There are a few concepts taught in business books and business school that are useful far outside the minor bounds within which they are taught. One of those concepts is the BATNA: the “Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.”
The concept behind the BATNA is that whenever you’re entering a negotiation, always make sure you have a really, really strong “Plan B” you will happily and enthusiastically commit to in case the negotiation for what you want doesn’t work out. This is important not just for practical reasons, but for psychological and emotional reasons. Once you have a Plan B you really like, you will subconsciously negotiate much stronger and much better than you would if you didn’t have one. As an example, if you have a good BATNA, and if the other side refuses to give in to a key point, you will be able to just walk away, in a way that you would be too scared to had you not had a BATNA.
My extrapolation of the BATNA principle is to apply it to every request to your boss, client, or really anyone.
Compare:
You: Bossman, please read this report I’ve prepared for you on why we need to start really investing in SEO.
Bossman: No, sorry, I just don’t do SEO because I’ve had terrible experiences with it before.
You: Ah, okay. No worries, I have lots of other ideas and I’ll brainstorm on other strategies.
Now, compare that to this:
You: Bossman, please read this report I’ve prepared for you on why we need to start really investing in SEO.
Bossman: No, sorry, I just don’t do SEO because I’ve had terrible experiences with it before.
You: Yeah, SEO almost always fails and the two main causes are not having a targeted landing page, and not producing enough content fast enough. That’s why my proposal purposefully addresses these two risk factors upfront. Also, how about this: I can rework the proposal so that we can start the SEO experiment in a very small and very cheap way, with a measurable test so that if it goes well, we can scale it up. This removes all risk.
Bossman: I like how you think!
Now, it could be that you just thought of that response in real-time. Maybe you’re just that smart—I hope you are! But it could also be that you just thought he would say “no” to your proposal before even reading it, so you already thought of how you would respond in case he says “no.”
The bigger point here goes way beyond little requests for your boss. Think about bigger requests. You want a huge—truly huge—raise because you’re that good? Before you go in to ask for it, don’t just plan out a BATNA, but be very confident in it.
