3 Tips to Win Salary Negotiations

Negotiating an annual raise at your current job or making a counter-offer at a new one is not easy. Many managers tend to provide standard 3-5% raises annually, even when team members are crushing it for the companies top-line revenue growth. This is why its so important to look back on your impact the past 12 months and be prepared to ask for what you deserve.

As someone contemplating a job offer, and getting ready to counter, it’s very important to position yourself for success - rather than just asking for more. In both these scenarios, here are 3 great tips to help you get a yes from your boss or hiring manager.

Tip 1: Leverage Your Big Victories

Its great to talk about what you’re capable of doing in terms of job function and past experience, but you need to put numbers, dollar impact, and an ROI on all of your victories. If this is your current job and you’re negotiating a raise, write down all of your big wins over the past year. Then crunch some numbers and figure the ROI impact for each of these achievements.

If you’re countering a job offer, do this same activity for your last 2-3 relevant roles. Hiring managers care that your a functional fit for the role, but when it comes to maximizing potential salary, bonuses, and benefits - you need to talk about your financial impact at previous companies and how that will potentially translate to this new job financially.

Some examples of positioning yourself in this way are “developed and implemented a customer acquisition campaign that added $10 million in revenue in 12 months”, “Actively managed a $50 million engineering project to completion 6 months ahead of schedule”, “Lectured on 3 graduate level courses that resulted in an average 4.9 out of 5.0 evaluation score from students”, and “optimized the SEO and SEM marketing for the corporate website resulting in 2x page views and a 50% reduction in CPC.”

In my coaching sessions, this is something I come across a lot. Most people think of articulating their job function and experience, but don’t leverage their dollar impact at previous companies on their resume, in interviews, and when they are negotiating. Read my 7 ways to level up your resume

Tip 2: Utilize References and Recommendations

This is often overlooked, but you really need to leverage recommendations from past managers and co-workers, as well as testimonials form clients. If you have a LinkedIn account, this is a great place to collect them over time. Although I recommend saving all of them on your computer somewhere.

I advise doing this at every job you have, so you always have at least one amazing manager, co-worker, and client recommendation to pull from. When negotiating a raise, you can also leverage positive feedback from your current manager, cross-functional team members and leaders, or clients from the past 12 months. This is a great way to validate your performance utilizing an internal 3rd party along with the ROI results of your work - when sitting down 1:1 with your manager.

If you’re negotiating a counter-offer, you can utilize as many recommendations as you have to provide credibility regarding your anticipated job performance and impact at this new company.

In my coaching sessions, I recommend putting these recommendations in quotes at the end of your resume in a recommendations section, as well as providing in support of a higher ask when countering an offer.

Tip 3: Keep the Ask Within Reach

This is kind of obvious, but it needs to be given serious thought whatever you counter. For countering a job offer, it may be that the salary offer needs to be higher, the bonus is low, or maybe you need health insurance and it’s not provided by this company.

Of these three things, I would say that bonuses will have the most flexibility. This is typically because they are usually tied to a performance metric. Thus, the hiring manager knows there is a certain ROI for the company when you achieve this bonus or bonuses.

If health insurance seems like its not something they will provide, work that into the salary for your counter-offer. I’ve seen most people be very successful getting an additional $500 per month in salary to cover the cost of health insurance.

Overall, if the salary offered for this role is say $110K, and the hiring manager posted the compensation between $90k and $110k, you know you are already at the top. However, this doesn’t mean they won’t give you more. I’ve had several jobs where I received more than the top range. In this scenario, I would limit your ask to around 10-15% above the top line to improve your chances of acceptance.

In this same scenario, lets say they offered you $95k - I would highly recommend countering for $110k and leverage recommendations and past performance impact results as much as you can in relation to this new role.

Lets say you’re negotiation a raise and you were offered a 3% salary increase after exceeding company goals. I would recommend leveraging internal recommendations from cross-functional teams, and referencing ROI impact in great detail when countering your raise.

I know this scenario can feel self-defeating, however, I’ve seen collogues successfully counter for 20% salary increases and/or given a bonus goal added to their compensation for the next year.

Whatever your current situation, if you are looking for a seasoned coach to give you 1:1 advise on salary negotiations, upgrading your resume, interview preparations, speaking more confidently, or accelerating your career trajectory - you can schedule your first 1:1 coaching session with me here.