No negotiation, no threats to leave, they weren't aware until we gave them the cash.
> Companies never give substantial raises to current employees.
and a single counterexample is enough to counter it.
If you are just internally lobbying for a salary increase at your existing employer, regardless of how successful you may be, how much revenue you are bringing in, etc. I would say at the vast majority of companies you will not see nearly the same raise as either presenting a compelling outside offer, or actually taking an outside offer.
Another way of thinking of it is that a company cannot pay their employees an arbitrary amount, it has to be justified up the chain, and usually that justification is based on "grades" or "scales" of some kind or another. Most of these scales will include a fixed range for annual raises. By bringing an outside offer, you are providing the necessary documentation that your manager, HR, all the way up the chain is required to actually sign off on the raise. The outside offer means no one is sticking their neck out to justify an out-of-spec raise, or claim someone was being previously underpaid, it's just a simple equation -- the employee has an offer, and the company can make a counter-offer or not.
Of course the trick is if they decline to counter, or counter low, you have to consider if you then leave, or stay? You also probably can't come back year after year with new outside offers, it's a trick you can only turn to so often.
That said, I did get a raise once with an outside offer. But I left just inside a year later.
That's why I look at it now as a system that just needs the outside data point in order to properly process the request. It's not a person holding back the raise, more often the process which the outside offer fixes.
If there was such a thing as an "employee appraisal" service maybe you could do it without actually going to interview, which would be pretty cool!
My dad was a little like Al Bundy though, he never really sought to improve himself like I do constantly and I'm sure almost everyone here does too.
I think the industry still has a lot of managers who think in terms of running a shoe store with employees that are improving themselves at a rapid pace.