Congrats, you’ve been promoted!

Dear Bob …

I have an opportunity with my current company, and in my opinion, it’s very unorthodox the way that it’s being presented to me.

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I have been a senior credit analyst for the last four-plus years, which has included working directly with our legal and bankruptcy counsel, negotiating settlements with opposing counsel, renegotiating contracts, and providing terms and conditions for clients, as well as numerous reporting for our CFO, COO, vice president of finance and accounting, and other top executives. I’m currently paid a bit more than the top of the range defined for this job when I started as a credit analyst. At that time, there were three people in the department. Presently, I’m the only one left.

Today, I’m being offered the position of senior investment analyst of acquisitions within our company. The part I find to be unorthodox is that they still want me to maintain my duties as a senior credit analyst as well. The prior senior investment analyst made quite a bit more than I currently do. My question: When this is offered to me, how much of an increase do I ask for?

I’m completely burned out with the senior credit analyst job, as the recession added the renegotiations to my title, along with a couple of other responsibilities. It is essentially another job, in my opinion.

How do you think I should handle this?

– Promoted?

Dear Exploited …

I’m tempted to tell you to use your by-now-well-honed negotiating skills on your own behalf and leave it at that. Think of yourself as your own client, engaging your services to get the best deal possible, and you’ll probably do better than I will in answering your question. After all, you know the principals.

You’re familiar with the rules: Keep emotion out of it, talk about the benefits they’ll receive from the deal you’re offering, not about what you want just because you want it.

You know you won’t receive more than you ask for, and if at all possible, you should get them to make the initial offer. You know you have to keep more than one dimension of negotiation in play, right up until the final agreement, so both sides are in a position to give something in order to get something. You also know you have to be clear with yourself what you want out of the deal, and you have to maintain your “walk-away power.” So far so good?

My best additional advice: Assume the conclusion you want, as in, “I assume that in offering me this position, you’ll provide a commensurate increase in compensation and let me hire someone to handle the day-to-day credit analyst work. That is, after all, a full-time job by itself, and none of that workload will be going away. So let’s get to the specifics — what do you see this position looking like?”

If it turns out they weren’t thinking along those lines, utter these words: “Why would I do that?” Don’t say them angrily. Ask them out of curiosity.

Somewhere in there, they’re likely to talk about working smarter not harder, growing into the position, excellent growth opportunity, and so on. Point out that their math doesn’t work. In the deal they’re offering in this hypothetical scenario, they’ll be getting a full-time credit analyst for $63,000. That means they’re expecting to get a full-time senior investment analyst of acquisitions for $10,000 per year, when it was clear from what they paid the last person in that spot that they recognize the position is worth more than seven times that figure.

The hard part won’t be making your point. It will be making it in a warm, friendly, engaging, professional tone of voice — assuming, of course, it comes to that. With luck, they’ll hear your initial gambit, understand its implications, and make an initial offer that’s close enough to what you need that your negotiation amounts to fine-tuning, not re-engineering.

– Bob

This story, “Congrats, you’ve been promoted!,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com.