This week’s SiliconANGLE Guest of the Week segment should not be missed by anyone in the technology industry who is in an executive decision-making or sales role. This in-depth interview covers all the angles of negotiation and offers great advice for those in the tech industry.

Deepak Malhotra is a Harvard Business School professor and the author of a book called Negotiating the Impossible: How to Break Deadlocks and Resolve Ugly Conflicts (without Money or Muscle), in which he offers advice on conflict resolution and negotiations. He also sits on the Board of Advisors at Nutanix, Inc., and as you will find out, there is a very good reason he is in this position.

At the Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2016 at the Wynn in Las Vegas, Malhotra joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts on theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss his role with Nutanix and offer valuable advice about negotiating deals in the technology industry.

Education not negotiation

Vellante began the interview questioning why a negotiations expert would need to attend the Nutanix .NEXT Conference and talk to customers? Malhotra explained to Vellante that it’s not about sales, but about bringing perspective.

“There’s a lot of things going on there. On the one hand it shows a little bit about the Nutanix perspective, that it isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s not, ‘We’re going to train the Nutanix people so they can get an advantage over customers.’ I think the company is focused on creating as much value as possible for the end user. When you take that mindset, it actually makes sense to be inclusive and bring everybody in the ecosystem into the room … it’s [about sharing] your ideas with everybody. And I think that’s a really good sign when a company is willing to do that.

“The second thing is … a lot of the people who are customers who are thinking about moving in the direction of Nutanix or have bought into the idea, still say they need to sell it internally. They still negotiate internally. … So why not educate them about some of the things they might not have thought about yet.”

A history lesson in negotiation

Vellante asked about the opening of Malhotra’s book and the story about the 3,000-year-old Treaty of Kadesh. Malhotra explained why the oldest known treaty is still relevant today.

“There is a lesson embedded in the story of the Treaty of Kadesh that I think is as relevant today in negotiations of just about every kind in the business world and outside that’s worth telling. The basic story goes as follows: The Treaty of Kadesh … was between the Egyptians and the Hittites, and these two parties were at war. And at some point they must have decided, ‘Enough of this. We need to put an end to this … we need to find a way to resolve this conflict.’

“What often happens in these situations is nobody wants to look weak; nobody wants to be the one asking for peace because that may just embolden the other side … somehow they overcome these hesitations [and] they reach this agreement. Now what’s really interesting is that we actually have access to both language version of the Treaty. So we have the Akkadian (Hittites) and the Hieroglyphics (Egyptian) … but there is one difference when you compare the two peace treaties … in the Egyptian version, it says that it was the Hittites who came asking for peace, and in the Hittites version, it says the Egyptians came asking for peace.

“What it goes to show is that no matter how far back you go … this need for every side to declare victory at the end of the negotiation, at the end of a conflict, is as old as human beings themselves. When you understand that, I think it changes the way in which you try to negotiate these deals. Sometimes it’s not the substance of the deal … but there might be other reasons they can’t say yes. For example, they might lose face, or they may look bad. And when you recognize that, I think you come at it a different way.”

Sitting at the table

Miniman wanted to know how to change people in the tech industry who are notoriously unwilling to change. Malhotra responded by talking about what to do when you have a seat at the table.

“You have to get the economics right, and you have to get the psychology right. The economics … you have to have a good product, it needs to be priced appropriately and you need to be bringing value to the table. … The problem is you may have the right product … but there might be these psychological hurdles that you need to get over. A prominent one [hurdle] …when no one else is doing it and nobody feels the urgency to do it … and you don’t have a long list of customers that you can use to prove to people that this is the way you should be going. There is always a risk that somebody is going to take a bet on this and something goes wrong; you know, it’s sort of nobody lost their job buying IBM kind of mentality.

“So as a negotiator in a company starting out in the early stages, especially in technology where you’re doing something a little disruptive, you need to start thinking about how do we get them over that, how do we get them to start understanding.

“The most common thing that happens when you walk into the room with a new disruptive technology is that the person on the other side says, ‘Are you crazy? You’re charging 10 times what your competitor is charging. You’re sitting here asking me to pay X? If I do nothing I have to pay zero.’ That is a very common response salespeople get when they are in an environment like this, and one of the things I advise people to do in that situation … is to not make the worst mistake a salesperson can make. … The worst mistake is to apologize for the price being too high. … The moment you go in that direction, you’re giving a license to haggle with you, because what you’re telling them is even you don’t think the price is appropriate.

“A better response in a situation like this is for the sales person to say, ‘Listen, I think the question you are asking me is, how is it that despite our price being 10x of what some other people are charging … what kind of value must we be bringing to the table. … Now I’m happy to talk about that value because, at the end of the day, we all know that nobody’s going to pay more for something than its worth.’ What you are doing there is shifting the conversation from price to value.”

It’s not about what you get, but how you feel

Vellante posed the question of whether it is more important to get the best deal or to find common ground. Malhotra rephrased the question and offered up the best result.

“In my experience, it is possible to get a great deal and a great relationship; it’s also possible to get neither. So what you are trying to do is optimize on both. Very often we assume that it’s a zero-sum game enough that the only way for me to get a good deal is for me to sacrifice a relationship in some way. That’s not how it works in a richer context … in more complicated deal scenarios, because what people evaluate when they walk away from the table isn’t just ‘Did I get a good economic deal?’ When people think back they say, ‘Do I want to work with this person again? Do I like this person? Did I get a good deal?’

“Often what they are thinking about is not so much of the substance that they got, what’s in the agreement, but the process they went through. … If you navigate the process more effectively, you can often get to a point where you can get the deal that you think is right for you and you get a relationship that both sides can walk away feeling good about.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix. NEXT 2016

Photo by SiliconANGLE