Chris Voss spent years in hostage negotiations watching people say things they didn’t mean to make pressure stop. The pattern showed up in boardrooms too. In Never Split the Difference, he identifies a single phrase that separates real agreement from fake agreement, and the techniques that produce the real thing. For freelancers navigating proposals and discovery calls, this distinction changes everything.
The Two Phrases and What They Actually Mean
“You’re right” and “that’s right” sound nearly identical. In most conversations, people treat them as synonyms. Voss doesn’t.
“You’re right” is what someone says when they want a conversation to end. It’s agreement by exhaustion, the other person has pushed enough, or argued enough, or the listener just wants out. In a sales context, “you’re right” often precedes a buyer going quiet: they agree on the call, then don’t respond to the proposal. They said “you’re right” to get you to stop talking. They never intended to move forward.
“That’s right” is different in kind. It happens when a summary or label lands so accurately that the other person recognizes their own interior experience in what you’ve said. It’s not capitulation, it’s recognition. When it happens in a discovery call, the buyer’s guard drops in a measurable way. The conversation shifts from interview to collaboration.
Listening for which one you’re getting, and noticing when you’re not getting either, is one of the most useful calibration tools available in any client conversation.
Why Freelancers Routinely Get “You’re Right” Instead
Most freelancer sales calls are structured as presentations. You explain what you do, you describe your process, you present a price. The buyer’s role is reactive, responding to your information. In this structure, “you’re right” is the most common outcome because the buyer never had the experience of being understood. They had the experience of being pitched.
The alternative structure produces “that’s right” moments because it prioritizes the buyer’s world before your offer. That means using the first 60–70% of a discovery call to build a model of their situation accurate enough that they’d confirm it if you summarized it back.
Most freelancers spend that time explaining themselves. The shift is toward explaining the buyer’s situation back to them.
The deepest mistake in sales conversations is confusing “I explained myself clearly” with “I understood them deeply.” Buyers don’t buy from people who explain themselves. They buy from people who seem to understand them. “That’s right” is the signal that you’ve crossed that line.
The Summary Formula That Produces “That’s Right”
The technique is the summary, but not a factual recap. The full formula has three components:
Emotion + Situation + Stakes.
Emotion: what they’re feeling about the situation, not just the facts. “It sounds like you’re frustrated with how this has been going” or “It seems like there’s some pressure around the timeline.”
Situation: the specific circumstances in their language, not yours. Use their words when possible, not “rebrand” if they said “refresh,” not “development” if they said “build.”
Stakes: what matters about getting it right or wrong. This is the level most freelancers skip entirely. What’s at risk if this goes wrong? What does success actually mean for them beyond the deliverable?
A summary that hits all three, delivered in FM DJ tone, not rattled off quickly, reliably produces “that’s right” in buyers who’ve been genuinely heard during the call. The summary is the moment of validation, but it can only land if the listening that preceded it was real.
How to Use Labeling to Build Toward “That’s Right”
Before you’re ready to do a full summary, you build your model of the buyer through incremental labels. Labels are statements that name what you’re observing, “it seems like,” “it sounds like,” “it looks like”, attached to an emotion, constraint, or concern.
Labels serve two purposes: they invite confirmation or correction, which gives you better information, and they signal that you’re paying attention at the level of experience rather than just facts.
The sequence that builds toward “that’s right”:
- Early in the call: “It seems like you’ve thought about this for a while.” (Acknowledgment of investment, almost always confirmed.)
- Mid-call, after they’ve shared a frustration: “It sounds like the last experience left you wanting more control over the process.” (Emotional label, they’ll confirm or clarify, both are useful.)
- Before summary: “It looks like getting this right matters more than getting it fast.” (Stakes label, this is often the first time anyone has named what they actually care about most.)
By the time you summarize, you’ve already pre-validated most of the components. The full summary lands as recognition, not revelation.
Three Discovery Call Moments to Deploy This
Moment 1, After they describe the project goal. Don’t ask a follow-up question immediately. Label what you heard: “It sounds like this isn’t just a design update, it’s more about how clients perceive you when they land on the page.” If you’re right, they say “that’s right” and continue. If you’re partly right, they correct you and give you more. Either outcome is better than moving on.
Moment 2, After they mention a past bad experience. This is the highest-value labeling opportunity in any discovery call. “It sounds like the experience with the previous developer made you more cautious about scope creep.” Name the lesson they drew from it. When they confirm it, they’ve told you the primary concern driving their current decision, and you can structure your proposal around addressing that concern directly.
Moment 3, Before you present the investment. Do the full summary. Emotion, situation, stakes. End it with: “Does that sound right?” Not “does that make sense”, which is a closed door, but “does that sound right,” which invites a “that’s right” or a meaningful correction. Both serve you.
What “That’s Right” Unlocks
When a buyer says “that’s right” in response to your summary, three things shift: they’ve confirmed your understanding is accurate (so you can build on it), they’ve experienced the emotional release of being seen (which lowers resistance), and they’re now in a collaborative rather than evaluative stance.
In practical terms: buyers who’ve said “that’s right” during a discovery call are more likely to engage seriously with your proposal, more likely to give you real objections rather than ghosting, and more likely to refer you, because the experience of being understood is rare and memorable.
The Practice Drill: Record and Audit
The fastest way to improve at generating “that’s right” moments is to record discovery calls (with permission) and audit them specifically for the ratio of talking-to-listening, the number of labels deployed, and whether your final summary covered emotion, situation, and stakes or only facts.
Most freelancers find on first review that they’re talking for 60–70% of the call and their final summary is entirely factual. The shift is not comfortable immediately, staying quiet long enough to build a real model of the buyer requires resisting the urge to fill silence with selling. But the output is buyers who feel understood before they’ve seen a price, which changes the entire conversation that follows.
