Alex Carter
speaker
110 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Alex Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The day that I walked into meetings and I thought to myself, if this works, great. If it doesn't work, somebody else is going to want me for exactly what it is that I'm offering. That's when my close rate went way up.
Last thing I'll say about corporate, if you're interviewing for a management or senior executive position, when you negotiate for yourself, you are showing them what kind of negotiator you will be for them.
So as an entrepreneur, as a speaker, and by the way, Ilana, my speaking career really came even before the book. It's part of what made the book possible for me, even though I had almost no social media and no website of my own. I landed a large book deal based on the strength of my speaking portfolio. But it all started around 2012.
When the truth is that I had a young daughter at home who was born with a couple of medical problems that I knew it was gonna take a large investment for us to really treat. And I had just taken a job as a professor recently, and I was making less than I was as a lawyer in private practice. And I thought, how am I gonna do this? I'm gonna go out as a keynote speaker.
And so all I did was start telling people in my circle, that I was a keynote speaker. I'd done a couple of workshops, but I'd never done a keynote. And lo and behold, somebody saw a post either that I made or my husband made on Facebook. It was the father of one of my daughter's little toddler friends. And he called me up, worked at a major company and said, so do you do keynote speaking?
And I said, absolutely. And we ended up negotiating and I got in front of a hundred of the top leaders at this company for a conference. Now it was interesting, Ilana, because they hadn't budgeted a lot for a speaker. So I did negotiate with them. I had a sense of what I should be paid. They had less than that. And I thought to myself, okay, what else can I do to get value out of this event?
So I asked them a couple questions. I said, tell me how you're documenting the event. And they said, we're having a professional photographer and videographer. And I said, okay, tell me who's going to be at the event. And they told me all the managing directors who were going to be there. And I said, fine, okay.
I'm going to do this slightly below market for the max you've told me you can offer me. Plus, I want a certain number of digital photos of me in front of your company's logo that I have permission to use for my speaking portfolio.
And if I blow the doors off it like I'm confident I'm going to, I'd like to have several high-level managing director people be references for me for other future clients." I went on, Ilana, from that one gig, okay, where I got up there and for a second I thought, oh my God, what am I doing? I'm in front of like these very senior people.
And then I thought, okay, I'm just going to do what I know I can do. Blew the doors off it. I ended up over the next few years going on to make like 20 to 25 times what I did in that one engagement just from referrals, referrals, referrals, referrals. And I built from there. So it started with taking a leap. It started with betting on myself.
But I also brought a really high level of excellence to every job I did. And I treated it, I treated the keynote like a negotiation because I see negotiation as problem solving. I don't sell. I problem solve. I serve people. And I tried to serve each one of my clients at a really high level because I knew that then somebody else was going to pick up the phone and call me. And that's what happened.
The place that I started for business development is the same place I start in negotiation. I sit down and I ask myself, what's the problem I want to solve? Most of negotiation success, and if you're in a company, most of your innovation success is really about picking the right problem to solve. That is where most innovation happens or doesn't.
And so I started thinking about what are the problems out there that I know I can help people solve that aren't being solved yet, right? And so I started thinking specifically about people in relationship-oriented businesses
and how I knew that I had an approach to negotiation that simultaneously was gonna help people build stronger relationships and maintain those relationships even as they were making more money in the process. And so I started thinking about, okay, who's in the relationship business? I mean, spoiler alert, Ilana, most people are. which is the reason, right, that business has been quite good.
But I started thinking about, and within different industries, what are problems that I could help people solve? For example, in certain industries, it could be tech, it could be insurance, There's been a lot of M&A activity. And so part of the problem people want to solve is thinking about how do we harness all of the new power under our roof?
How do we negotiate together for the best business development results? How do we tell the story of our new company in a way that induces people to work with us? And so whatever it is for every industry, I'm always going back to the problem I want to solve. And that is one of the first questions I ask clients or potential clients on the phone. I want them to tell me about their business.
I also, Ilana, want the individual to tell me about themselves. Because Ilana, if you are the executive at the company that I'm negotiating with, I don't just want to help your company. I want to think about how I can help you. Where are you looking to go in your career? What do you want to show on your next performance review?
And how can I, in the context of working together, help you towards your career goals while we're also just crushing it for the company? So always, always starting with the problem we want to solve.
So let me tell you there. Let's take that as an example. I'm working really hard. Can you give me a promotion? I want to talk about two issues with that. The first is I'm working really hard. What are the problems that your boss needs to solve in the company? What are the problems that the company is needing to solve? And how are you being impactful already in solving those problems?
This is why we start with the problem we want to solve because then I'm leading that conversation by saying, Ilan, I'm so glad to sit down. Wanted to thank you for your support and mentorship and to say, I'm so excited to show you these results over the last year that show we're making significant progress toward that major goal that we've set as a company and as a division, okay?
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