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
And I'm very excited about this opportunity. And what I want to know is, my research about the market tells me the band is here. What can we do together? And how can I help you make the case for moving the comp to the place where market is for this position? So perfectly collaborative, right? And I have to tell you, Ilana, a lot of people think, what if they pull the offer?
If they pull the offer, then that is a giant red flag about the organization. If you are negotiating collaboratively, if you are asking those questions, if you're doing your homework like I know everybody on this podcast is, And they say, oh, you negotiated. Consider yourself lucky and move to the place that's meant for you.
Yes, especially if you're going to have an ongoing working relationship going forward. I love to do either face-to-face or on a virtual platform where I can see the person because everything is data. The body language is data. The tone of the voice. Do you know, research shows actually that most of our emotion is carried through our voice.
So if you are attuned to little changes in people's voices, you might have a clue as to what's on their mind. I like to look at their facial expression. I like to look at what people have in their background. There have been times I'm negotiating with folks and I might look and say, are those birthday balloons in the background? Somebody says, yes, actually, my granddaughter just had a birthday.
We are off to the races. We start talking. In negotiation, there is no small talk. It's all important. It's all building relationships. And in my background, there are things, especially if you have a wider screen, that tell you a bit about who I am and what I value. And I think all of that is really important. I would say there are instances where sometimes negotiating over email can be helpful.
If you think it's going to be very emotionally charged and that you're going to be able to put your points more linearly and say things the way you want to say them with space to do so, email can be good. I've counseled a number of people who are negotiating severance who felt like it was too much to be on the...
phone or on Zoom with someone and email allowed there to be some distance so that you could take a pause and really think about how to put your best foot forward. Most of the time, big fan, like you said, of the in-person or face-to-face, there are times when email can be very useful.
I have to tell you, can I just say, one of the fascinating things I find about negotiation is how different it can be jurisdiction to jurisdiction. And so this very successful German entrepreneur I know said, Alex, I just have a way of putting things sometimes that is not conducive.
to negotiation, she actually writes up the email and then puts it into an AI tool and says, do the following things to this. And she said, so they massage some of my language and then I'm able to send that out and not sound like I'm quite so strident. So... There are lots of tools out there now for you to put your best foot forward, but it's also a lesson to your global audience.
Know who you're negotiating with. I've worked with a number of Israeli professionals, and I'm originally from New York. We are both delightfully direct, right? And there's something that's wonderful about that. When I negotiate in other jurisdictions, like maybe in certain East Asian jurisdictions or certain African jurisdictions— So different people are a little bit more indirect.
And so I have to think about not that my way should always be right, but how can I negotiate in a way that's going to feel appropriate for that person and they're going to be able to hear me.
Some of the problems I went through initially counting myself out because looking at the market out there and saying, well, maybe, honestly, I'm a woman in a male-dominated field and I'm a little younger. I'm not that young, Ilana. I cover my gray hair. But I'm still a little bit younger than perhaps your average negotiation keynote speaker out there.
And knowing that what makes you different is actually your market differentiator. It's your greatest advantage. And so one of the challenges I went through initially was looking out there and counting myself out when really people needed me. And it was just a matter of finding the people for whom I was a match. And it turns out there were a lot of those people.
So that was one of my psychological hurdles initially. Second challenge I would say, and let me be transparent on this, was pricing. Sometimes in certain industries, there's not a lot of transparency for entrepreneurs about what people charge. And here is where I found building relationships to be so important because I was coming from academia.
Academia, the pay scale for speaking engagements is totally different than it is in the private sector. And through building relationships, I realized that I was underselling myself. So it took me having relationships where I could call people and say, I just need to ask you directly, what are you charging and what are you seeing out there?
And now I have a community of people where people reach out to me and say, I saw you worked for such and such a client. Do you mind telling me what you charged them? And I will share information because this way we can all help each other make it a little bit more transparent. Oh, I love that.
The last challenge I had, Ilana, was one that I imagine many of your earlier stage entrepreneurs or founders have, where I was doing it all myself, right? And I thought to myself, I got here because I did it myself, and that's the way it has to be. And then I had a student in my class who unbelievably changed the whole way I thought about entrepreneurship.
This was a very wise student who'd been practicing already. And he said to me, Professor, I have a mantra. It's only do what only you can do. And I remember thinking, first of all, what a powerful statement about where you should go in your entrepreneurship. Where is it that only you can make an impact? What are the areas where other people could make an impact?
What are the areas where you can make an impact? But it also helped me delegate because I started thinking about over the course of a week, what are the things that only I can do? And everything else is an opportunity for someone else, right? It's an opportunity for somebody else to grow in their career, for somebody else to operate in their zone of genius.
And these days, now, I have a number of people who work with me, both who support me in Ask for More, but also a number of other trainers. because I was saying no to certain opportunities because I was booked or the pricing didn't work.
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