Are you being creative in your negotiations? A little while ago, I had a client who wanted to sell his company. He had received three proposals. The first proposal worked for $1.2 million, the second proposal for $1.9 million. And the third proposal were for $2.1 million. He called me and said, Well, this is pretty easy, isn't it?

We want to sell the company to the highest bidder. And the highest bidder is the $2.1 million. I said, well hang on a second. Do we actually know what the buyers want to buy? And he said, Well, it's not really important. I just want to get the highest possible price.

And I said, exactly. Let's have a questionnaire with some of these buyers to see what is their real interest. What we actually learned was that the first buyer or the first one who made the proposal, 1.2 million, wanted to bind the client base. The second buyer, the one who was actually giving a proposal of 1.9 million he wanted to buy it patents and the intellectual property of the company. And the last potential buyer, the one who giving a proposal $2.1 million actually wanted to buy the real estate. That means the whole area where the building and the factory was actually founded.

Now, what's the conclusion of this story? Well, my client actually sold his whole company for total 3.8 million. So the conclusion is that we need to be creative. We need to focus on what is the real interest of interest of the counterpart and not assuming that we know what they want. So remember the creativity and remember asking questions