How to Negotiate an Offer with Vicki Bevenour

My guest is Vicki Bevenour, an executive career coach with expertise in personal branding, communicating with strength, leadership presence and negotiation. Coach Vicki is the President of the RDW Group and the author of “Unleashing Your Inner Leader: An Executive Coach Tells All”. RDW stands for Results Derived From Within and represents Vicki’s belief that everyone has a powerful leader inside of them, which is also the premise of her book.

Vicki talks about who should negotiate (hint: everybody!) and suggests that instead of interviewing, you are engaging in Business Evaluation Meetings when you meet with a potential employer. That evaluation works both ways - you are evaluating the company and they are evaluating you. Keep in mind that as you go through these meetings, you want to set yourself up for a successful negotiation. You can do this by having 20 success stories ready to share.

Prepare your stories by thinking through (1) the challenge you faced, (2) the action you took, and (3) the result you achieved. These are your C-A-R stories! Use these on your resume and in your interviews / Business Evaluation Meetings.

Negotiate when you have an offer - this is the moment when you have the power. In addition to negotiating salary, you can negotiate vacation time, your job title and level, benefits, bonus, tuition reimbursement, work from home days, cell phone reimbursement, training, and parking expenses. That’s a lot of things up for negotiation! So how do you go about it?

Know your numbers: Check salary.com, The Muse, and Glassdoor.com for salary data. Also, poll your network so you know the compensation structure in the industry.

When you receive a job offer, don’t accept it on the spot! Ask for 48 hours to consider the offer, then get back to them within 24 hours to initiate a negotiation. Don’t negotiate over email! Use words such as “This is a great offer and I have 3 questions.” Then remind them of your accomplishments (your CAR stories) and ask for what you want. After that, stop talking.

Vicki shares tons of great phrases you can use in a negotiation as well as some good book recommendations and statistics about women and negotiation.

You can find Vicki on LinkedIn and online at http://coachvickie.com/. Vicki’s book Unleashing Your Inner Leader: An Executive Coach Tells All is available on Amazon.

Vicki’s book recommendations:

Women Don’t Ask - The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation and Positive Strategies for Change by Linda Babcock and Sarah Laschever

Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want

by Linda Babcock and Sarah Laschever