Negotiation
Tactical negotiation for high-stakes conversations
Win high-stakes negotiations using FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss's tactical empathy techniques. This skill equips your AI agent with labeling, mirroring, calibrated questions, and the Ackerman model for getting better outcomes in any conversation.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/negotiation --global 
Never Split the Difference Chris Voss View on Amazon
02 What it is
What is the Negotiation skill?
Negotiation packages Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference — the toolkit he used as the FBI’s lead international hostage negotiator — into a skill your agent loads before a hard conversation. It drafts labels, mirrors and calibrated questions, runs an accusation audit over your weak points, and plans concessions using the Ackerman model.
03 Key concepts
Five principles your agent applies.
Drawn from Never Split the Difference — not advice it repeats back to you, but decisions it makes while it works.
04 Fit
When to use it, and
when not to.
four symptoms it fixes, and four it doesn't.
Reach for it when
A renewal call is on Thursday and the buyer has already opened with a demand for twenty percent off.
Every deal lands on a split-the-difference compromise that leaves both sides quietly resenting it afterwards.
You need to refuse a client and have the refusal hold without the relationship cooling by a degree.
You’re walking into a salary or funding conversation and want their objections voiced before they can be used.
Reach for something else when
What you’re selling is the problem, not how you’re discussing it. $100M Offers rebuilds the package itself.
You’re setting list prices across a whole market rather than closing one deal. Monetizing Innovation handles that.
You need more conversations before you need better ones. Predictable Revenue manufactures the pipeline.
You’re persuading an anonymous audience through a page or an email. Influence Psychology is built for that.
05 Prompts
Say it like this.
Name the skill at the end of a prompt and the agent applies the framework rather than a vibe. Or say nothing — it loads on its own when a task matches.
Prepare a negotiation strategy for my enterprise contract renewal using negotiation skill
Write calibrated questions for a salary negotiation using negotiation skill
Create a tactical empathy playbook for our sales team using negotiation skill
Role-play a price negotiation and coach me through it using negotiation skill
06 About the author
07 Same stack
The stack it sits in.
Six Sales & Persuasion skills. Most people run two: this one, and whichever fits the next problem.
All Sales & Persuasion skills08 Questions
Before you install.
How do I install the Negotiation skill?
Run npx skills add wondelai/skills/negotiation --global. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Negotiation skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills.
Which book is the Negotiation skill based on?
It packages Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss — former FBI lead hostage negotiator. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering tactical empathy, labeling & mirroring and calibrated questions. It sits in the Sales & Persuasion part of the library.
What’s the actual difference between mirroring and labelling?
A mirror is repeating the last one to three words your counterpart said, as a question, then staying silent. It costs nothing and almost always buys more information. A label names the emotion or dynamic you’re reading — “It seems like the timing is the real problem here.” Mirrors keep them talking; labels prove you understood, which is the part that defuses. The skill picks between them by what the conversation is doing.
How is this different from the Influence Psychology skill?
Influence Psychology is designed in advance and aimed at many people at once — a pricing page, an onboarding sequence, a testimonial block. Negotiation is live, aimed at one person whose position shifts as you speak, and useless if scripted too tightly. Cialdini gives you principles to build into a surface; Voss gives you the next thirty seconds. Sales teams tend to use both, at different points in the same deal.
Isn’t tactical empathy just manipulation with better manners?
Tactical empathy means understanding the other side’s position accurately — not agreeing with it, and not performing warmth you don’t feel. It works because it’s real: a label that misreads the room gets corrected immediately, which is itself useful. The tactics extract information and make people feel heard, and both of those serve an agreement that survives contact with their finance team. Anything you talk someone into against their interest tends not to.
Can it help when the other side holds all the leverage?
Only at the margins, and it will say so. These tactics change what you learn and what you give away; they don’t change who can afford to walk. If your alternative to this deal is genuinely bad, the honest move is to improve it first — build a second option, stretch the timeline, shrink the scope — before getting clever with calibrated questions. The techniques earn most where both sides have something to lose.
09 Guides that use it
Put it to work.
Long-form playbooks where this skill does part of the job.
One skill, one command.
Install Negotiation, or the whole stack.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/negotiation --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account