"Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute" by Jack Chapman

• To negotiate either a salary or a raise, sixty seconds is all you’ll need.
• Proper negotiations can double your income.
• Winning at salary and raise negotiations requires, first of all, understanding the principle of quality.
• Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten.
• Their job is to make good business deals. Your job is to see that they recognize your quality and pay you your best price.
• When you negotiate for your true value, both you and your company win.
• Good negotiations are ones in which both sides applaud the outcome.
• The employer’s first principle is Labor is intangible.
• The more problems you can do, the more complicated are the problems you can solve for someone, and the more your labor should be worth.
• Since labor is an intangible, employers know there’s no fixed price, no number chiseled in granite; rather, there is a range.
• The employer’s second principle is The main variable that determines compensation is the extent of the employee’s responsibilities.
• The employer’s third principle is very simple. The “universal hiring principle,” as careers author Tom Jackson terms it, is Make me a buck.
• Your decisions and labor must gross a company several times your salary to make hiring you worthwhile.
• Either you make more for your employer than you cost, or you go.
• Three presuppositions for this principle are: 1) Labor is an intangible; 2) Salary relates to level of responsibility; 3) Employees must make more money for the company than they cost.
• Being greedy can boomerang.
• Good negotiations, after all, are always win-win negotiations.
• A budget is the way we hold on to the illusion that we are controlling our finances.
• The best moment to talk salary with Mr. Employer is when he’s reached the judgment stage.
• When faced with a lot of applicants, they use salary as a quick, shorthand way of assessing the fit and narrowing down the list.
• Since salary is related to degree of responsibility, employers think someone earning less than the budgeted range probably couldn’t handle the job.
• Is it ever in your interest to be screened? If you’re qualified for the job, no! Don’t talk salary yet.
• Salary making rule 1 is Postpone salary discussions until you have been offered the job.
• The same applies to raises. There, the rule is never discuss a raise until you’ve had your review.
• Keeping a price flexible and open motivates people to check back before deciding.
• If the job challenges you comfortably, the right money should follow.
• You can respond confidently to any premature salary gambit with the reply, “I’m sure we can come to a good salary agreement if I’m the right person for the job, so let’s first agree on whether I am.”
• A tug of war over disclosing your money requirements hurts your chances of being hired because it destroys the rapport needed for hiring. Your rule of thumb here is to put off the first request, maybe the second, but if asked again you’ll need to handle it more directly.
• Salary making rule 2 is Let them go first.
• The best postponing phrase speaks confidence in being hired.
• Salary making rule 3 is When you hear the figure or range, repeat the figure or top of the range, and then be quiet.
• You must repeat the figure or top of the range with a contemplative tone in your voice, as if this were the start of a multinational summit meeting. Count to thirty and think.
• First, you should calculate exactly what the offer is. For example, you can easily convert an hourly figure to a yearly one by doubling it in thousands. So ten dollars an hour is roughly $20,000 a year.
• Calculate what the salary is, then compare it with your expectations of what this job should pay, considering your quality.
• The most likely outcome of this silence is a raise.
• Compare, contrast, evaluate, and then respond. What do you respond with? The truth. The truth is either “Sounds great,” “sounds acceptable,” or “sounds disappointing.” You’ll know which is correct because before the interview you’ll have researched your market value.
• Understand that a fair market value is not one neat, tidy number, but a range.
• A market value is like a puzzle made up of three pieces: your objectively researched value, your extra individual value, and what I’ll call your risk-factor dollars.
• Objectively researched value; present. Objectively researched information from current published data about the going rate; this year’s average earning range for people doing the kind of work you’re considering.
• Individual value; past. A subjective assessment of the strength of your past track record. It puts you somewhere on the scale from entry level to seasoned professional. It measures how you stack up individually above or below the competition.
• Risk-factor dollars; future. Compensation you are willing to make, contingent on your future success; speculative compensation.
• Find out in what range people get paid for work similar to yours by consulting published surveys.
• Job seekers forget they are not just giving info in the interviews, they are collecting it too.
• Before you show up at Mr. Employer’s office, you should have an opinion -- not chiseled in stone -- of your range, the highest value you think you’re worth, and the lowest you’ll accept.
• Salary making rule 4 is Counter their offer with your researched response.
• Remember, you’re not out to get every penny you can; you want only a fair salary to match your peak performance.
• When the offer is too low, don’t give up! There are many ways to increase it.
• The range you give will bracket the high end of your research.
• If you research a salary spread of $5,000, you’ll want to ask for the top of the spread if you believe your expertise merits it. Otherwise, you’ll settle for a middle range. Even if you’re entry level, however, go for a grand or two above the bottom. Sell your ambition and potential.
• Whatever you do, don’t say no in the room!
• If you can’t reach a mutually satisfying salary, you still have the lower offer.
• The first figure you hear is generally the employer’s lowest.
• Salary making rule 5 Clinch the deal, then deal some more.
• One of the reasons for negotiating the best base salary first is that raises are generally computed as a percentage on that base.
• If your raise is 10 percent one year, but inflation is 10 percent over the same time, then you haven’t received a raise at all.
• For positions in which there is a lot of travel involved, discuss the travel and mileage allowance or the possibility of getting a company car.
• If you can’t increase the money, perhaps you can reduce the time! Negotiate vacation, personal days, or your hours per week.
• No one pays you to go on vacation. You earn it.
• Money decisions are best made in the cool climate of logic and impartiality.
• It is extremely important to maintain your enthusiastic voice, gestures, and energy so your request for time is not taken as a lack of interest in the job.
• The key in buying time to leverage other offers is to concentrate not so much on getting the firm offer extended as on accelerating the pending one.
• If the offer is more complicated than the standard one of salary, benefits, and starting date, you should get it in writing right off the bat.
• Delay giving notice to your present employer until you have your letter from the new one.
• Employers will not pass you over if you’re right for the job, provided you show them respect.
• People will want to know your salary expectations as a way of understanding what level of work you want and are able to handle.
• Part of getting top dollar is your self-presentation.
• Getting what you’re worth through your image requires dressing in your salary range, displaying etiquette in your salary range, grooming in your salary range, and speaking in your salary range.
• Look around you and notice the way your target-level people dress and act. Imitate them and their supervisors.
• Besides looking the part, you also need to communicate your capabilities in a strong, positive way that is directly understandable and applicable to your prospective employer’s needs.
• If you followed salary making rules 1, 2, and 3, they’re choosing you, not your price. The really want to hire you! They think you’ll make or save them money. Evidently you have the ability to do the work or the company wouldn’t be making you an offer.
• The company’s hiring decision is based 95 percent on your personality, enthusiasm, and transferable skills. Only 5 percent has to do with your specialized knowledge. Since the company can’t teach manners and common sense, the company hires it. Since it can teach its subject, it trains you.
• If being fired, don’t sue, negotiate a severance instead.
• Severance pay should be in addition to, not in lieu of, accrued vacation and personal time.
• Employers don’t give raises, employees earn them.
• If you put your brain to it, you can actually work less time and accomplish more.
• If your mind is active and engaged in your job, productivity increases will happen automatically.
• How do you negotiate a raise? Communication. Here are three communication steps: 1) Document your results; 2) Get your boss to acknowledge them; 3) Negotiate a raise the same way you’d negotiate a salary.
• A journal can assist your career in a number of ways, but none of them is magical. You have to work at career advancement, and a journal gives you excellent material to accomplish the task.
• What do you write in your career log? There are four kinds of observations, and the first are observations about your achievements. Record these small triumphs in your journal, with enough factual information to describe exactly what happened and what the results were. The second set of observations comes from time spent studying your superiors, colleagues, subordinates, or customers. Start a policy of observing people in order to find out what their strongest talents are. The third set of observations includes your ideas for progress. Insights of genius should be recorded since they may be lost due to the frailty of human memory. The fourth kind of observation includes news items, information, or sources of information about your chosen career field, such as newspaper and magazine articles. You want to be professional, to keep up with what’s going on.
• Measure your achievements with respect to dollars, productivity, exposure, or anything else countable or measurable.
• Don’t take the ordinary responsibilities of your job for granted. Remind your boss of the benefits that come from your simply doing your job right.
• Getting other people’s input on our decisions, albeit hindsight, is a way to be even more productive in the future.
• If you do your work so well that nobody notices, nobody will notice!
• Don’t just wait for reviews and anniversaries to ask for a raise, either. An ideal time to get an increase is when changes occur at work.
• Do some subtraction. This year’s responsibilities minus last year’s responsibilities may yield a big remainder. It’s called a new job. Instead of a raise, it deserves a whole new salary based on its actual value to the company.
• If salary talk won’t screen you out and you think it will help the employer think bigger, you can share your target market value before there’s an offer.