Planning for Negotiations, Negotiation Strategies December 1, 2025
How to Strengthen Your BATNA Before NegotiatingBATNA—your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement—is one of the most powerful tools in negotiation. A strong BATNA gives you confidence, leverage, and walk-away power. Strengthening it before discussions begin ensures you negotiate from choice, not desperation.
Dr. Karrass emphasized that power comes from preparation. This article shows how to identify alternatives, improve them, and use BATNA strategically without overexposure. With a solid BATNA, negotiators approach every deal with clarity and composure.
In business as in life, you don’t get what you deserve—you get what you negotiate. And the key to negotiating with confidence and power often comes down to one thing: preparation. At the heart of that preparation is your BATNA—your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. Strengthening your BATNA before the negotiation begins isn’t just a good idea. It’s the foundation of effective negotiation strategy.
Dr. Chester L. Karrass taught that the best negotiators are always prepared. They understand that power in negotiation doesn’t come from bluff or bravado—it comes from having real, viable options. That’s what a strong BATNA provides: the leverage to say “no” if a deal doesn’t meet your minimum threshold, and the confidence to push for more if the deal is close.
Below, we explore how to prepare for a negotiation by strengthening your BATNA. We’ll walk through why this matters, what the process looks like, and how it shapes your negotiation outcomes before a single word is spoken.
BATNA is not a backup plan—it’s your negotiating bedrock. It represents the most favorable outcome you can pursue if the current negotiation falls apart. Knowing your BATNA—and knowing how to improve it—puts you in control. It anchors your decisions, sharpens your expectations, and reduces the emotional stakes of the conversation.
Without a clear BATNA, you’re negotiating in the dark. With one, you bring clarity, discipline, and structure to the bargaining table. It allows you to walk away if needed, not out of stubbornness, but because you have something better waiting.
Dr. Karrass believed that “you have more power than you think,” and BATNA is one of the tools that proves it. When you know your best alternative, you negotiate from strength, not desperation.
Before improving your alternatives, you need to be crystal clear about what you actually need from the negotiation. What are your core objectives? What’s essential versus negotiable? This process shapes what a “good” BATNA actually looks like for you.
Too often, negotiators chase a better deal without defining what better means. Clarifying your interests helps you evaluate options more rationally and avoid getting pulled into surface-level wins that don’t serve your deeper goals.
Take stock of the options you currently have. If the negotiation fell through today, what would you do? These alternatives might be other suppliers, job offers, partnerships, or timelines.
List each alternative and assess its value. Not all options are equal, and your job is to realistically evaluate the costs, benefits, and risks of each. This forms the baseline against which any negotiated deal should be measured.
Dr. Karrass emphasized that power is often rooted in facts. Knowing your real options—rather than vague hopes—gives you negotiating power rooted in truth.
Once your alternatives are clear, take proactive steps to improve them. If you’re negotiating a contract, start conversations with other vendors. If you’re seeking a promotion, explore external job opportunities.
Improving your BATNA is not about being disloyal or deceptive. It’s about preparation. When you make your alternatives more attractive, you increase your leverage. You also increase your freedom to say no without fear.
KARRASS’s principle of “trading, not giving” applies here too. A strong BATNA allows you to make strategic trades instead of concessions you’ll regret.
It’s not just enough for you to know your BATNA. You must also communicate—tactfully—that you have real options. The other side should understand that you are not locked in. However, this must be handled with finesse. Overplaying your hand can come across as arrogance or threat, which may damage trust or escalate conflict.
A well-prepared negotiator doesn't bluff; they convey quiet confidence. You don’t need to reveal your BATNA in full, but you can make it clear that you’re prepared to walk away if necessary.
With your alternatives in mind, define your reservation price—the minimum acceptable outcome before you walk. This step is critical. It prevents you from agreeing to a deal that’s worse than what you already have.
Your BATNA informs this line in the sand. If your alternative is strong, your reservation price can be firm. If it’s weak, you may need more flexibility—but at least you’ll know where you stand.
Too many deals go wrong because negotiators fail to prepare this line. KARRASS taught that a well-prepared negotiator makes fewer concessions and better decisions. Preparation protects you from giving away more than you intended.
Preparation is not about scripting the outcome—it’s about giving yourself the tools to adapt, influence, and respond effectively. A strong BATNA is one of those tools. It reduces anxiety, increases confidence, and helps you avoid being manipulated by artificial deadlines or pressure tactics.
Preparation also improves your ability to ask the right questions, test assumptions, and shift the balance of power. It turns the negotiation from a reactive process into a strategic one.
Those who prepare effectively—especially around their BATNA—rarely get pushed into bad deals. They also tend to uncover value others miss, simply because they’re better positioned to see what’s possible.
Some negotiators fall into the trap of assuming they already have a BATNA—or worse, that they don’t need one. Others mistake BATNA for wishful thinking instead of actionable alternatives. And many don’t go far enough to improve the alternatives they do have.
Your BATNA strategy should always include real-world steps to identify, validate, and enhance your options. Preparation isn’t passive. It’s the quiet, behind-the-scenes work that gives you the power to influence outcomes later.
Finally, don’t neglect timing. Strengthening your BATNA doesn’t have to happen months in advance—but it must happen before you begin serious talks. Once the conversation starts, your leverage depends on how prepared you are.
One of the most important aspects of strengthening your BATNA is knowing how to use it strategically in the negotiation—without showing all your cards. While you want the other party to understand that you have real alternatives, explicitly revealing every detail of your BATNA can weaken your position, especially if your alternative has vulnerabilities they could exploit.
Instead, aim for subtle but confident communication. For example, saying “We’re currently reviewing a few other strong proposals” signals that you have options, without needing to disclose what those are. You can also ask more probing questions about timelines or deliverables to make the other side feel the competition without making threats.
Dr. Karrass emphasized that negotiation is a process, not a battle. You’re not using your BATNA as a weapon—but as leverage to keep the process fair and mutually beneficial. Used with discretion, your BATNA provides quiet strength, not loud ultimatums.
To better understand what it means to strengthen your BATNA, let’s look at two different scenarios:
Imagine a job candidate negotiating salary. They’ve received an offer from Company A but also have interviews scheduled with Companies B and C, both of which have expressed strong interest. They’ve done research on market salaries, clarified their priorities, and have a backup consulting project if none of the offers meet expectations. This candidate can negotiate with confidence, knowing they have viable alternatives.
Now picture another candidate negotiating an offer after being unemployed for several months. They have no other interviews lined up, no freelance opportunities, and little clarity on their minimum acceptable salary. Even if they negotiate assertively, they’ll be doing so from a place of dependence—making them more likely to accept unfavorable terms.
The difference? Preparation. Strengthening your BATNA isn’t about luck—it’s about putting in the work to identify, pursue, and evaluate alternatives that give you options when it matters most.
Confidence is often the silent edge in negotiation—and a strong BATNA is one of its greatest sources. When you know you’re not trapped in a bad deal, you enter the room with calm, clarity, and control. This kind of quiet confidence tends to make the other side more respectful and willing to collaborate.
In contrast, when negotiators feel stuck or underprepared, they’re more likely to fold under pressure, overreact to minor concessions, or fixate on “winning” rather than creating mutual value. These patterns lead to poorer outcomes and unnecessary conflict.
Dr. Karrass believed that good negotiation starts long before the conversation begins. It starts with the knowledge that you’ve done the work. That knowledge—of your BATNA, your goals, your limits—doesn’t just prepare you technically. It prepares you psychologically.
BATNA and reservation price are closely related—but they’re not the same. Your BATNA is your best course of action if the negotiation fails. Your reservation price, on the other hand, is the worst deal you’re willing to accept before you walk away. In essence, your reservation price is determined by the value of your BATNA.
For example, if your BATNA is accepting a competing offer worth $80,000, then your reservation price in the current negotiation should be no lower than that number. Anything below it would leave you worse off than walking away. If your BATNA improves, your reservation price should rise accordingly.
To explore this relationship in more depth, check out our companion post: Reservation Price vs BATNA: What’s the Difference?
A BATNA, or Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, is the most advantageous option you can pursue if the current negotiation does not result in a deal. It represents your fallback plan—the alternative that gives you the most value if you walk away from the table. A well-defined BATNA helps you determine whether an offer is acceptable or whether you’re better off pursuing other opportunities. It’s one of the most powerful tools a negotiator can have because it keeps you grounded in reality rather than pressured by the moment.
Strengthening your BATNA involves identifying viable alternatives, evaluating their value, and actively improving them before you begin negotiating. For example, if you're negotiating with a supplier, you might reach out to competitors to get better quotes or lead times. Strengthening your BATNA is a proactive process that may require research, outreach, or even small investments—but it pays dividends by giving you options. The stronger your alternatives, the more confidently you can negotiate, knowing you’re not locked into a single outcome.
A strong BATNA empowers you to negotiate without fear of losing the deal, because you have something else to fall back on. It gives you clarity on when to accept an offer and when to walk away, allowing you to avoid bad deals and push for better ones. Without a strong BATNA, you’re more susceptible to manipulation, artificial urgency, or settling for less than you deserve. It also helps you stay composed under pressure, which can shift the balance of power in your favor.
Technically yes, but it’s risky—and often leads to poor outcomes. Without a BATNA, you may feel you have no choice but to accept whatever the other side offers, even if it’s far from ideal. That kind of desperation can be sensed by the other party, weakening your negotiating position. Having even a modest BATNA is better than none at all, because it restores your ability to make decisions based on logic and value, not pressure or emotion.
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