Welcome to another episode of The Effective Statistician podcast!
Today, I tackle the essential skill of negotiation—a tool we statisticians use every day, often without realizing it. We negotiate when we push for better study designs, adjust project timelines, or secure resources like training and conference budgets. Beyond work, we negotiate in our personal lives with family, friends, or vendors.
In this episode, I share proven strategies to prepare for negotiations, uncover interests behind positions, and confidently advocate for yourself and your work.
Mastering these skills empowers you to drive success and create a bigger impact as a statistician. Let’s jump in!
Key points
- Negotiation as an Essential Skill
- Examples of Negotiation
- Importance of Preparation
- Effective Strategies
- Professional Impact
- Broader Application
- Practical Insights
Negotiation transforms your professional and personal interactions, empowering you to advocate for yourself and achieve better outcomes.
In this episode, I share actionable strategies and insights that help you master negotiation and boost your impact as a statistician. Don’t miss these valuable tips—listen now!
Share this episode with friends and colleagues who can benefit, and let’s empower more statisticians to succeed together!
Join me for a free webinar, How to Be an Effective Statistician!
Wednesday, February 5th, at 5 PM CET!
Learn how to boost your efficiency, manage your workload, and improve your work-life balance with practical tips you can apply immediately.
I’ll share proven strategies from the book How to Be an Effective Statistician to help you thrive in your career and make a bigger impact.
Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your skills and grow as a statistician. Register now and invite your colleagues to join!
I want to register!Never miss an episode!
Join thousends of your peers and subscribe to get our latest updates by email!
Get the





Learn on demand
Click on the button to see our Teachble Inc. cources.
Featured courses
Click on the button to see our Teachble Inc. cources.
Transcript
Negotiation for Statisticians: Advocating for Yourself and Your Work
Alexander: Welcome to a new episode of the Effective Statistician. Today I want to talk about Negotiation. And whether you believe it or not, you are negotiating all the time. Probably lots of times during the day, even if you don’t realize it. For example, you go into a study team meeting and you negotiate about design features.
You want to improve the design and maybe you want to have a broader patient population or maybe use things that you could add some adaptive features to the design or maybe you want to advocate for having a comparator arm or having a balanced design instead of a design that is much more Patients on your study truck.
Maybe you wanna propose something that helps [00:01:00] you get faster to to the success of the study, or maybe you wanna get out of something that looks like a seating study, a one armed study, and you want to have something that actually has a comparator in it. Or you negotiated about timelines. I think we negotiated about timelines.
Kind of all the time about how long will it take to get these analysis done about how much time will you get from the CRO? How fast can the CRO deliver? How fast can your internal programmers deliver? Or CRO side and the customer says, ah, can we have that? Three months earlier or two weeks earlier and you think that’s nearly impossible.
Or you negotiate about resources. You want to have more time for doing something. Or you want to have a bigger team. [00:02:00] You want to have another headcount. Or maybe you want to Get money for so that you can go to this conference or maybe you want to get money for getting the training. And of course you negotiate when you apply for a new job.
You negotiate about maybe you want to work remotely or at least partially remotely. You surely negotiate about your salary. Negotiation happens all the time. By the way, in your private life as well. You’re probably negotiating with your kids, your spouse, your parents, all the time. Negotiation and being successful in negotiation can make a huge difference.
It can very often mean whether you’re successful or you’re not successful. Especially when you negotiate about your salary, but also let’s, for example, you [00:03:00] outsource and I had said once where I was outsourcing a huge number of tables and usually, many of us, your contracts are set up that you pay per table.
No, these were huge. Thousands of tables that we wanted to outsource, however, they were highly repetitive. Yeah, so I didn’t want to, pay 10 times just because there’s another buy statement somewhere. Yeah and these were highly repetitive and I could easily explain that there were just 10 different templates and everything else was just a variation.
And so I negotiated with the CRO that we don’t pay by table, but we pay by the hours that they spent. And we negotiated a good price for that, from my point of view, and they were also happy. And the really good [00:04:00] thing was that we needed to do these tables. yet another time. We didn’t expect it, but because these were for a German HDA dossier we got a feedback from the EQIC, that is the German payer watchdog and they declined us all the analysis for a certain study.
And so we needed to redo all of these analyses. Tables on a different subgroup or different subpopulation, better said 11, 000 tables, 11, 000 tables. If we would have paid by the tables that would have cost us hundreds or millions of euros. Instead, it was a significant very much lower price.
And we got them in three days. That was the other really cool thing. Because of good negotiation. Another example. Early in my career, [00:05:00] at the company I was working, the statisticians did not attend the advisory boards. And I understood already at that time, being at an advisory board with the key opinion leaders is really key, because lots of decisions are taken within that.
advisory board. And if you are not present, you don’t have influence on these decisions. And you also don’t learn first hand what the European leaders are saying. You only learn it through the physician attending or organizing the advisory board. And I negotiated my seat at the table. The first table was just, the table at the side, not just the, main table where all the queue opinion leaders were sitting.
But because I got that back seat, and because I [00:06:00] was then able to show how valuable my input can be, I then negotiated next time that I will be part of the core group for organizing the advisory board and so on. Negotiation is super, super important. And actually I’m speaking about negotiation in my book, how to be an effective statistician quite a lot.
There’s a couple of different sections about negotiation and I want to give you a little bit about some background of what you can do to become better in terms of negotiation. Now, I talked about all these kind of different things that you are negotiating all the time. And one key thing that you need to understand when you negotiate is what are your positions [00:07:00] and what are your interests.
Now, positions Are things that you say you want from the other side, or that the other side tells you what they want. The interest is why you want this. Yeah, so for example when you negotiate on the job. Yeah. Maybe you negotiate about salary. Why do you want the salary? Is that because you want to look equal to the others?
Maybe instead of having, this very high jump on salary, you can also get a really nice title. If, that makes you look good. Or maybe you can get additional budget for training. But not a higher salary, or maybe you can get more vacation days. I have done that [00:08:00] once where I said, Oh yeah, if you can’t give me, so much salary, then give me more vacation days.
It always depends of course, on what the other side can actually negotiate about. Yeah. But that was what was one kind of thing. We basically, I got this. Not the complete salary, but I said I only work 95 percent and that basically resulted in more vacation days.
You can negotiate about your positions, but you should not negotiate about your interests. Your interests stay, but you can be flexible with your positions. The same is for the other side. Understand what are their interests, yeah? Why do they want X, Y, Z? And is there a different way? that you can match the interest while not mentioning the positions.
There’s a classical example that kind of shows [00:09:00] that. Imagine there’s, in the example, there’s two young girls that fight over an orange. And you are the father of these two kids. And they come to you and say, Daddy, I want to have this orange. And the other says, No, I want to have that orange. Now, you can’t give the orange to both.
And you could cut it in half, yes, but that’s not the best solution. The position is clear. Everybody wants, every side wants to have the orange. Now understand why do you need the orange. And so one girl says I want to create some orange juice. And the other said I want to make some muffins and I need the skin of the orange for the recipe.
And now because you understand the interest, you can clearly say, okay, You take [00:10:00] the inner part, you take the orange juice, and you take the rest, and then both are happy. On the position side, you couldn’t resolve that. But on the interest side, you could resolve this. Clearly understand what are your positions, what are your interests.
And that should be part of your preparation. Always prepare for any negotiations that you have. At least any negotiations. important one. You’ll very often run into negotiations with, that come out of nowhere or that are a surprise. But when you have a big negotiation, always prepare for it.
Next question you should always think about is, where’s the other side coming from? What will likely be their interests, their positions? What are the things that could be interesting for them? Is there anything that you can bring to the table [00:11:00] that helps you in terms of the overall negotiation? Yeah, so for example can you write a nice testimonial for your vendor?
It doesn’t cost you a lot, but it could be very valuable for your supplier. Yeah.
Can you maybe give some more budget so that timelines are met? Things like that. Also, in negotiations, it’s really important to understand who’s the decision maker. Are you directly negotiating with the decision maker? Or do you need to make the other person you’re talking to your ally so that he or she is influencing the decision maker in the back?
Of course, the best thing is always that you negotiate directly with the decision maker. But, that is not always possible. Yeah, for example, imagine your decision maker is maybe someone [00:12:00] higher up the food chain, and you’re just not part of the committee. Then you need to negotiate. influence those that are part of the committee so that they can then influence the decision maker.
And then it’s your negotiation to bring them on your side. Another thing that you need to absolutely prepare for before you go into a negotiation is your BATNA, B A T N A, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. For example, You want to outsource something, yeah? What is the alternative to outsourcing?
Do you have could you outsource it to a different vendor? And you have that already agreed. And now, that is an alternative that you already have in your pocket. Now, it doesn’t make sense to have any negotiation [00:13:00] or any agreement that is worse than what you already have. Okay. Or maybe you want to do it, could do it yourself.
Yeah. Or maybe you can insource it. Yeah. There’s always usually a best alternative to this negotiated agreement. And the better that alternative is, the stronger you are in your negotiation. So always think about what is your best alternative. If you negotiate for a job, then obviously, staying in your current job could be your best alternative.
Or maybe you have multiple job offers, then you know, the best job offer that you already have is your best alternative. I once had that when I was interviewing, yeah? I had two interviews, pretty much at the same time. And I got first a job offer from company [00:14:00] A, then I got a better job offer from company B that I negotiated because I already had A in the plan, and then A further improved it.
And then I went with company A. So be sure that you have that best alternative to a negotiated agreement. The next thing that you should do in Negotiation is listening. Shut up and listen. If you’re talking all the time you don’t know about what’s the position, what is the interest, all these kind of different things.
Ask what they need. Listen to them, yeah? That will make a huge difference. And by the way, listening also builds trust. And that will help you in [00:15:00] negotiating better. Paraphrase. I hear that you want x, y, z. And test the waters. Yeah? If you get a yes from the other side, you actually don’t know so much more. If you get a no from the other side, then you have a decision.
Okay, for example. Let’s say you are a vendor and you negotiate privacy with your client. If you pick a price and you get a yes you could have potentially chosen a higher price. If you choose a higher price and you get a no, then you can still go down. Oh it depends on the situation, but then you can still decrease the price until you get a yes.
So nos are really important. So these are a couple of things that you should always do. When you [00:16:00] negotiate, prepare for your negotiation. Yeah. What are your positions? What are your interests? Where’s the other side coming from? Who’s the decision maker? What can you bring to the table that is of interest to the other side? What is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In my book, I go actually into many more topics around negotiation and I can highly recommend you check out the book how to be an effective statistician on Amazon. Just for example, search for data science Schacht and then it should come up. Yeah. And if you don’t know how my last name is pronounced, S-C-H-A-C-H -T.
So we also will have a book, launch party on January 15th, which is the days that you can order the paperback and order the hot cover. You can already pre-order [00:17:00] the ebook. Yeah, so the Kindle version you can pre-order, and then automatically on January 15th, it will be downloaded to your device. Please check out the homepage, you, there will, you’ll find also things about the book launch on because we’ll also have launch parties there with some nice activities, training on how to be an effective statistician, reading from the book a Q& A with Gary, surprise guest and myself.
And I’m pretty sure you will love that. So check out the effective statistician slash book dash launch slash, and then you can sign up for this book launch. Enjoy the new year. I hope you have a great start and be an effective statistician.
Join The Effective Statistician LinkedIn group
This group was set up to help each other to become more effective statisticians. We’ll run challenges in this group, e.g. around writing abstracts for conferences or other projects. I’ll also post into this group further content.
I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.
I work to achieve a future in which everyone can access the right evidence in the right format at the right time to make sound decisions.
When my kids are sick, I want to have good evidence to discuss with the physician about the different therapy choices.
When my mother is sick, I want her to understand the evidence and being able to understand it.
When I get sick, I want to find evidence that I can trust and that helps me to have meaningful discussions with my healthcare professionals.
I want to live in a world, where the media reports correctly about medical evidence and in which society distinguishes between fake evidence and real evidence.
Let’s work together to achieve this.
