Trade Secrets: In a Negotiation, Almost None of It Is About Price

Whether you are selling a diamond or deciding a revenue split with a vendor, the person across the table is saying words. But like every good movie or book, the scene is almost always about something other than what is being said. They are asking for what they think they want, not always telling you what they actually need. And most of us are too busy thinking about the number to hear the difference. 

Last week, I participated in two negotiations. The first was a client deciding whether to spend money with us. The second was a vendor deciding how we should divide the money we make together. On the surface, two totally different negotiations. 

Both of them looked, at first, like a struggle about a number. Neither of them was. And the moment I remembered the most important rule of negotiation, both came together in a way that left everyone more committed than when we started. This is the most useful thing I know about doing deals, and almost nobody in our trade talks about it. So here it is. 

The game vs. the scoreboard 

Every business runs on negotiation, whether it admits it or not. You negotiate with suppliers, with retailers, with staff, with landlords, with the firm setting up your CRM system. And because we are a trade raised on the number, carat, per-carat sum, the Rap list, the discount off the list, we negotiate the way we price. We anchor ourselves in a figure and we push. Consultancy Simon-Kucher’s 2024 study of 600 B2B companies across 13 countries found that three of the top five negotiation topics for these companies had to do with price. We sit down and we argue about the number, because the number feels like the whole game. 

It is not the game. It is the scoreboard. The game is happening underneath it. 

Consulting firm Gartner has studied this for years, and the finding is blunt: B2B buyers are nearly three times more likely to commit to a supplier when they feel a personal benefit from the relationship, not just a functional one. Even the most sophisticated buyer, spending the most serious money, is deciding on something other than the figure they are discussing. 

The number is a symbol, a proxy. It is the language people reach for when what they actually need is harder to say out loud. So the job, the whole job, is to find out what that is: the unsaid need, fear, want. Once you know that, you can work toward an agreement that solves for it, as well as for what you want, need, or fear. Then you can jointly build an outcome in which both of you are genuinely incentivized to do more business together. 

A tale of two deals 

Let me show you what I mean. 

The client in my negotiation last week wanted me to lock in at the very bottom of my estimated range and take a thinner margin on the first pieces of work. That was the demand, stated plainly in the language of price. But I did not argue the price. I asked, “On what are you basing the fixed price you have asked for?” How could they name a firm number when we, the experts, could only give an estimate until we knew more? And then it came out: They couldn’t. They had simply never bought anything like this before. It was an unfamiliar category, and the not-knowing frightened them. They told me it was not actually a lower price they wanted; it was a fixed one. What they could not tolerate was the surprise. 

If I had simply caved and handed them the floor price, I would have lost. I would have had to either underdeliver or promise something I did not yet know if I could deliver. Meeting their demand would have made the whole project fail. So I solved for the real need instead. We agreed that I would give them a firm price after 10 days of research. That turned the unknown into something they could see. I became their advocate rather than someone selling to them: I would show them exactly what was essential and what was a nice-to-have, and let them choose. Nobody moved on price. Everybody got what they came for. Because the price was never the point. Certainty was. 

The vendor was the mirror image. They wanted a bigger slice of our split. Again, a demand in the language of a number. And again, I asked what the bigger slice would actually get them. What surfaced was not greed; it was fear of the future. Their costs would climb as we grew. Mine, they believed, would flatten. They were afraid that a year or two out, they would be doing more of the work for less of the reward, and would feel foolish for having agreed to it. 

Here’s the thing: The slice they were asking for would not even have fixed that fear. It would simply have demotivated me from acquiring more deals for us to split. So we did not negotiate the slice. We built a structure to reduce the fear. We would split evenly up to a certain size. Beyond that, we would open our books to each other on a regular basis, so fairness could be measured against real data rather than guesses in the dark. Both of us protected, both of us now wanting and incentivized to achieve the same thing. 

Cardinal rules 

So how do you negotiate the need instead of the number? Four moves: 

1. Stop countering the figure and ask what it’s for: “What would that actually get you?” The most powerful move in any negotiation is not a demand; it is a question. The number is the answer to a question the other side has not said out loud. Find out what that question is. 

2. Show your hand. I do not run onto the field and hide the ball. I do not walk into the doctor’s office complaining of stomach pains and forget to mention I am pregnant. When you give the other side the whole picture of your costs, your constraints, your fears, you turn them from an opponent trying to guess your position into a partner who can help you improve it. Transparency is not weakness. It is how you reach a solution neither of you could have found alone. 

3. Make their constraint your problem. The person across the table is not the obstacle between you and the deal. Their need is the deal. Treat it as yours to solve, and watch how fast the room changes. 

4. Solve for the relationship, not the transaction. These are marriages, not one-night stands. In the vast majority of successful high-value purchases (85% of them, according to marketing platform 6sense), the buyer already had direct experience with the seller. The buyer bought the trust before buying the product. The Edelman Trust Barometer now puts trust alongside price and quality as a reason people buy at all. So structure your deals for the long game: sprints, tiers, open books, whatever it takes to make sure nobody feels like a fool a year from now. The deal you sign is worth less than the relationship you keep. 

Real-world relevance 

None of this is abstract. It is exactly what happens at your counter. The client haggling over a stone is almost never really negotiating the price. She is negotiating confidence: Is this the right stone? Am I being taken in? What will people say when they see it? Meet that need, and the price objection quietly disappears. It is what happens when you sit down with a supplier, a landlord, the company installing your systems. Same discipline, every single time. 

This is also where the machines stop and you start. AI can run the numbers now, faster than any of us. But Gartner has found that 69% of B2B buyers still turn to a human being to validate what the machine told them, whether for reassurance, for context, or for a read on what they actually need. A machine can price the stone; only you can hear what the person is really asking for. 

The best negotiators in this trade are not the ones with the sharpest pencils or the hardest lines. They are the ones who have worked out that the number was never the point. They are the ones who are curious, not furious. They are the ones who ask the question: What does that extra $5,000 buy you? What need does that request solve for you, us, or your business? 

So the next time you are across the table, stop negotiating the price. Start negotiating the need. That’s the way to win, and to keep winning with the same person for the next 20 years. 

Elle Hill is founder and CEO of management consulting firm Hill & Co., which specializes in the diamond, gem and jewelry trade. Hill & Co. publishes The Business of Jewelry Report twice a year. 

Main image: Elle Hill. (Hill & Co.)