Negotiation Skills Training Courses

Our public Negotiation courses and in house Negotiations courses are enlightening, educational, measurable and fun. Negotiation training courses can be scheduled at your offices or through our open enrollment courses. We do offer negotiation skills training courses to the general public.

Contact us today to discuss your specific Negotiation training needs or to sign up for one of our public negotiations courses. 

Participants in the Win- Win Negotiations course will learn to:

• Develop an effective plan and strategy for any negotiation
  
• Know when and when not to negotiate
  
• Negotiate face-to-face, on the phone, and through e-mail
  
• Learn to become a more persuasive negotiator
  
• Develop a common negotiating language with the other parties
  
• Use negotiation techniques that pull information from the other parties
  
• Read client and employee behaviors styles to maximize closure
  
• Recognize interests and issues and avoid unnecessary positions
  
• Neutralize manipulative negotiation tactics
  
• Minimize negotiation conflicts and deadlocks both internally and externally
  
• Coordinate negotiations within client organization
  
• Meet business objectives by focusing on planning rather than on tactics

The ability of a good negotiator to make a significant difference is often brought into question. Does it make sense to improve your negotiating skills or is it all a big waste of time? The issue came up when a friend asked: "Should I sell my house by myself or am I better off hiring a real estate agent?" Real estate agents receive as much as six percent commission. What my friend was asking is, are they worth it? Can a real estate agent earn her commission by negotiating a better deal than you could all by yourself? Good question.

If you ask around, many people will suggest that every deal has a "perfect outcome" that will be reached no matter what the negotiators do. A house that is worth $300,000 will sell for around $300,000, give or take a minor variation. A job that is worth $100,000 per annum will pay around $100,000. Not much any negotiator can do to influence the outcome. Can this be true? Here is the answer that I discovered in my Negotiation Boot Camp™ seminars.

In each seminar, participants are divided into pairs for negotiation role-plays. If the group consists of 50 people, we have 25 negotiations going on simultaneously and they all have the exact same situation, the same assumptions, the same amount of time to make a deal. Over the last twenty years, I have conducted literally hundreds of these seminars with thousands of participants from every conceivable industry and region. Without a single exception, the results of the role-plays always show as much as a 100 percent variation in outcomes. In other words, if the participants are negotiating for the price of a house in which the seller is asking $300,000, the outcomes will range from approximately $175,000 to $350,000. Considering that they are all negotiating for the same thing, how can this be? Without question, it is the negotiating ability of the various participants that accounts for the difference.

You may ask, does this apply to the real world? One of my clients, a software company, was curious if the money they spent on my fee was worth it. They decided on a little experiment. They tracked the average selling price of their products before and after I trained their sales force. This is what my client found out: Before I showed up, the salespeople were caving in to customer demands right and left. Profits were hurting. In the year after I taught them the correct way to negotiate a sale, the company's average sale went up by an extraordinary 59 percent!

The way you negotiate really does matter. A good negotiator can be responsible for as much as a 100 percent difference in the outcome of a deal. This is clearly the most eye-opening nugget of wisdom I have acquired in twenty years of teaching people how to negotiate. The consistent evidence suggests that a perfect outcome is nonexistent. Every deal must rise or fall based upon the behavior of the parties. These factors will influence the outcome of your negotiation: Your ability to read the other side's situation; how you manage the other side's expectations; where you open and how you make concessions; the point at which you decide to agree.

Every negotiation is unique. Any given pair of negotiators will arrive at a one-of-a-kind agreement. The elements may differ: personalities, time pressure, exigencies of the situation, etc. The one element that you have the most control over, and which can have the greatest impact on the outcome, is your negotiating ability.

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