Truth 12. Signal your BATNA
You may have noticed a BATNA-related Catch-22: “I can’t tell the truth without being totally duped, and I can’t lie without suffering moral-strategic-legal costs. What exactly do you advise?”
To make matters worse, counterparties often ask you about your BATNA directly. “Do you have any offers yet?” Similarly, a homebuyer asks home sellers, “Any action on your home?” And a vendor might bait a procurement director with, “Do you have another source for this product?”
So, what should you do when hit with a “What’s-your-BATNA” question?
First, there are two things you shouldn’t do:
▪ Don’t ignore the question and hope it will go away. It won’t.
▪ Don’t turn the question around by saying, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
Rather, signal to the other party that you have a BATNA, without revealing it: “If you’re inquiring about whether I have alternative courses of action, the answer is yes. But I’m sure you can understand why I can’t discuss those with you at this time.”
Signal to the other party that you have a BATNA, without revealing it.
Here’s another strategy that I like even better, in the context of an interested company asking a job-seeker how many job offers she has: “I put an 80 percent probability on my having an offer from a Fortune 100 firm in the next two weeks. I have three second-round interviews. I am on the short list at eight companies. And I have two phone interviews this week and five recruiting events coming up.”
Reading between the lines, it’s clear that this job-seeker does not have another job offer in hand, but she is signaling that her BATNA is being actively watered and fertilized and is blossoming wildly. Of course, I advocate saying these things only if they’re true. This again points out the importance of not releasing your alternatives prematurely. Even if you get a tempting job offer, keep interviewing and attending recruiting events!
The good thing about signaling is that saying things like, “I put an X percent chance on event Y happening” is not a material fact. It is a subjective probability.
Don’t signal your BATNA to threaten the other party. Rather, send signals under the following conditions:
▪ The counterparty challenges you directly. (“Do you have any other job offers?”)
▪ The counterparty severely underestimates your alternatives.
▪ The counterparty has faulty information about you that you want to set straight.
▪ The counterparty low-balled you, and you wish to signal that he needs to increase the value of his proposals quickly.