When in doubt, concede

In many arguments, your opponent will disagree with you or in some other way try to put you on the defensive. You might be tempted to reply with a snappy comeback, a sarcastic remark, or an angry comment.

But remember, you aren’t trying to win a fight, you are trying to win them over. You won’t win them over by making them angry or by making them look like an idiot.

In these situations it’s time to try a little verbal jujitsu. Be inspired by the martial arts. Jujitsu techniques were developed around the principle of using an attacker’s energy against him, rather than directly opposing his attack. Learn the art of concession.

Concession buys you time. Concession prevents you from seeming to disagree. Concession allows the other person to save face.

Remember, the goal of persuasion is not to win the fight but to win over your audience. It’s likely that your opponent isn’t thinking in rhetorical terms, they just want to win. So let them. They want to score some points, so concede and allow them to score. Concession is a jujitsu move where your opponent is no longer pushing against you.

Once you’ve conceded (at least tactically), then you can use their point to change their mood or change their mind.

Imagine that you were selling a web development project to a company. You are talking to the team of people who will be involved in the decision and the person representing the Information Technology department says:

Techie: “We don’t need to spend the money to pay someone else to develop this application. We can do it ourselves internally.”�

Uh-oh. These guys could sabotage the whole thing. Not only are they over-confident about their own abilities, no one else at the table is technical enough to challenge their assertion. But if you just shoot him down, he’ll be angry and you’ll look like a bully to the rest of the group. How to respond? Concede!

You: “You’re right. Your group probably could do this project as long as you brought in a few specialists to cover the database development on the back end and the AJAX for the client side.

Great. You’ve conceded the point and used some code grooming to show that you know the technical terminology. You’ve also poked a few holes in the assertion that the IT group can do this project with their existing staff.

Now that you’ve agreed tactically, it’s time to move on.

You: “Of course, this assumes that you’ve got plenty of time on your plate to take on a major new project. You’ll be climbing a steep curve to learn how to develop this type of application. What we’ve found is that it takes our teams about half the time to develop a web application compared to an internal group, simply because we’ve developed many applications, we’ve seen all the problems that can come up, and so we can get it done more quickly than a team that is doing it for the first time. Although it’s an additional expenditure for your company to hire us, when you do the ROI calculation, it’s cheaper to go outside and hire us because your application will be ready to go live and start producing revenue for you much sooner.

Ok, you’ve used inductive reasoning with facts and comparisons to show why it’s advantageous for your client to use you rather than to use an internal group. You’ve used commonplace language that will appeal to the financial people in the room. To make your argument even stronger you could use a story of a client that considered using an internal group and then decided to use you for the project.

If you had gotten into a back and forth argument with the IT person about technical capability, you would no doubt have lost your audience. Your techy person would have won by derailing your project. But by conceding, you allowed the technical person to save face, you bought yourself some time, and you were able to get the conversation back on track to persuading the client to take action on your proposal.

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