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Why naming your price first can win the deal
💡 The first number on the table silently pulls the final deal toward it — so make it an ambitious, defensible offer rather than waiting to react.
Common wisdom says: never make the first offer — let the other side show their hand. But decades of negotiation research point the other way. Whoever states a number first sets the anchor, and every counteroffer quietly orbits around it. Our brains latch onto the first figure and adjust insufficiently from it, so the final price drifts toward wherever the anchor was planted.
In one classic study, real estate agents shown a house with a high listing price appraised it higher than agents shown the same house with a low listing price — even though all of them insisted the listing hadn't influenced them. The anchor worked precisely because it felt irrelevant. The lesson: an ambitious but justifiable opening isn't rude, it's strategic.
Two cautions. First, only anchor when you have a rough sense of the deal's real range — anchor blindly and you may leave money on the table or look absurd. Second, when the other side anchors first with an extreme number, don't counter near it. Instead, re-anchor with your own reasoned figure, or refuse to treat their number as the starting line at all.