Repeated success in sales negotiations requires not only situational awareness and the knowledge of System 1 and System 2. You also need the power to change your own responses to situations, and at the same time, influence how others respond.

What kind of intuitive yet intentional responses would you like to have? After all, everyone wonders about ‘what if…?’ questions from time to time. What would you do if you won the lottery? What would you do if you won a prestigious award? The situations are not always fun or positive ones. What would you do if you needed to make a speech in front of 1,000 people after winning that award? Or far worse, what would you do if an intruder entered your home in the middle of the night?

The truth is that most people have absolutely no idea how they would really respond in those situations, regardless of what they might speculate or claim. This is especially true when the person has never experienced that situation.

Now imagine that you are out for a leisurely walk on a sunny afternoon and a stranger suddenly collapses nearby. What would you do? Kai's parents had an opportunity to find out on a late summer day in 2020. When a middle-aged woman fell unconscious near them, the woman's sister froze in panic. In the first critical moments, everyone else seemed paralyzed with inaction, including Kai's mother.

Kai's father, however, sprang into action.

His quick response and actions ultimately saved the woman's life by keeping her stable until an emergency team arrived. ‘Make them safe, call in the emergency, start with heart massage, and every second counts … that's the way it's set in the back of my mind’, he told a local radio station.¹

Everyone's immediate actions on that sidewalk in Aspach, Germany were governed by System 1, but in the case of Kai's father, these actions reflected a considerable amount of training, to the point of programming. He had spent years as a voluntary firefighter and afterwards kept his responses sharp with Red Cross training.

Soldiers, actors, professional athletes, and medical professionals are prominent examples of people who exhibit strong and positive reactions in high-pressure situations that others with less practice, training, or experience could not summon. This type of programming is deep-seated within the mental machinery. The complexity of the task at hand as well as the presence of others can elicit and enhance these pre-programmed responses. A University of Michigan psychologist named Robert Zajonc tested that theory by confronting 72 participants in a study with four challenges: sprint in a straight line with and without a crowd present, and run through a maze, likewise with and without a crowd present.

The straight-line sprint served as the proxy for a simple challenge, while the maze served as the complex – and presumably more challenging – test for the participants. The resulting academic paper by Zajonc and his colleagues claimed clearly, ‘runway performance was facilitated when compared to performance … in solitary conditions’ while ‘maze performance was impaired’.² The team therefore concluded that, ‘the mere presence of conspecifics is a source of general arousal that enhances the emission of dominant responses.’³ For any given challenge, every single creature will exhibit what is known as a dominant response. These are stereotypical System 1 responses, hard-wired in our brains, independent of what we might claim or say when we discuss stressful situations hypothetically.

To put Zajonc's findings into plain English: if a crowd watches you do a simple, habitual, or routine task, the chances are that you will perform better than if you did the task in isolation. In terms of a dominant response, it means that the presence of observers – a partisan crowd at a sports event, colleagues at a meeting, or attendees at a conference – will enhance your performance of your ingrained or intuitive tasks. You are psyched up, not psyched out.

How universal and pervasive is the idea of a dominant response? When the dominant response of almost everyone on that summer day in Germany was to panic, Kai's father's dominant response was to offer first aid. Think back also to the ‘blackout moment’ of baseball outfielder Adam Eaton that we described in Part I. In a do-or-die final game, he saw a pitch coming and told himself, ‘No, don't swing!’ but his dominant response was to swing anyway. His successful hit helped his team win the 2019 World Series.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Zajonc's experiment takes us back to ‘animal spirits,’ the term coined by Keynes and used by Akerlof and Schiller for their book title. That's because Zajonc didn't conduct that experiment with people. He conducted it with cockroaches.

Obviously, we are not trying to equate salespeople with cockroaches. But challenges in the business world likewise elicit dominant responses from all participants, and a sales negotiation is no exception. The responses are so deeply rooted and hard-wired that we share those basic elements with the world's simplest social animals.

You recall that in Part I, we explained why salespeople should make the first move in a negotiation. This defies the conventional wisdom that the sales team should ‘wait and see’ what the buyers expect for a price. The problem is that a ‘wait-and-see’ stance allows the purchasing team to set a price anchor that frames the entire negotiation. That puts the selling team at a disadvantage that can often be insurmountable.

Let's envision a sales negotiation and assume that the sales team makes its first offer. In that case, the most common next step is for the buyer to ask for a lower price. When that happens – as it almost inevitably does – the path and the outcome of the entire negotiation can hinge on the dominant response your brain brings forth.

What will that dominant response be?

Imagine that you could say ‘no’ to those requests immediately, with confidence and without hesitation or reservation. You are psyched up, not psyched out. Wouldn't that be a great superpower to have? Imagine having the same kind of immediate, powerful, and trained reaction as a paramedic, soldier, or athlete, when a customer asks for a lower price, a discount, or some other form of concession.

Motivating you to develop and maintain ‘no’ as your dominant response to discount requests is one of our primary objectives in Part II. It is an essential aspect of playing defence in the Invisible Game. Ingraining that habit will prevent you from drifting even further away from the ‘feel-good’ price in the buyer's minds, as shown in Figure 5.1. The same techniques will also enable you take other steps – comfortably, confidently, and consistently – to close deals at prices that are much closer to the feel-good price by implementing price increases and price adjustments. Those are essential aspects of playing offence in the Invisible Game, and we explore the techniques for offence in Part III.