'When Linda Babcock asked why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses and most female students were assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask."'
Incidentally, for a while, the authors would give a free copy of this book to women who would ask for one.
A professor of mine one asked the class: "How would you like to live your life 10% better?" Everyone was like "yeah, of course"
The professor's friend would always ask for discounts, everywhere he went. He would normally get a discount of about 10%. This was simply because he asked. His theory was that if he could get a discount, why not ask? It doesn't hurt anyone and you just have to get past the social stigma of "haggling."
So the professor's challenge for us until next class was to ask for a discount, or more simply "is that your best price?"
Some of the results:
A friend of mine got a free appetizer at a restaurant he frequents
At least 3 people found out that Taco Bell has a student discount program
One person used this in his salary negotiation (literally "is that your best offer?") and instantly got a 5K bump. He was going to take the job anyway, but got $5k more without any hassle.
If you had called the office supply chain where I previously worked and I was being very strictly attentive to policy "Is that your best price?" would not have been the magic words but probably would have gotten you the accommodation I'm about to describe from 99% of our CSRs.
Basically, we sell the same stuff via a variety of channels, and the catalog you have in front of you (if you're a regular customer) is systematically above the prices available to other customers like, e.g., schools districts, small businesses in California, people responding to our fall circular, etc etc. The actual software mechanism for this was a three character catalog code, which would cause the system to reprice everything when it was changed. If you were ordering from CAT (the big published book that 98% of orders came from, and you said the magic words -- canonically, "Can you do anything about lowering the price?" -- I would tell you that we had a competitive bidding process and, if you'd give me one second, the computer would come up with our best competitive bid for your business deletes CAT, writes BID ahh, I see we can knock 10% off the order)
There was actually a Bids group, but you'd have to be ordering office paper by the truckload (literally -- some people do) to be worth their attention. The folks in charge of things had long since decided that it was cheaper to just give 10% to anyone who asked than to involve the folks in Bids on $400 accounts or lose business because a law firm secretary decided to do price shopping prior to placing her order.
Of particular note: there is literally nothing you can say, starting from "You're placing an order in CAT", that would cause you to pay more money than the CAT prices. Savvy purchasing managers understand this, which is why purchasing departments almost without fail spent the extra 5 seconds asking for a discount.
... which is why nobody can quote a real price on a website when selling to big companies; they all have purchasing groups that are required to secure discounts.
Which is why you need to keep your price under the purchase authority for department heads if you do want to sell to big companies via a website.
AKA "The Atlassian Model":
Scott realized that to get adoption, the software had to also be inexpensive. This meant there was often no need to get approval from the C-suite.
Another key was the simplicity of the sales process. “We have a standard contract and there are no discounts,” said Scott. “We do not want to waste time and money on legal."
I've done a fair amount of negotiating (on both sides) and to me saying that telegraphs "I'm going to buy but please throw me a bone so I can keep my pride".
I use the same technique in reverse to get a few extra bucks out of a buyer sometimes so as to not screw an already good deal (when looking a gift horse in the mouth).
Say someone is willing to pay $5000 for something and I would gladly accept. I don't want to loose the deal so I say "do you think you can do $5500??". If in their mind they have money on the table they will normally do the deal but it gives me the ability to accept the initial or latest offer if they won't. It's like a Rorschach test in a way interpreted differently depending on the mindset of the other party.
It seems that most/all of our competitors work this way, and I wonder why they're so inflexible. We negotiate different rates for every customer (although it turns out that in practice, most smaller customers work out essentially the same).
There's much more to pricing than just "you get 10% off regular price". It may come out that a company who replaces their computers less frequently, is more concerned about software costs than hardware, so we can adjust according to those categories. And, of course, in the realm of large customers, there are the licensing agreements that they negotiate directly with the manufacturers. So every one of our customers has a customized catalog reflecting their specific needs.
I happen to be responsible for the systems that maintain all this catalog data. Updating all of this (our master product list is well over a million products, multiplied by the costs offered for various customer types [e.g., education frequently gets a lower underlying cost] from all of our various suppliers, is a mountain of data) in a timely fashion, when our distribution costs and inventory levels change nightly, is a real technical challenge.
I've been doing this for a while (I think it comes from my dad talking every where we ever went into giving him a military discount). I've gotten a good amount of free food (appetizers and desserts mostly) just by asking for it, as well as fairly large discounts. It works amazingly well.
Yet when it came to salary negotiation for my first (and current job, I was too scared to ask for more because I didn't think I held any cards. I was fresh out of college with no internships and from a pretty mediocre school, and in an area with close to 0 software companies. I know everyone says that they won't take an offer away because you asked for more, but it felt too important to chance it. In the future however I don't ever plan on just taking the initial offer.
Fresh out of college and your first job, you didn't hold many cards. I think you made exactly the right decision. (And I'm not just saying that because it was mine, either!)
But yeah, in the future, look for a job while you don't have pressure and you can afford to be pickier and ask for more. (I did this, also.) You might be amazed at the results.
> It doesn't hurt anyone and you just have to get past the social stigma of "haggling."
I agree that this makes sense for salaries and used cars, but if you do it for small-ticket transactions, isn't that like saying, "Hey, you can save a bunch of money as soon as you get past the social stigma against tipping 0%"?
I have lived for years in countries where there is no tipping and after the first week I found it quite easy to save 10-25% on every meal I ate in a non-fast food restaurant. Occasionally I'd round up and not ask for change, but it wasn't such a tough transition.
What I found more troublesome was last week at a restaurant in Toronto when we used a gift card to pay and the tip was off the net charge to the credit card (when we'd calculated the % off the gross amount of the bill) and so the tip ended up being half what we'd expected. The server was noticeably upset and we didn't know why initially, and left wondering. In the parking lot we figured it out and couldn't decide to go back or not to give extra cash tip. But because we probably won't go there again (service and food was great, but inconvenient to get to) and no one had change they were willing to give up, we drove away.
I wonder why women do not ask more. Especially with something like dating. It happens but far less regularly than the other way around. I wonder if that leap of faith contributes to men being more comfortable to negotiate/ask for higher income.
It's definitely a function of social conditioning -- how else would it vary so much based on the community in which one is raised?
When it comes to salary negotiations, most lower-SEC (socio-economic class) country women I know will counter their first offer. Getting more than the initial offer makes them feel respected; they want to see that the employer wants them enough to make a concession. Most higher-SEC urban and suburban women I know won't ask -- they'll take or turn down the initial offer, but they tell me that asking for more money would make them look whiny and high-maintenance.
Growing up in the country, being able to haggle was a badge of honor. One haggles (or at least asks about discounts/freebies) everywhere from garage sales to car dealerships to the local fabric store. I cannot tell you how many times as a child I heard my mother, grandmother, and aunts say "it never hurts to ask". It's considered mostly a woman thing there -- I get funny looks from the men for teaching my 8yo son to haggle, but my male friends ask me to come shopping with them to handle negotiations.
The women I know from the techie world (all from higher-SEC and more urban backgrounds than I) may look for advertised sales, but haggling or asking for discounts not offered is seen as showing weakness/looking poor. When I go ahead and haggle around them, they say things like "I cannot believe you just said that!" or "You are embarrassing me, we don't need a discount that badly, we can afford this."
As adults, we seem to translate that consumer experience to how we approach salary negotiations. Both groups pursue the strategy that they were raised to believe shows confidence and strength.
My advice: if you want your daughter (or son) to negotiate a higher salary as an adult, teach her (or him) to haggle young. That garage sale where she/he asks "If I buy all twelve of these books [marked 50 cents each], would you sell the lot for five dollars?" will eventually become
"Would you consider 70k/year?" (in response to an offer for 55).
http://www.womendontask.com/
'When Linda Babcock asked why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses and most female students were assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask."'
Incidentally, for a while, the authors would give a free copy of this book to women who would ask for one.