What to Say - Salary Negotiation — Mid-Year Pivot Script

What you'll need to fill in

This script has 6 details to fill in before you read it. Have these to hand — the customizer above updates the script as you type:

• Month of Review
• Huge Project
• Project
• Specific Metric improvement
• Target Number
• Date

That timing assumes about 130 words a minute, which is a normal conversational pace. If you are presenting to a room you will likely go slower; if you are nervous you will go faster. Read it aloud once and time yourself before it matters.

When to use this script

Use this before a conversation where you know you will undersell yourself. Salary negotiations, resignations, and interview introductions all have the same problem: they are high-stakes, infrequent, and emotionally loaded, which is exactly the combination that makes people improvise badly and hedge their own case.

Writing it down does two things. It forces you to make the specific claim you are avoiding, and it gives you something to fall back on when the conversation gets uncomfortable and your instinct is to soften the ask.

Making it sound like you

• Put a real number in. A negotiation script without a specific figure is a script that ends without one.
• Replace hedging language with plain statements. "I was hoping maybe" undoes the case the rest of the sentence makes.
• Ground every claim in something verifiable — a shipped project, a metric, a scope change with a date.
• Write what you will say after they respond, including the silence. That is the part people improvise worst.

Reading it out loud

These conversations are usually live and often remote, so keep notes where you can glance without obviously reading — a narrow column near the webcam, or a printed page beside you. Rehearse the ask out loud until you can say it without softening it, because the softening happens in the delivery, not the draft.

More on the setup side: Teleprompter for Webcam, Teleprompter for Laptop, Moving Text for Scripts.

Questions about this script