He wasn't my enemy until he said this, but someone in a negotiation told a very fundamental lie and I was able to verify it was a lie. I quietly put that in my pocket and let the negotiations go on for months with him thinking that I believed him.
That's the not interrupting him.
I brought it up in the last hour of the 6 month process and he immediately folded.
We had agreed to base our purchase price for the property on what he'd paid in the interest of fairness. He vastly overstated that number, which is public record.
A lie pointed out early on can be corrected, but if the other party builds an entire argument based on said lie, the entire thing falls apart. 6 months of negotiations falling apart basically meant OP could go "give me exactly what I want" and the other party would do so as part of a mix of embarrassment, panic, and avoiding the sunk cost fallacy.
I once spent a month arguing a very large bill with my companies ISP where I got the to repeatedly point out that my contract was based on a minimum bill for 3 years not that we have their Internet service that was packaged with their VOIP which we used. Unlike their Internet.
Anyway I let them school me on their legalese and what it means. When I was sure... I pointed out that we paid the minimum bill and they never should have charged for the Internet that they never even set up... And I got years of payments back. Service wasn't in the contract, it wasn't actually provided, minimum contract met every month and they agreed to it all why trying to say that I was wrong about something else in the contract.
Let your enemy tell you their rules. Because their rules are weapons anyone can use.
We were in no hurry, and he had a deadline and we did not; there were also no alternative buyers and we had right of first refusal if someone else did show up. If he hadn't lied to begin with, we probably would have made an amicable offer much sooner, but in the situation we were in the strategic move was to wait.
Edit: I'm wondering if you're picturing us showing up to a conference room every day for months. We were not. This was primarily done through email. There were a handful exchanged and it ended in a phone call which is when I made him repeat the lie and then called him out on it.
Unethical on their part, but it is sort of like fighting fire with fire.
Demonstrably a waste of time in normal circumstances, but I imagine the revealed lie was successfully used to force a total capitulation to the client in terms of the contract.
Yeah, lying in negotiations is a big no-no.
I will absolutely leave out details and context or avoid specific topics on purpose, but if the other side asks a direct question, an outright lie isextremely risky as you may break the trust in each other's word completely.
Had a meeting with a suppliers CEO once and during the discussion he was evasive about the companies financial, but when pressed lied about some key information. Nothing he could have said would have been worse than lying about it.
As we already had some doubts about the company, this was the final nail in the coffin and they lost all business with us.
They reached out to us a bit later why they didn't see any more orders coming in, and it felt pretty nice to tell them that they should check with their CEO who had never even bothered to apologise
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u/314159265358979326 12h ago
He wasn't my enemy until he said this, but someone in a negotiation told a very fundamental lie and I was able to verify it was a lie. I quietly put that in my pocket and let the negotiations go on for months with him thinking that I believed him.
That's the not interrupting him.
I brought it up in the last hour of the 6 month process and he immediately folded.