Mastering Sales Negotiation: Insights from Saad A Saad

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, welcome back to the Sales and Marketing podcast.

And Matt, today we have Saad joining us, who has a pretty amazing book out. And the book is all around consulting and mastering your sales negotiations. And I just figured we'd have to get him on this show to talk about sales negotiations,

maybe even negotiations in business in general. So Saad, welcome to the show. I'm excited about it. Thank you both for having me on. My first question to you is, why did you write the book? Yeah. So I used to teach in academia.

And I taught negotiation. And then after I finished teaching, I started working, training salespeople on negotiation skills. And I saw this big disconnect. In the sense that there was all this research and science on negotiation, but the sales context is so unique.

And while there's a lot of negotiation books out there, they don't particularly speak to the sales context. And in my mind, the sales negotiation is different from any other kind of negotiation. So I wrote a book kind of combining the two and speaking directly to the sales context

and what you have to do in a sales conversation to make sure that you end up with pretty good outcomes at the end of the day. Yeah. So I agree with you. And the whole premise of this podcast is Matt and I think that in modern times, sales and marketing

should not be separate organizations. They can be joined at the hip. I want to start this conversation from a sales point of view, but eventually we're going to come back because there's also internal negotiations. Sometimes marketing people have to do.

And in today's world, sometimes marketing leaders have to negotiate with the sales leaders as well. I agree with you. The dynamics of a sales conversation that eventually leads to a closed deal is different every single time.

Each industry is different. Each vertical is different. Enterprise deals are different than SMB deals. What are some of the things that you see where that sales people make a mistake on when they're starting this process

and when they're starting negotiations? Yeah. They don't negotiate. That's the biggest mistake, right? Or they perceive that negotiation starts 70 or 80% of the way. The assumption is that the way in which people think about negotiation is negotiation starts

when procurement gets involved or when the customer starts pushing back on price. And that's a misdefinition of negotiation altogether. People tend to think of negotiation as bargaining or handling around deal terms.

I don't think about it in that way. I think about it as outcome-based conversation. So anytime, whether it's me in marketing or whether it's me and my client trying to reach an outcome in a conversation, what we're doing is we're negotiating.

And if we're in a negotiation, then I as a person, I as a salesperson, have to make sure that I'm actually negotiating and actively pursuing what it is that I'm trying to achieve in the conversation. Dude, you are singing our song.

So I think I agree. I think negotiation starts with the first customer interaction. I also think that the goal of negotiating is not to beat up the other person or other company. The goal is to come to a fair deal. By the way, tell me if I'm wrong because you're an expert at this.

I also think that usually the person that comes out on top of negotiations is the one that has the most information, not the one that's the biggest bully or the one that can bluff the best. Yeah, I mean, if you're a bully,

I never want to work with you altogether again. And our relationship is damaged and your credibility and the trustworthiness is damaged. The argument that I make in my book, Mark, is you shouldn't go into negotiation with a sort of wind-boost mentality

because that doesn't get anywhere. You're dealing with a person. Nobody wants to walk away feeling like they've lost feeling like they just dealt with a jerk and they got walked all over. But I would also argue that you shouldn't walk into negotiation with a mentality of trying to find a win-win outcome.

I find that when salespeople have this mentality in negotiation, what they tend to do is they tend to be less ambitious. They tend to accommodate and say they got a good outcome and they tend to land on a lot less creative outcomes by the end of the day. Ultimately, I think your job in the conversation

is to land on your most optimal outcome. That's a different goal than finding win-win outcomes. What that really requires of you as a salesperson is to figure out what is it that you're trying to achieve, how you're going to support it, how you're going to justify,

and how you're going to make sure that that relationship ultimately stays intact by the end of that conversation. Yeah, and a lot of that is actually driven by sales leadership, usually the financial incentives they put in front of salespeople. I told a story a while back around when I worked for a company

and they changed the sales comp where they incited us to lock up customers long-term wise. We made more money. So in those negotiations, I was trying to increase the term of the deal and my fellow sellers were too

and we could care less about margins. And so there was a mistake by the company because we did what they incited us to do, but it lowered the profitability of the company. We had everybody locked up in five-year deals. Fantastic, yep.

They were bad deals, but they were locked up. Yeah, so knowing what you want to accomplish, I think probably is one of the first things you need to do. What else do you see salespeople do as far as making mistakes in the negotiation? Salespeople are typically people, people

in the sense that they love to build relationships. They love to connect with people. They love to have rapport and they want to make sure that that report stays intact. And just on a sort of like a macro perspective, 30,000 feet, they tend to avoid tension in negotiation.

They tend to avoid friction in negotiation. They're afraid, if I say no, or if I start pushing back, that that's going to damage the relationship. And I'm like, if you say no and that's going to damage the relationship, you don't have a relationship.

You have a one-way street where the other side sort of dictates the terms and you just kind of go along. One of the things that I argue in my book is friction is really at the heart of negotiation. There's a quote in my book in the beginning that says,

gosh, I forget to come to me at some point, but in essence, suggesting that really, in order to optimize in order to reach creative outcomes, there needs to be a healthy level of friction in the conversation.

Yeah, agree 100%. It is interesting. I think it's also a human nature trait. We're wired to be social beings and people have these, especially young sellers,

have these unrealistic fears. Oh, if I go up on my price, they're going to tell me, no, we're doing business with somebody else. No, if they spent all the time to let you come to them,

talk to them, do proposals, propose something, meet with a negotiating team and the decision making team. They're not going to say, no, and get out of here.

They're not. And yet a lot of young salespeople, especially, and actually some elders too, they have that fear. And I think that fear causes people to not negotiate to their best standards.

And I think if you get around the fear of whatever this imaginary bad things can happen and understand the business, I think you're in a much better place when you're negotiating. Yeah, absolutely.

Nobody wants to come off unreasonable. I want to make sure I come off reasonable in the conversation. As a result of trying to come off reasonable, sometimes there's a tendency for people to not be as nearly as ambitious

as they can be. Or one of the things that they start to do is start to immediately convey flexibility to the other side. We can work with you. I can do this or I can do that.

And what you're doing in those conversations is when you leave the other side that there's a lot of room for negotiation. You're inviting negotiation. You're telling the other side, I'm willing to work with you.

And perhaps they start to be left with the impression that there's some kind of discount I could get here. Or there's better terms. Let me continue to push and see what we can land on. Yeah, and those concessions,

I see a lot of people making a mistake is they'll just almost offer the concessions. And the concessions, a lot of people think concession is price. Sometimes it could be other things. Speed of getting whatever the product or service

is being delivered. Support, terms, payment terms. Or we could hit you with a lump sum to hit your CAPEX budget. Or do we rent this solution to you? Hit your OPEX budget.

There's all kinds of levers you can pull when you're making concessions. I think you need to understand the person sitting on the other side of the table, what levers do they have to pull, and what levers do you have to pull.

I'm seeing that going on right now. And I don't want to get into politics, but our current presidential administration is throwing tariffs around. And when I first saw it happening and people were freaking out,

it's like, to me, it was obviously just a negotiation lever. He only has so many levers to pull and implementing a tariff is causing the other party, in this case, a country,

to come to the table and let's renegotiate terms. But that's understanding what levers you have to pull in those type of concessions. Yeah. I find it's like, when I start talking to potential prospects,

I'm trying to understand what's wrong. They want to know, can you help me? What do you need help with? How long does it take and how much does it cost? Those are kind of the frameworks in which I go into it.

And those are kind of the things I'm trying to check off. You said earlier, value-based outcomes. And if you're going for a win-win situation and they're talking to you, they're trying to solve something. And so if you can figure out what they're trying to solve,

what is the value of that to them? And then you can credentialize yourself and show in a multiple different ways that you can do it. Now you can have a real discussion about, okay, how long is it going to take? How are we going to get there?

Because those are also levers, Mark. I feel like of like, do you want to do it really fast? Because there's like a premium to that. Or are we spacing this out? Are we going to do it in phases?

I think you're just really trying to get clarity on the shape of the deal. And once you understand the shape of the deal, and usually they'll bring to you, if you're building that rapport, to the table of like what they have to do

because they want to get the deal done. And then it's more of like, okay, how do we structure this? Because you know everything on your end is going to deliver that. I know everything on my end.

And that we can get to that resolution where we can both win. Because to your point, Mark, let's not go all the way back and start over with a new vendor. If we've been investing this much,

because you've checked these boxes. So I use the term, or when I was doing sales like gating, getting through the first hurdle, and then getting to that next phase. And if you can keep moving forward

and you gate it where you can't move backwards, you can progressively going down that thing. But you want to get those things, I guess, identified on the front end. I don't know if you can speak to any of that. Absolutely, Matthew.

So negotiation starts right in the beginning of the conversation. To set yourself up for success in the deal terms conversation, there's things that you need in the beginning to make sure that you're able to succeed.

And specifically, what you're negotiating on behalf of in the beginning is information. There's some specific information that you need from the other side that sets you up for success. That gives you a strong foundation

that justify the terms that you're going to lobby on behalf of later on. Three things that I think are absolutely critical. One, you need to figure out how the client is defining the problem that they're running into.

This is absolutely critical. Why? Because you're going to sell value at some point. And if you don't figure out what problems they're running into, then you're just sort of shooting darts in the ocean. You're not going to be relevant in your messaging.

Two, you need to figure out what alternatives are they considering? Are they comparing you to this competitor or that competitor? Because competitors are going to influence how they define the problem.

And ultimately, you need to differentiate from those competitors if you don't want to get commoditized. Three, and I think really importantly, really critically, you need to figure out

how are they going to make their decision? Meaning, are they the only decision maker in this situation? Or is their colleague also a decision maker? Is Perkarmic going to get involved at some point? Once you leave that initial sort of discovery phase

in the beginning and you secure this information, what you should be able to do, Matt, is you should be able to lay out the entirety of the process. You should be able to say, you know what, in order for me to get to signature,

these are the steps that I need to go through. Go ahead, Matt. I know you had to come. I think the biggest thing that a lot of people don't ask, and I find myself having to have it written down in front of me,

where are you at in the deal cycle? Where am I coming into it? If it's an RFP process, like they're coming to you, we need something like, I had a multinational company go,

we need something by Monday. And it was like Wednesday. And I was like, okay, like, am I just fodder to make sure that you have a selection here? Or is this like for real?

There was a lot of qualifying questions to know, and is this a real deadline? Is this a real deadline? Who else are you talking to? And if they're not willing to give up that information,

I don't know. I find the likelihood of the deal progressing becomes less and less because if someone's not open to say, like, I want to work with you, they're going to share that with you.

They shouldn't maybe give you the information of the other client, but they should at least tell you some of where the buoys are and how to navigate around them. Yeah, it's a two-way street.

It needs to be a two-way street. If it feels like you're the one doing all the work and they're not doing anything, it's not likely to end up as signature at the end of the day.

So you have to negotiate these many commitments all along the path, them sharing information, them being transparent with you, them giving you data, them introducing you to their colleagues.

If you're not able to secure any of those gifts initially, it's either that they haven't seen the unique value that you can provide, or they're just not serious and you're a price check

or something else is happening there. Yeah, I would love to hear from you from the academia side or from like data or study side of a big data guy. Where in kind of the process of sales

have you seen people go wrong or where the data suggests something that goes against the trend and people haven't adopted that yet? I would love to bring in kind of what you've seen in the data

into certain points in the sales process. Tell me a little bit more about that when you say sales process, is there... Okay, no, sorry, negotiation process. Like when you're negotiating, I guess, you said you were in academia a lot,

right, before this and you saw the real world didn't match. There wasn't exact matches. So are there data points that you had where there's that mismatch to kind of set the record straight

and create some alignment for people that are in the field doing this where maybe data suggests doing it a little bit different than what the natural trend is? Yeah, absolutely.

I'm going to give you like the research study that perhaps really influenced my foundational thinking of negotiation. Yeah. That influences how people should look at negotiation altogether.

So here's the research study. We tell two people to be collaborative in negotiation by telling both people that what you should do is empathize with the other person and try to find a win-win outcome.

The next group of people, we tell them, who cares about the other person? Only care about your outcome. Try to secure your most optimal outcomes. We want to see who does better in this situation. Now, there's a third group.

The third group is we take one person that's a cooperator, one person that's a competitor, meaning we tell one person care about the other person. We tell the other person,

only care about yourself. I hope you're keeping up here, but there's three groups. We want to see who does the best in this conversation and we want to see who does the worst.

You want to take any guesses at who does the worst? It's either the two people who come in hard-headed or the two people that are told, ultimately, to just worry about the other side and try to find an outcome

that works for them as well. I'm going to guess it was the two people that were hard-headed. Matt, what's your guess here? I have no idea. I think the people that,

one thinking about themselves and one thinking about the other person, probably came up with the best solution. They do. Yeah, that's amazing. You're right.

They do, but here's who does the worst. This is the counterintuitive finding that really influenced my thinking and negotiation. You would think the two hard people did the worst, right, Mark? It doesn't go anywhere.

It's the attitudes, behaviors. This person is difficult to work with. They're trying to beat me. I don't want to lose. Actually, the two people that are told to be collaborators

and strictly empathize with the other person do the worst. Why? Because they tend to lie in on the quickest outcome and they compromise and concede and are not creative at all

because there's no friction. There's no tension. There's no pushing. There's no back and forth. There's no incentive for people to start to think outside of the box.

We know that the two people who want to collaborate with one competitor tend to do the best. That influences my thinking and negotiation quite a bit because there's this tendency

for salespeople in the conversation who want to avoid friction, who want to avoid tension, who want to make sure that they continue to have a relationship and that report with the client.

That doesn't necessarily yield to the most positive outcomes in the conversation. I think in the conversation to be impactful and effective, you need to have that relationship.

You've got to have both. You've got to have both. You still got to have boundaries. These are my needs and let me think about the other person and if you have somebody doing each one of them,

you're going to come to the better outcome because if two people are going at it and they're not considering at all anything, like if you're two of anything, it might be too much. And I would even say

the two people that are going directly head to head, if they're looking for their own outcomes but they're going to come to a resolution, they're probably going to get the best terms for each of them

at some point, you know, but it might sacrifice the relationship at a certain point too. So there's probably a threshold of selfishness or whatever you want to call it in achieving your own outcomes.

You brought us up to a really interesting man. I don't want to glaze over. You mentioned earlier about an RFP and in our space, the deals are enormous. They're global.

They're complex. At the same time, you're also dealing with dedicated buyers. So procurement and supply chain who are just as good, if not better than you are

at getting what they want out of things. But one of the things I've seen, I love how you brought it up about the short timeframe with the RFP. We know what that is. Somebody needs another entry.

You have zero chance of winning the RFP unless it's just pure blind luck and you're wasting your resources. And if you ask them that, they should tell you that. But here's a perfect example

how supply chain or procurement in oil and gas has its own metrics and business drivers, which sometimes are different than the business side who internally hired supply chain to run the RFP. And that's why it's so important

as a salesperson to figure out who the actual buyers are. You know, the supply chain RFP people, you're just a number. You're another deal they have to negotiate that day

and they got another one right after you that day after blah, blah, blah. But if you can't reach out to the people that need the product or service that engages supply chain, the decision making team, so to speak,

you will never get the information you need to respond properly or to be able to negotiate. So the audience, if you're listening to this, I know you get issued RFPs all the time if you ask the supply chain or your procurement contact, hey, can I talk to the decision making team

and they say no and they mean it. My suggestion is to walk away from the deal and go find another one because you're not going to be able to be in a position to meet their needs or to negotiate a good deal.

And supply chain is intentionally using that lack of information to help. That's one of the levers that they can pull. And if they're pulling it, I think the only counter to it is to just walk away. And if you walk away,

you'll be surprised about 40% of them will come back later and go, okay, we'll let you talk to the decision making team. They also don't give you all the information. They might not have all the information. There might be things that are in the RFP

or whatever the problem they're trying to solve is, it might not be explained in the right way. So you're operating on a deficit of like, I don't really know what I'm trying to solve. No, Matt, you're absolutely right. The supply chain person is a trained buyer.

But if they're buying drill bits or if they're buying pay-per-click ads or if they're buying steel-toed boots, they don't know that world. They just know they have to try to get for the cheapest price possible.

And I did this with Chevron years ago. I literally asked procurement, how do you get rewarded? And basically at that time with the group I was dealing with inside of Chevron, their supply chain people got rewarded

at the opposite of salespeople. The deal came in for $10 million and they were able to reduce it by 20%. They got bonus on that, right? So well, once I understood that, it's like, well, this is easy.

I'm gonna come as an artificially high price. I'll let you mark it down, negotiate me down to my price I wanted anyway. But internally, you get the props for it for doing a good job and you get bonus for it. And I get commission on it.

So it's a win-win. Once again, back to what Sad said, the more information you have about stuff, the better off you'll end up being. Yeah, so a couple of things to break apart there. Yeah, break apart that,

but also give the summary of the study. The summary of the study is you have to embrace friction and negotiation. Don't rely strictly on your relationship and empathy and goodwill that that's gonna yield you

your most positive outcomes in negotiation. And the thing Mark was just mentioning, Mark, if you don't know that procurement is gonna be involved from your deal, and they come in blind, I see this happening all the time

where you thought you had to deal with a business stakeholder. Procurement comes in and they ask for a discount and then you're forced to deal with a critical, really critical in the beginning of the process for those that are selling to enterprise in the beginning

when you're dealing with that business stakeholder to really figure out who else is gonna have to make the decision. Because if you know procurement is gonna be involved or you know legal is gonna be involved, you probably should account for that

as you start presenting your price and deal terms to that business stakeholder to make sure that you're not giving away too early before those critical decision makers who are gonna have to sign off are involved. The Mark, the other thing that I would

tell people to be careful of, this is the thing that sales people tend to do and in some ways I think we've trained buyers to be more difficult with sellers as a result. Sellers have this tendency to say, I'm trying to reach 100,

so I'm gonna start at 130, they're gonna work me down anyways. I've accounted for it, they're gonna feel happy as a result of the discount. I would encourage sellers to be conscious of how much they're conceding

in conversations. The reason that I say that is when you concede too much, you're trading the buyer to be left with the impression that the next time I negotiate with you, I'm gonna assume that there's this much negotiation room.

And I'm gonna assume that every number and every proposition that you throw out there has a whole bunch of baloney in it. So I'm gonna test your resolve and make your life difficult every time. So just be careful,

you need to give yourself some negotiation room, be careful not to give yourself so much negotiation room that it ends up undermining your credibility. A hundred percent. And I see this all the time.

I don't know if SAP still does this. Their fiscal year used to end in May. Right before the end of their fiscal year in April, they would give discounts up to 50%. If I'm buying SAP products, and I know that in April

you give a 50% discount and it's January, I'm asking for that 50% discount. Because I know you can do it, it's just a matter of will you do it. And you're 100% right. But also remember a lot of times price

isn't what you're after. Depending on what type of company you work for and what type of your commission structure or everything else, sometimes it's margins, sometimes it's logos,

sometimes it's brand awareness. Once again, the more you know and the better knowledge you have, I think the better you come out of this. But side, I love every place you're going with this. And I do think the industry as a whole,

not just our industry but all industries, I think salespeople by default should undergo rigorous negotiation training. Because most of them don't and they learn from their peers. And typically they learn that

my way versus your way, less butt heads, or the other side is like, they're gonna beat me up on price. I just know I'm gonna have to concede the pricing. I think that's just wrong.

I think in 2025, so much of the buyer journey being done before you get a chance to be engaged as a salesperson, you need to counter for all that. But the other thing I think is interesting,

especially about our industry, is that we're truly global. So you have different business cultures. Negotiating in Central and South America is radically different than negotiating in Norway,

which is radically different than negotiating in the Middle East. And I think you also have to have understanding those business cultures when you're in those type of spaces. Can you talk a little bit about that,

the different business cultures important? Oh, 100% cultural difference makes a massive difference because how people communicate, how they deal with each other. In certain cultures,

let's say you're negotiating in Japan and somebody more senior is gonna get involved later on in the deal. You wanna save your discounts for later on because that person who's senior in the organization needs to feel

like they've done their part. I do training all across the U.S. And even within the U.S., there's all types of differences. You're down South, you're in Texas versus in New York.

The way in which people communicate is different. The degree to which people are, direct the pleasantries in which they engage in or don't engage in, all of that influences how people...

So understanding that audience and understanding what their business motivations are, understanding the personal motivations. One of the things that I highlight in the book is that you have to play offense in negotiation. What that means is that you need to be deliberate

and intentional. What that means is you can't just jump into these conversations. You have to take some time to prepare and part of that preparation needs to be really trying to take the most educated guesses

on who you're dealing with, what some of their motivations are, what some of the things that they care about are, so you can try as much as possible when you get into that conversation, guide it in a direction that makes sense for you.

Love this. I absolutely love this. I do a lot of negotiations. I've done it for years. And one of my favorite people to walk in the room, and I can only say this because I am now an old white guy, is when the senior old white guy walks in the room

who did no preparation because he's done this his whole life and he think he can take me to the cleaners. And I've spent the last two weeks learning everything about his company. I'll probably know more about his company than he does. And in the negotiations, it's almost a shame

because I'm a good hearted person. I try not to take advantage of that disparity. But if I wanted to, I could. The worst thing you could ever do in negotiation is just show up with no prep. Yeah. And it's subtle things too.

It can happen right from the beginning because if you're not clear and you don't have confidence and conviction on what it is that you want and you're not lobbying on behalf of it in a way that's compelling,

you're setting up the other side with the impression to be left with the impression that there's some room there's going to be some leeway that could be had here. Or I can possibly drive this in a direction that makes more sense for me. Yeah. And when I say prep,

it's not just learning the customer and maybe the person you're going to be negotiating with, the team. It's also learning your own company. I've worked for several very large companies and internally I had to get approval ahead of time

on what I could do, what I couldn't do. And I'm not going to say the name of the company. I actually had one incident where I did all that work up front, understood what my boundaries were as far as negotiation,

stood by my boundaries, and then the customer went around me, went to my management and got a concession that I was told I shouldn't give, which then totally ruined my ability to negotiate with the customer in the future.

I ended up leaving that company. Now even internally, make sure you really know what your boundaries are. Make sure you get signed off by your management so that you have your toolbox full and you know what tools are in that toolbox

before you engage in the negotiation. So Mark, I would love to hear from both of y'all, okay, after the deal gets inked, is there anything that you think about or you look at to prevent like a buyer's remorse? Because until you really get the project going,

you're just really getting a commitment or MOU of like, hey, we want to do business together. I mean, yeah, maybe, and I will tell you though, actually, my sister works Ferrara that sold off from Nestle, and they had a vent.

Oh, I shouldn't probably say out of the story, so. But I would just tell you, sometimes when stuff signed, it's signed for sure. It's signed for sure, for sure. But I also feel like to get that person

buying from you in the future, you want to maintain like a positive relationship. So I'm just curious if there's any kind of focus on after the deal signed, is it done, move on to the next one, depending on the role of the company.

But a lot of times, the person signed the deal is somewhat involved, or might be account manager or overseed in some way, and getting continual sales. So I'm wondering, is there any thought to that from the negotiation process

for like future business after this deal's closed to make sure that you've achieved that win-win outcome, but it's not a one-time deal. It's the lifetime value of the customer. I'll tell you one of the things I do all the time, and I learned this from a senior salesperson 30 years ago,

I never come in and just sell a deal, I never just have a term sheet. I try to negotiate an MSA up front, and I try to make sure those terms are in perpetuatory, so that that MSA, the governing legal language is agreed upon

by between my company and their company, and it removes so much friction when you're dealing with large companies, because now the legalese has been agreed upon. It's a lot of work, and especially if it's a small deal,

people will tell you it's not worth the effort, but it is, because now you have the legal rights to buy in that company, and if you did it well, all you need is an SOW that references that MSA, and anybody in that big company can buy from you

without having to engage legal or anybody else, and that is one of the probably biggest things for future business, I can think off the top, man, that you should do, regardless of the size of the deal, is try to get those long-term terms agreed upon up front

so that you're limiting who gets involved in deals in the future. So you're saying build the master service agreement and then do the service line agreements underneath it so then you can spread out inside the organization. Yeah, and a lot of companies won't go to that trouble

unless it's a big deal, but I'm telling you, I've closed some very small deals with companies and negotiated MSA, and it's come back later to help me, because when they wanted to buy from me later,

they had no hoops to jump through internally, they could just buy from me. And you got your foot in the door, they built some familiarity with you, built some trust with you, and you can just kind of expand your focus from there.

Yep, good stuff. All right, guys, we are actually running slightly over. The book is called In the Lead. I haven't read it yet. I need to get a copy and read it. Actually, in between the time,

I'm sad that your PR company first reached out to us. And today, what you don't know is we're launching a book review site on our website. We have so many people that wants to review books that instead of us doing it and keeping it private, it's like, let's just open it up to the world.

So audience, I'll tell you this much. I'm going to get a book out to Daniel, who's running our book reviews. We will get it reviewed on the website. It's probably going to be sometime a month or so. But we're going to put a link in for Sad's book.

Like I said, it's called In the Lead. It's fantastic. It's real, even though he mentioned academia. If you read the excerpts from the book on his website, you can tell that didn't come from academia. That came from being in the trenches somewhere.

So highly recommended. This is the point in the show, Sad, that we ask our guests to give us a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. Do you have one for the audience? Specifically towards LinkedIn

or specifically just general towards negotiation, Mark? Actually, you know what? You could do it just general. If you don't have one for LinkedIn, that'd be different. We didn't cover this, but post-COVID negotiations are happening in all types of mediums.

Some of them are happening over email. Some of them are happening over the phone. Some of them are happening in person on site. Some of them are happening over Zoom. Just one quick practical tip for people is if you get an opportunity to get people in front of you,

that's great. Highly, highly recommend you avoid negotiating over email. What the research shows on that is negotiating over email tends to land in the greatest number of impasses. If you're on Zoom, highly recommend that you turn your camera on.

Encourage the other person to turn their camera on. It's nice to just induce a little bit more collaborativeness in the conversation. People tend to be just a little bit less rigid. So last quick tip, if I were to go to one there, Mike. Love it, love it, love it.

All right. So the URL for your book, SAD, is what? Rattle it off real quick. I don't know the URL, but it's on Amazon and Amazon has a super long URL. But if you search on Amazon in the lead, SAD,

it'll come right up. And what are the details on the study? If someone was trying to research that study or if we could put a link to it, Mark, that would be cool. Absolutely. I'll get you those details, send that link to Mark.

Oh, perfect. We'll put the show notes. And then if people want to learn more about you and guess LinkedIn is the best choice. LinkedIn is the best choice. My first and last name are actually the same.

So if you go to LinkedIn type SAD, A, SAD, A is the middle initial there. You'll find me on LinkedIn. I thought that was a typo. No, it's not. It's real simple.

My parents thought, Mark, what am I going to do about it? Yeah. Actually, it's so unique. You should probably be an author with a name like that. That sounds like somebody that writes a bunch of great books. I'll take that.

Anyway, audience, all of our social links are in the show notes sides linked to his book. And also to LinkedIn will be in the show notes as well. Coming soon, we'll review the book on our web page. Time to get out of here. Oh, no, not yet.

This is Matt's idea. So if you listen to the very end, which is where we are right now, all you got to do is shoot me a note and I will send you free of charge and OGG and Gulf of America

temporary tattoo or sticker or both whatever you want. But this is the way for us to encourage you to incite you to negotiate with you to listen to the very end of the podcast and give away some free stuff. So if you're listening, shoot me a note.

Happy to send it to you. Time to get out of here. Remember, make a difference and not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGM, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry.

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