. If someone immediately accepts your first offer, without any pushback, any questions, or any attempt to improve their position, know that you probably left something on the table. Or, more importantly, that you missed something in the contract that is going to cost you later.

Immediate acceptance is rarely a win. It is more often a signal that your opening position was more favourable to the other side than you realised, or that there is complexity in the deal they have already accounted for and you have not. The appropriate response to immediate acceptance is not relief. It is a careful review of what you might have missed.

The best negotiators I have encountered are not the most aggressive or the most theatrical. They are the most prepared. They know the deal inside out before they sit down, they understand what the other side needs, and they are focused entirely on reaching a result rather than winning the performance. The result is the only thing that matters. How you got there is irrelevant the moment the contract is signed.

Negotiation Is a Sales Skill, Not a Separate Discipline

In a B2B sales context, negotiation is not a separate phase that happens after the selling is done. It is woven through the entire sales process, from the first conversation about budget and expectations through to the final terms of the contract. The salespeople who struggle in negotiation are usually the ones who treat it as a distinct event rather than a continuation of the relationship they have been building.

The same principles that make someone effective in the earlier stages of a sale, genuine curiosity about the buyer’s situation, honesty about what is and is not possible, patience with the buyer’s timeline, apply directly to negotiation. The ego traps are the same. The temptation to win the room rather than close the deal is the same. The discipline required to keep the focus on the outcome rather than the performance is the same.

Building that discipline into a sales team is part of what separates businesses with a sales process from businesses with a collection of individual styles. If your team is losing deals late, in the negotiation phase, after the selling has been done, it is worth looking at whether the process supports them properly through that stage or leaves them to figure it out on their own.

That is exactly the kind of problem we work through with clients at Outsold. You can read more about how we think about sales process, sales strategy, and building outsourced sales teams that perform consistently at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.