NAME IT FIRST

Conversation Prep

Before You Ask for the Raise

A 15-Minute Prep for the Salary Conversation

This prep moves you from shower rehearsal to a two-way conversation your manager can respond to.

This is for:

For the employee preparing the salary ask.

You'll produce:your Your Preparation Guide

The Name It First Experience

The shower rehearsal has one speaker — the real conversation has two. Before You Ask for the Raise walks you through what your manager actually needs to hear: your contribution in their terms, the specific number and the evidence behind it, and the response you are least prepared for. It is for the employee who has rehearsed their case privately and needs to prepare for what happens when someone else is in the room. You finish in 15 minutes ready for a conversation, not a performance.

You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.

Sample questions

  1. What have you contributed that your current compensation does not reflect?
  2. What is the number you are asking for — and can you say it out loud right now without qualifying it?
  3. What do you do if they say no or ask you to wait?

Research basis

Grounded in Babcock and Laschever (2003) research on gender and negotiation initiation / Bowles et al. (2007) on social consequences of salary negotiation and the role of framing / preparation research (Galinsky and Mussweiler, 2001) showing that perspective-taking before negotiation improves outcomes for the initiating party.

Choose your format.

Every format asks the same questions and produces the same document.

Print Paperbackpersonalize

A real book and a pen. Write in the margins. The most permanent version of you on a page.

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eBook + journal

The full guide on any screen, with a companion journal to write your answers by hand.

Not available

Audiobook

We read every question and every scenario aloud. For the commute, the walk, the dishes.

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Hardcoverpersonalize

The keepsake edition — sewn, ribboned, made to sit on a shelf and be returned to.

Not available

Digital Fill + membership+membership

Answer on screen. Your responses save as you go and assemble into your finished document.

$2.99

Hands-Free Interactive + membership+membership

Listen to each question and speak your answer. We capture it. You never touch a keyboard.

Not available

Everything packages

The Paperback Everything Package

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The Hardcover Everything Package

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The Premium Hardcover Everything Package

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Choose your pace.

The Essential path takes you to your finished document by the questions that matter most. The Full-depth path walks every question, every scenario, every angle. Both produce the same signed document — one just goes deeper on the way there.

Essential path

Shorter sessions. The questions that go directly to the document.

Full depth

Every question. Every scenario, every angle.

Paper doesn’t change its mind.

Thoughts change. Documents don’t. The answers you write are there when you return — unchanged by memory or mood.

You won’t just feel clearer — you’ll have written proof of what you decided.

Writing is the mechanism by which internal clarity becomes external evidence. Evidence you can return to, share, and hold someone — including yourself — accountable to.

Every question is answerable by everyone.

Every question in every title is answerable by the person for whom the assumed experience is true and by the person for whom it is not. No reader is excluded by how a question is built.

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