How To Prepare For A Salary Negotiation: A Check List

ike buying a house or a car, our yearly salary has a massive impact on our financial well-being. As we’ve covered before, even a small raise in the beginning of your career can have an outsize impact on your life-time earnings. Yet we’re never taught how to negotiate.

“This is an opportunity to make thousands of dollars within a few minutes, you have to take advantage,” says Jim Hopkinson author of Salary Tutor: Learn the Salary Negotiation Secrets No One Ever Taught You. Come prepared, he says, and you put yourself leaps and bounds ahead of other candidates. We asked Hopkinson how creatives can be ready for the negotiating table:

1. Get in the right mindset.

If you’ve never negotiated before (or your last negotiation went poorly), it’s likely you have some preconceived notions about negotiations being adversarial or awkward. Instead, view the negotiation as a discussion and a partnership. When negotiating, you need to aim for a “friendly but assertive” mindset. Remember that you’re not being a nuisance, you’re taking control of your financial future, an admirable and necessary aspect of being a professional.

If you’ve gotten far enough to receive a job offer or raise, the company (or client) has already invested lots of time and mental energy in you and a little negotiation is not going to make them rescind their offer.

“They’re offering you the money and a job so it may appear that they hold all the cards, but you are offering stuff in return, too. You’re going to put in your expertise and bring your experience and work ethic to the table,” says Hopkinson.

2. Research a salary range.

Before you negotiate your salary, you need to have an objective measurement of what you’re worth on the open market. By providing facts and figures backed up by research, you replace “I think I’m worth…” with “Someone in my position typically makes between $35,000 and $40,000.” The former is subjective and easily shot down, the latter is objective and encourages both sides to arrive at a fair number together.

“It shows you’re not pulling numbers out of thin air,” says Hopkinson. “Then it’s not you against me, we’re working together to make something that works for the both of us.”

Remember to research comparable job titles and companies. One company’s “community manager” is another’s “customer service associate.”

3. Show your accomplishments.

If the negotiation is for a raise, rather than a new job, you should have materials that help demonstrate your value to the organization. Depending on your field, these can be projects pushed forward, a portfolio of work completed, or clients landed. Highlight ways you made and saved the company money. It’s likely that you are one of many employees at your company, so a little refresher on your contributions can place all of your great work at the forefront your employer’s mind.

This can be anything from printed materials to an actual presentation. “I’ve had clients that did a little bit of everything and were able to show [using research] that if her company had to hire for her four different roles, it would cost them another $150,000 a year,” says Hopkinson. “So it’s planting that seed and the person she was negotiating with was probably thinking, ‘Oh God, I hope she doesn’t leave because it would be a nightmare.’”

4. Come ready to discuss more than money.

Numbers are only one side of the equation. You may offer a salary range and discover that the company can’t budge. In this case you can be willing to negotiate more than money. If you’re stonewalled on the salary, you can also discuss:

• Accelerated review schedule
• Additional vacation
• Conferences you’d like to attend (or other educational opportunities)
• Relocation fees
• An altered bonus structure

Hopkinson recalls one client who was told her salary couldn’t improve because salaries were standardized across the company. She pressed for more. “They came back and said, ‘We’ll give you a one-time bonus in January 2014, we’ll double the bonuses that we give you quarterly, and we’ll pay you for two months to live in the corporate housing for free when you move here.’”

The dollars for these perks often come out of different budgets than your salary. Teach yourself the phrase, “Are there any other compensation elements that we can discuss?”

“The main goal for you,” says Hopkinson, “is to be able to walk out of the room and say I was prepared and I did everything I could.”

5. Remember a few key phrases.

The best way to get good at negotiation is to know your numbers cold and then practice with a friend who takes different approaches each time you role play. To help deflect some common negotiation enders, you should teach yourself the following phrases and strategies before your meeting.

One of the cardinal rules of negotiation is that you should never be the first to name a number (read more rules of negotiation here). Sometimes, the other party will pressure you to come clean with what you make so they can adjust their offer accordingly. Deflect this with any of the below phrases.

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People are naturally conditioned to fill silences. When being made an offer, don’t feel compelled to answer right away. Remember: you’re in control of the conversation. Let any offers breathe and oftentimes, you’ll be on the offensive without saying a word as the other party rushes to fill the dead air.

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When you present your salary, always do so in a range and mention that you’d like to be in the upper part of said range (provided you can back up that you are successful at your role). Never name a specific number as you could be “anchoring” the number lower than if you had waited.

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And lastly, whenever you offer a number, always back it with facts that you’ve pulled from reliable sources.