Negotiating Breakthroughs

Course details

The Negotiating Breakthroughs workshop is designed for business negotiators. The process and tools are applicable to all negotiation situations – management, leadership, sales, procurement, marketing.

At a Glance

Create lasting partnerships and measurable improvements that result from mutually successful negotiations. Once participants learn how to transform potential combatants into lasting partners, they significantly increase their confidence to enter any negotiation.

Learning Outcomes

• Complete our online NSKQ (Negotiating Skills and Knowledge questionnaire) to identify priority improvement areas
• Use a self-assessment skills analysis to identify priority improvement areas
• Use a negotiation-planning document to prepare strategies and tactics to achieve required outcomes
• Learn to identify, rank and trade negotiation variables to achieve optimum settlement objectives
• Learn how to manage competitive tactics at all stages of a negotiation
• Post workshop assignments over six months

Immediate Benefits:

• Reduce negotiating time by investing in planning
• Apply a full range of negotiating skills
• Eliminate potential misunderstandings
• Know when to negotiate and when to sell
• Realize a higher degree of satisfaction from the negotiation
• Build lasting relationships

Course Content

Welcome to the Negotiating Breakthroughs Workshop.

The program is designed for business negotiators. The process and tools are applicable to all negotiation situations – sales, procurement, marketing, finance, construction, projects etc, and are equally relevant to internal as well as external negotiations. The detailed negotiation guide, and the planning tools, will provide you with the necessary concepts, structures and processes of negotiation to enable you to become more skilled and confident about any negotiation situation in which you find yourself. The focus is on win:win outcomes. We spend a large part of our business lives managing transactions with others, and we owe it to them, ourselves and our organization to do it well. Case studies and practice sessions make this an interactive workshop to learn and enhance your negotiation skills.

Unit 1 The Process of negotiation

In this unit we examine the negotiation process, and work in depth on the essential skills involved in the five stages of preparation, discussion, expansion, bargaining and finalizing.

The preparation stage includes stating with certainty the reason for the negotiation, with clear written objectives about the negotiation and the people involved. You will analyze the gaps, and learn how to manage and use the tension for resolution for both parties. Analyzing all the issues and variables is an essential precursor to ranking the variables in terms of value and cost to each party, which ensures you get the most from each variable traded. From that information you will prepare settlement objectives that reflect the situation, and enable continuous control of all variables during the face-to-face or telephone negotiation.

The discussion stage includes the behaviors needed to initiate, gain and maintain initiatives during the negotiation. You will learn how to control the opening stage of the actual negotiation, manage the time and process agenda, confirm expectations and objectives, and control the process throughout the negotiation. You will learn how to obtain the other party’s shopping list.

The expansion stage will ensure you make proposals that will achieve your optimistic objectives, and show you how to proactively develop options and alternatives, and creatively explore ways to expand the outcomes available.

The trading or bargaining stage will ensure you are effectively trading variables based on your objectives, costs and values, and use bargaining techniques to achieve your optimistic settlement objectives.

The finalizing stage ensures you positively initiate final decisions, summarize all interim settlements and agreements, and close.

Unit 2 Expanding the essential skills

This unit expands the essential skills to ensure you understand and can deal with different approaches, competitive tactics, and achieve material and emotional wins for both parties.

In the discussion stage you need to be confident dealing with competitive tactics and opening gambits in a win:win manner. You will understand how to ensure both material and emotional wins are provided. You will also learn how to avoid being cherry-picked, and know when straw men/wheat and chaff are being introduced, and how to deal with these.

In the expansion stage you need to confidently deal with price issues, and negotiate on value and benefits. In the trading/bargaining stage to will learn common bargaining techniques, and how to assertively deal with competitive tactics and conflict. In the finalizing stage you will learn how to deal with endpoint competitive tactics, such as nibbling and escalation, and understand the six outcomes and the consequences of each on the relationship.

After completing the two day program, you will confidently take both strategic and tactical views of your negotiations, and manage both the structure and the process. You will be able to influence the final outcome in terms of win versus loss, and manage both logical and emotional issues and outcomes.

You will manage conflict through adopting assertive styles and behaviors, and an abundance mentality. You will be able to establish credibility quickly with new negotiating parties, and build trust that leads to long term relationships reliant on continuous negotiation.

The Learning Guide also includes a useful glossary of international negotiating terms.