Erica Rooney: Have you ever wanted to ask for something at work and then you've talked yourself right on out of it before those words even got close to your mouth? Now listen, I'm not talking about asking for a day off, and I'm not talking about asking someone to cover a meeting for you. I'm talking about a big ask.

One that makes you, ooh, nervous, scary, gives you those butterflies in your stomach. The one where maybe you've already run the numbers, you know what you're worth, and you still hear this voice in the back of your head saying, “Ooh, girl, don't push it. Don't be greedy. Don't make them regret choosing you.” Now listen, I know that voice really well, and I'm sure you do, too.

But for me, a few years ago, y'all, I was sitting on my back porch, I was negotiating a job offer, I was hunched over my phone, and I was about to ask for 100,000 more dollars than I was currently making. Y'all, seriously, $100,000. Like, I remember back in the day, I never thought I would even make six figures, and here I was about to double that number.

I thought I was gonna be sick, okay? But today I wanna walk you through exactly what I did. I'm gonna talk about the research, the numbers, and the actual words that I used, and the part that nobody talks about, which is what was actually going on in my body that almost made me not make the ask. And I'm gonna run this whole thing through my favorite method, the SNAP method, because the strategy is only half of it.

The other half is the sticky floor that almost kept me from asking.

Welcome to Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, the podcast where we stop playing small, start calling things out, and actually do something about it. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, executive coach, speaker, and a little bit of a movement maker, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there.

Erica Rooney: Today's episode is a little different.

It's a super personal one. It's all about them dollars and them finances. But this one is also a very tactical one, so you're definitely gonna wanna have that notebook, have the pen and paper. But what I'm about to go into today is the story that I get asked about more than anything else. This is crazy to me that I've never actually done a full episode on it.

So here it is, guys. I asked for a $100,000, six figures, y'all, increase in my salary, and I got it. Now, listen, this is moving from one company to another, from one role to a more elevated role, and that plays into it. But asking for this And getting it, it really changed the way I lived. I mean, it changed my whole life.

It changed my confidence, it changed the way I look at every single negotiation that I've ever walked into since then, and it's the methodology that I teach inside Her Collective. And if I'm really honest with you, I made it super easy, and I have turned it all into this incredible AI agent that helps women determine what those numbers should be when they're inside of negotiations, okay?

And it all stemmed from this one conversation. Now, here's what I want you to really hone in on. 55% of American workers just accept the first offer that they're given. They don't counter, they don't ask a single question. They just say yes, and they cross their fingers, and they hope it's fair. And for women, that picture, it gets more complicated.

We negotiate at nearly the same rate as men do now, which is great, okay? We're stepping up on that, that game. Now, this old story that we often hear about women not negotiating, y'all, that's out of date, so don't even listen to that anymore. But when we do ask, our average increase lands around 15%, and men land closer to 20%.

And we are more likely than men to ask and then be handed exactly what was originally on the table, which is some bullsh*t. So the problem isn't that we're not asking, the problem is what we are asking for and what we're walking in with when we make that ask. So let me tell you what I was walking in with.

All right. At the time, I was an HR business partner at a large global company in the med device and pharma space, and it was a big company, big brand, established pay bands, established comp philosophy, established everything. My scope was one country. And then an opportunity came along to move into, into the tech industry, into an SVP role, and it was at a much smaller agency, so smaller scope, but bigger responsibilities, right?

So I would be in charge of benefits, employee experience, the entire life cycle, whereas at the larger company, I had a much smaller role, okay? I was going from being one of these many business partners inside this giant machine to the person responsible for the whole kit and caboodle, okay? So that was a big factor for me.

I was that entire function, and I was going into an industry that I had no experience working in, at a company size that I'd never been at a company that small, and pay bands that I didn't even know if they had them. But this is the part that really made it so hard because in my old world, I knew what those bands were.

I built the bands. I was in HR. I had that visibility. I was the one telling other people what was reasonable, and I had the data to prove it. But here I was walking into a smaller tech agency where I had no idea what their executives were paid, whether or not they had pay bands, or if I was going to even be asking anything that was feasible.

I didn't want to go in and undersell myself, and I didn't want to go in and price myself out of the job, right? And here's the thing. The person who was offering me the job did not say, “Hey, listen, here's what we're gonna offer you.” They looked at me and they said, “What's the number that's gonna make this work?”

And I just remember thinking, “Holy sh*t, how am I gonna answer this?” And I told him I needed to run the numbers. I needed to look at the benefits, and I was really just buying myself some time to do the market research and to figure out, like, what I thought was a fair ask for this size company in this industry in a role and a scope I'd never done before.

There was no track record for me. There was no performance review to go off to. This person who was offering me the job did not know what my current salary was, so I was the only one with that information, and all of that put together made it really terrifying. But that's also a little bit why this worked.

So we're gonna walk you through that SNAP method, right? We all know SNAP, the first step in there is to stop and notice that feeling inside of your body, okay? Our default is typically to solve or to fix. Our default is to open up that big old spreadsheet and start gathering the data so that we don't have to, you know, figure out why we think this number is the right number, okay?

I want to be really clear. I did do that spreadsheet, okay? But I sat with it first, and I noticed the feelings that were going on in my body. I noticed that my stomach dropped when I thought about the number that I actually should be asking for, considering my scope. And that's the crazy thing. I was scared of that number because I just remember sitting there on that porch and thinking, “Nobody is ever going to pay me that number.

There's just no way.“ I still could not believe that I was actually considering that number. Now, let me be clear, I'm gonna be real honest with you. Erica Rooney: I was gonna ask for a $190,000 base salary. 190,000. My husband looked at me like I had lost my damn mind, y'all. And so these physical sensation that I was feeling my body, y'all, my chest was tight, my hands were sweating, and the entire time there was that voice in my head saying, ”Don't F it up, Erica.

Like, do not ask for that number. It is too much. Nobody's ever gonna pay you that.“ Erica Rooney: And I wanna tell you that story because those were very real thoughts and feelings that someone who knows compensation analysis, who knows how the negotiation game works, like, I still had those thoughts and feelings, and it was a lot of fear.

And so if you are in a situation like this where you are approaching negotiation and you know that you need to be strategic and careful, pay attention and focus in on what's going on in the body, and really notice where those tensions and the fear and the anxiety is all bubbling up, because that's gonna help you name the sticky floor.

That second step in the SNAP method is to name it, because once you name something, you start to take agency over that. And so then I started to ask myself, “What is it, Erica, that you are actually afraid of?” And that surface answer was super easy, right? I'm afraid the number's too high. I'm afraid they're gonna say I don't understand the market.

I'm afraid they're gonna tell me I am fricking bananas, and that I am so far off what they were gonna offer me that, “You know what? Let's just call it a day. Thanks for playing.” But underneath all of that, there was this heavier feeling that I felt if I pushed too much, they're gonna take the offer back.

And if they rescinded the offer, then I was gonna be stuck where I was, and I was trying to get out of that job. This was my exit. This was the door, and I didn't wanna F it up. Okay? And there it is, right? That was the sticky floor I was sitting in. The sticky floor wasn't confidence. I had plenty of confidence in a conference room.

The sticky floor was really looking at gratitude as a cage. I was so grateful to be presented with this opportunity that I was ready to accept whatever I could if it could get me out of the role that I was currently in. And so this one's really sneaky because it doesn't necessarily feel like a sticky floor, right?

It feels like I'm being reasonable. It feels like I'm being humble, and it feels like not being difficult. I mean, does that resonate? Now, I see this in so many of the women that I coach, right? Where they have the offer, they have the promotion, the seat, and the thing she is protecting is the seat itself.

It's not what she gets paid to actually sit in it. Erica Rooney: And the piece of data that I think would've really saved me weeks of stomachaches had I known it, and this comes from Harvard Business Review, it is that negotiation is very unlikely to actually cost you the offer. Okay? The thing that we are all so terrified of, that rescinded offer, the burned bridge, it's a story that we tell ourselves.

Only about one-third of women say they feel comfortable asking for a raise, and it's not because we don't know our worth. It's because we've been rewarded our entire careers for being easy to work with, and asking feels like this moment where we stop being easy. And when I named that, I really had this realization that I wasn't negotiating against a company, I was negotiating against a version of myself who believed that the seat was the prize, right? Erica Rooney: That was where I was stuck. So then I had to dig in, y'all. Step three, ask and answer the deep and personal questions. And this is the step that everybody wants to skip, especially in salary negotiating. That is a problem, y'all, because when you skip this step, it gets costly for you. And so I had to ask myself these honest questions first.

Erica, if they say no, like, what actually happens? Am I gonna lose the offer? Do I lose the money? Like, those are two very different outcomes, and I had been treating them like the same one. I think for me, too, I really had to ask what I was afraid of, and a lot of it was I was afraid of looking ridiculous, like I didn't know what I was talking about.

But I really had to think, like, what am I actually walking into here? And it was not just a bigger title, but it was an expanded scope. And here's the thing. If a man with my resume and my experience were looking at this job opportunity, what would he have come up with? Probably three times as much as me.

I don't know. But that is where I really had to kinda take a moment, pause, and think about it. And it was, it was really this pivotal moment for me of what is the story that I'm gonna tell myself for the next five years if I don't make this ask? And that's when I was like, “Holy sh*t, Erica” and I turned my own career on myself.

And here's the thing, if I had spent all of these years telling other people what was reasonable, I'd never done it for myself. So here is exactly what I did, y'all. I pulled real compensation data, not a salary aggregator. I didn't go and look to see what other SVPs were making, but I went for real market data for that role at that company size, in that industry, in the same geography that I was in.

Okay? All four of those matter, and most people only use one or two of them. An SVP of employee experience at a 200-person tech agency in one metro is not the same thing as the same title at a 5,000-person company elsewhere. Right? Now, I researched the bands even though I couldn't see theirs. Too long, didn't read, they ended up not even having them.

I couldn't get internal numbers, y'all, but I could try to figure out how to triangulate a little bit. Okay? What do comparable agencies pay executives? What does the market pay a full employee experience portfolio? What does the market pay for someone who owns benefits, and talent acquisition, and compensation all at once?

I also reached out to people in my network who would be honest with me, not the people who'd be nice, not the people who'd tell me what I want to hear, but the people who would say a number out loud, who would tell me if I was on point or being ridiculous. And that is a very specific kind of person that you need to have in your network, right?

You need to be able to call the person and ask them directly, “What would you ask for?” Erica Rooney: And then I wrote down my scope. I translated that scope into business impact, and this is a step that a lot of people, they don't even think about. They completely miss it. I didn't walk in with this list of responsibilities.

I walked in with how those responsibilities would tie to company revenue and company worth, so I focused on turnover cost, cost per hire, benefit spend, the real dollar value of what I was about to own. And then I took that number and I took a sticky note and I wrote it down on a piece of paper because I knew that if I were gonna pick up this phone and make this call and say this number out loud, I wanted to have it directly in front of me so that I would not stray outside of it. Erica Rooney: I practiced. I know that sounds silly. I know it sounds, gosh, annoying. Nobody likes role playing, but I had to say it enough times so that it actually would roll off my tongue as a full sentence. Now, one more thing here on the research, because I think this is where a lot of women start to lose the most money, is there is data showing that women report lower expected salaries than men before they even submit an application.

So nearly 10% lower on average. So that gap is not an opening in the negotiation, right? It's already open before we've even said a word. We're expecting less, which means that the number that we're putting in our head, the number that feels reasonable, the one that you would say if someone just asked it to you right now, is probably already too low.

And this isn't because you're bad at math or something like that, but it's because you've been calibrating off of what you've been paid in the past, and we already know that what you've been paid in the past was already calibrated off someone else's assumption about you. So I need you to get that real number, and then I need you to decide, and then we're gonna move into the final step, which is the pivot, the P in the SNAP.

And the pivot was this I really had to stop trying to protect the opportunity, and I started trying to give them the information they needed to say yes. And that's the whole shift, right? I went from, “Do not blow this up. Do not lose this opportunity,” to, “Here's why this number makes sense.” Because when you walk in prepared and with the market data and the scope translated into impact, you're not being a difficult person.

You're being handed, or I should say you're handing your future boss the entire business case that he actually needs to walk down the hall and fight for you, right? Nobody wants to advocate for somebody who just says like, “I feel I, like I deserve $190,000.” That is like a hard no for me. But everybody can advocate for somebody who says, “Look, here's the data, here's the scope, and here's my number.”

So picture this. I'm back on my porch. I am literally hunched over my phone, and I said it. I said, “For me to make this move, I'd need 190K.” And y'all, the silence that followed, I think in reality, it probably only lasted like three seconds, but it felt like three years. And then he said, “Let me see what I can do.”

And that was it. That was the whole terrifying moment. Four seconds, three seconds of silence, and then a completely calm and normal human being saying, “Let me see what I can do about that, Erica.” And guess what? I got the $100,000 raise, okay? I remember telling my husband, who pretty much just died on the spot right there because that is life-changing money.

But I wanna be very clear about what changed because it wasn't just them, them zeros, right? It changed how I lived, it changed my confidence level, and it changed how I look at every single negotiation that I've ever walked into since, including the ones I do for my own business. The money matters. It always does.

We need money to live, and that money gave me F-you money, which I talk about in my book, The AI Gap, and if you don't have F-you money, we gotta get you on that track too. But what it really did was prove to myself that the disaster that I was so sure was coming wasn't going to show up. So I wanna be honest, though, about something, and the reason I could do all of this research and I could figure all of this out was because I had spent so much time in HR, right?

Like, I knew how compensation analysts work. I knew what data needed to be considered. I knew where to look. I knew what data was reliable. I knew what pay bands were. I knew how to translate my scope and impact into dollars because that was literally the job I had been doing for the past decade. Now, most women don't have that, right?

And it's not their fault. They're in project management. They're in a completely different industry. They're not in HR. That information has typically been locked behind people like me, honestly. And so you know what I did? This is the best part, y'all. I built it out. Inside Her Collective, y'all, I did an entire negotiation toolkit that is powered by AI, which means that it runs on everything I know from sitting in that chief people officer sit.

It's gonna analyze your role, your scope, your industry, your geography, your company size. It's gonna tell you what is a reasonable ask, what that actually looks like that is backed by industry and market data, and it really helps you translate your scope into business impact language that gets you the yes, okay?

This is what a compensation analyst does, and if you hired someone like that today, it would probably cost you, I don't know, five grand, something like that. But this entire negotiation toolkit, it's included in the membership. You can have 15 job offers and run it 15 times. That's it. I didn't build it because this was a nice feature, but I built it because I don't want another woman sitting behind another $100 ask guessing or maybe not even making the ask, right?

This is how we close pay gaps, y'all. This is how we change lives for women. Now, listen, if you're sitting on an offer right now or a promotion conversation, or maybe you have a review coming up in a couple weeks, I want you to really hear this. You're probably not going to feel ready. I didn't feel ready.

I felt nauseous. I felt anxious. I felt sick to my stomach, and I had done every piece of the research, and I still thought I was gonna throw up when I had to say that number Being ready is not the requirement, okay? Being prepared is the requirement. And maybe your version of this is not $100,000, right?

Maybe it's only $15,000. Maybe it's asking for the title that actually matches what you already do. Or maybe it's the first time that you have ever countered anything in your life, right? The size of the ask, it doesn't change the work. So bring it back to SNAP. I want you to stop and I want you to notice what is your body telling you before you start solving the problem.

I want you to name the sticky floor. I want you to find that belief underneath the fear because it almost is never the one that you think it is. And then I want you to ask and answer those honest questions, and then I want you to go get the data. I want you to pivot. I want you to stop protecting the offer, stop pretending like it's the only option out there, and I want you to start making the case.

You don't need the whole path, y'all. You just need the next best step. So I'm here, I'm cheering you on, I'm in it with you, and I believe in all of the infinite possibilities that are sitting just on the other side of one uncomfortable conversation. I'll see you next week.

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Until next time, y'all, keep going. Keep choosing differently, and let's smash the ceilings and close the gaps.