When you’re negotiating you don’t want to use round numbers because they sound made up, they make it obvious that you’re playing a game and so they invite the other person to negotiate with you, rather than accept your price. Precise numbers sound stronger, more real, more carefully calculated, and therefore harder to argue with.
However, we don’t want to make numbers TOO accurate or they will just sound ridiculous. You wouldn’t offer somebody £874,163.32 for their house for example – in fact you wouldn’t even offer them £874,100.
So the question is how round/how precise should a number be?
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For houses, a good number would be 765,000, then 768,000, then perhaps finally 768,500.
For cars a good number would be 22,500, then 22700, 22800, maybe 22850.
For four figure numbers an example would be 4680, or 2740. You might open on 4650, and then move to 4670 and maybe even 4680. You’ll notice I like 4s and 7s, not 1s or 9s. 1s are worth bothering with, and 9s sound dodgy.
For three figures it’s numbers like 255, 485, 570, moving to perhaps 580, 585, 590 maximum
And for two figures, say at a car boot, you might offer 27, or 35, moving to 37, or 38 maximum.
So we have moved from three significant figures on large items to two significant figures for smaller items, often opening with a number ending in a 5 but then moving to something other than a 5 because we only move in small steps – smaller than 5 / 50 / 500 / 5000.
