You're Not a 'D.' You're 43% Closer.

Four founders. Four negotiation styles. Four years of measuring ourselves wrong on every other instrument.

That’s how NegotiatorIQ started.

I’m a Closer. My wife Sue is a Diplomat. Corina is a Strategist. My son Collin is a Game Changer. Between us, we’ve sat through enough corporate trainings to fill a bookshelf — DISC, Myers-Briggs, Insights, StrengthsFinder. Every one of them told us the same thing: a letter, a four-letter type, or a color that summarized who we are.

None of them told us how we negotiate.

That gap is the entire reason this company exists.

The Letter Problem

DISC has typed roughly 50 million people. Not one of them got a percentage.

You’re a D. Or a C. Or a high-D-low-S. The instrument names a dominant letter and stops. No gradient. No nuance. No way to say “I’m 43% Closer when the deal is small, and 28% Diplomat when the relationship matters more than the price.”

A letter isn’t a profile. It’s a label.

A profile says you’re 43% Closer, 27% Strategist, 19% Diplomat, 11% Game Changer. Now we can have a real conversation about what happens when you walk into the room.

That conversation can’t happen with a letter.

What’s Under the Percentage

The percentage isn’t a vibe. It’s built from fourteen underlying traits — Assertiveness, Empathy, Patience, Determination, Tenacity, Adaptability, Spontaneity, Flexibility, Resilience, Compromise, Confidence, Listening, Analytical, Creativity — that roll up into a seven-trait radar showing how you actually behave when the room gets hot.

That’s already deeper than DISC. But there’s one more variable, and it’s the one that matters most.

EQ Is the Missing Measurement

Negotiation is a pressure cooker. Stakes rise, the other side pushes, the clock compresses, and the version of you that walks in is rarely the version of you that signs.

DISC doesn’t measure that. Myers-Briggs doesn’t measure that. They measure who you are on a calm Tuesday morning.

Emotional intelligence — your ability to manage your own state and read theirs while the temperature is climbing — is the single biggest predictor of who keeps the room and who gets played in it. Closers run hot and often score lower on EQ. Diplomats run high on EQ but burn it on harmony instead of leverage. Strategists stay calm but can disengage. Game Changers spike on energy but spend EQ unevenly.

We measure EQ inside the instrument because we measure under pressure. That’s where negotiations live.

"Personality tests measure who you are on a calm Tuesday morning. Negotiations don’t happen on calm Tuesday mornings."

Your Weakest Trait Is Not a Life Sentence

Here’s the part that separates this from every personality test you’ve ever taken.

DISC types you at thirty-five. You take it again at forty-five. The letters don’t move. That’s by design — DISC measures dispositional personality, which is mostly stable across a lifetime.

NegIQ measures negotiation traits. Those move.

Your 4.2 on Empathy can become a 6.8. Your 3.9 on Listening can become a 7.1. Not because you became a different person — because you trained the trait. Active listening is a skill. Setting boundaries is a skill. Reading emotional cues is a skill. The instrument measures the baseline — and then measures the lift.

Here’s what that looks like on a real Closer profile. Mine.

A personality test gives you self-awareness. NegIQ gives you self-awareness plus a roadmap.

That’s a different category of product.

Take My Son

Collin is a C/I in DISC — careful, conscientious, sociable. Take that to a sales kickoff and you’d build him a workshop on rapport and detail orientation.

In NegIQ, he’s a Game Changer.

Both readings are correct. They measure different things.

DISC tells you the personality Collin walks through life with. NegIQ tells you the pattern Collin falls into when he has to move someone off a position. His personality is conscientious. His negotiation behavior — when the stakes are real and the script breaks — is creative, fast, and willing to bet on the bold move.

Train him from his DISC type and you teach him things he already knows. Train him from his NegIQ profile and you teach him to channel creativity into discipline — to follow through on the bold opening with the boring close.

That’s not a personality assessment. That’s a development roadmap.

The Bottom Line

A profile is a fingerprint, not a label. It changes with context. It improves with training. It tells you not just who you are, but where you can go.

Your assessment is a baseline, not a verdict.

Over the next four posts, we’ll go deep on each of the four styles — Closer, Diplomat, Strategist, Game Changer — voiced by the founder who lives it. You’ll see the trait fingerprint, the cognitive bias signature, the famous figures who run the style, and the growth path that turns a 4.2 into a 6.8.

This is Move 1: Know Yourself. It’s the foundation every other move stands on.

Start with your fingerprint.

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