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Summary.
New research reveals that negotiators who ask more open-ended questions achieve higher personal gains without compromising their counterparts’ interests. The findings are based on the analysis of more than 60,000 negotiation interactions and highlight the importance of question wording in eliciting valuable information and positive responses.Imagine knowing a negotiation tactic that could boost your earnings by 20%, takes less than three minutes to prepare, and only a few seconds to implement. This powerful approach isn’t a well-guarded Phoenician trade secret or a complex strategy devised by tacticians in hidden war rooms — it’s simply the act of asking open-ended questions. Astonishingly, our research has found that open-ended questions make up less than 10% of what most negotiators say during their conversations — a problem for anyone hoping to negotiate effectively.