Before the Offer

## The two numbers a benchmark sheet exists to produce Market research is not an end in itself. It exists to produce a written position: two numbers on your own benchmark sheet, each attached to a level, a geography and a company stage, and both fixed before the final round of a loop. - **The target** is where you would be pleased to land — a defensible point inside the pay band for the level you are being hired at, not the best figure you can imagine. - **The walk-away** is the floor — the point below which you would decline and continue searching. The sheet itself is small: one row per data point, with columns for level, geography, company stage, what the figure includes, and where it came from, plus two lines at the bottom for the target and the walk-away. ## Express both as positions in a band, not as bare figures A bare figure carries no frame. It dates, it does not travel between markets, and it silently smuggles in a level you may not have been offered. A position inside a band survives all three. Suppose you gather entries for a senior-level security engineering role in one large US metro, and after discarding the ones you cannot tag to a level you hold 23 usable entries whose totals spread from roughly the 35th to the 85th percentile of that sample. A target at the 68th percentile is ambitious and still inside your own evidence. A floor at the 41st percentile says you would rather stay in the process elsewhere than accept the lower two-fifths of what that level pays. These are illustrative percentiles for one level in one US market — substitute your own benchmark, and note that bands, and what parts of a package are negotiable at all, vary by employer, by market and by jurisdiction. Eventually you do write an absolute figure, because offers arrive in currency. Write it beside the percentile it came from, so that later you can tell whether it was the number or the level mapping that moved. ## Why the numbers are fixed before the loop ends **Anchoring.** A floor invented after you hear a number is a function of that number. Every study-worthy thing about negotiation preparation reduces to this: the first figure you encounter reshapes what feels reasonable, and the only defence is a position that predates it. **Time pressure.** An offer commonly arrives with a response window. Deciding your floor inside that window means deciding it while tired, flattered and afraid of losing the process. **Honesty with yourself.** Before an offer exists, a floor is cheap to set truthfully. Afterwards it is expensive, because admitting the offer is below your floor now costs you something concrete. ## A floor you would not honour is not a floor The walk-away is not a bluff and it is not a line you deliver. Its whole function is private: it converts a hard decision under pressure into a lookup. If you would in fact accept a package below the number you wrote down, you did not write a floor, you wrote a wish — and you will discover that at the worst possible moment. A useful test before you commit it to the sheet: if this exact package arrived tomorrow, could you say no and go back to the other conversations without regret? If not, the floor is too high; lower it until it is true. ## What legitimately moves the numbers, and what does not New information about the job moves them. If the role turns out to be opened a rung higher than you mapped, the whole band shifts and both numbers move with it. If your level mapping was wrong, redo the mapping and re-derive, rather than nudging the floor. Pressure is not new information. A closing deadline, a warm conversation with a compensation partner, or the sunk cost of five completed interviews change nothing about what the level pays. When you feel one of them tugging on the floor, that is exactly the moment the pre-written number is earning its place. ## Where the floor sits for a first search With no history to lean on, derive the floor the same way: pick the level the role is opened at, pick the geography and the company stage, gather what you can, and set the floor low in that band rather than anchoring it to your living costs. Living costs tell you what you need; they say nothing about what the level pays, and a floor built from them will either be embarrassingly low or unmeetably high by accident.