A licensing negotiation between an artist and a distribution house looks nothing like a procurement negotiation between a buyer and a vendor, which looks nothing like an internal negotiation over budget and scope. Our facilitators have negotiated across all of those contexts, including years of daily negotiation in art licensing around rates, terms, and distribution rights, along with careers in sales and account management. That range is not incidental. It shapes how we teach, because we know that the approach that works in one context can fail completely in another.
Every team negotiates in a specific context, with specific pressures, specific relationships, and specific patterns that show up again and again. A conversation before the program begins tells us what those patterns are and what participants are actually walking into. The session that follows is built around that picture rather than a general idea of what negotiation training should cover.
Some of the most consequential communication happens in the moments people most want to avoid. We offer programs on navigating difficult conversations, dealing with difficult behaviors, delivering feedback, and managing conflict. Participants work through realistic scenarios with a facilitator who can push the practice further than a scripted exercise would allow.
What happens before anyone sits down matters as much as what happens during the negotiation. What you know about the other party, how you have framed the discussion, what options you have lined up, and how clearly you understand your own position all shape the outcome before a single offer is made. Our programs address the full picture rather than focusing only on in-the-moment tactics.
There is a version of negotiation training that teaches people to be harder, more aggressive, and more willing to use pressure tactics. That is not what we teach. Our programs focus on the kind of influence that holds up over time, including how to understand what the other party actually needs, how to build the trust that makes agreements stick, and how to be persuasive without being the kind of negotiator people dread dealing with again.
Participants practice negotiation in realistic scenarios built around the kinds of situations they actually face, including complex multi-party negotiations, vendor and procurement discussions, internal stakeholder conversations, and high-stakes deals where the relationship and the outcome both matter. The debrief that follows connects what happened in the simulation to what happens at the actual table.
Some participants have never thought systematically about negotiation. Some have been doing it for years and want to work at a higher level. The catalog covers both, from foundational programs that build a complete negotiating process from the ground up to advanced work on influence strategy, reading styles and motivations, narrative negotiation, and handling the tactics skilled negotiators use against you.
A program built around the specific negotiations a team faces will produce better results than a general one. The scenarios, the practice cases, and the frameworks we emphasize reflect the context your team operates in, whether that is procurement, sales, internal alignment, or something more specialized.
Our negotiation programs are built around well-known and proprietary frameworks and tools that cover the full arc of a negotiation, from preparation and planning through closing and evaluation, so participants leave with something concrete to apply the next time they are at the table. Depending on the course, the toolkit may include:
BATNA: Helps negotiators identify their best alternative if the current negotiation fails, so they know exactly when walking away serves them better than accepting a bad deal.
WATNA: Helps negotiators understand their worst alternative to a negotiated agreement, giving them a realistic floor for evaluating any offer against the consequences of no deal.
WAP: Gives negotiators a defined walk-away position before they enter the room, so the pressure of the moment does not push them past a line they should not cross.
ZOPA: Helps negotiators identify the zone of possible agreement between both parties before discussions begin, so they can see where overlap exists and where it does not.
Strategic Thinking Tool: Gives negotiators a structured way to map their best-case scenario, most likely outcome, walk-away position, and best alternative before a single offer is made.
AEI Table: Helps sellers prepare for negotiations by mapping the features, benefits, problems solved, supporting evidence, and opening questions for everything they bring to the table.
Four Motivators Framework: Gives negotiators a way to anticipate what the other party actually wants by organizing their likely motivations across four categories — gain now, gain later, avoid pain now, avoid pain later.
TIPO Framework: Helps negotiators assess and plan around the four factors that most influence outcomes — trust, information, power, and options — before and during a negotiation.
Eight-Step Negotiation Process: Gives negotiators a repeatable process for moving from needs assessment through agreement and evaluation, so nothing gets skipped under pressure and every stage gets the attention it requires.
Framing Statement Tool: Helps negotiators open a discussion by stating the meeting’s goals, confirming the other party’s objectives, and establishing shared focus before positions harden.
The T: Gives negotiators a mid-session tracking tool that separates what has been agreed from what still needs to be resolved, keeping both parties anchored to progress rather than stuck on remaining gaps.
CLOSE Framework: Helps negotiators recognize when an agreement is within reach and apply the right closing approach without pushing the other party away at the moment the deal is most available.
PURCHASE Model: Gives negotiators and sales professionals a structured process for identifying customer needs, navigating objections, and moving toward agreement by addressing the concerns that actually drive a decision.
Concession Guidelines: Helps negotiators plan, sequence, and control the concessions they make so that each one produces something in return and the overall pattern signals strength rather than desperation.
NPSC (Negotiation Preferences and Styles Chart): Gives negotiators a way to assess their own negotiation style and identify the styles of the people across the table, so they can adapt their approach rather than apply the same strategy to every situation.
Negotiation Style Matrix: Helps negotiators map styles across two dimensions — energy and empathy — to identify whether they are dealing with someone confidently promoting, carefully suggesting, pushing aggressively, or quietly maneuvering.
The Communication Jungle: Gives negotiators a framework for recognizing how Lions, Peacocks, Doves, and Turtles negotiate differently, so they can adjust their language, pace, and approach to match the person in front of them.
Ten Power Types Framework: Helps negotiators identify the sources of power in play on both sides of a negotiation — from expert and referent power to informational and connection power — so they can leverage what they have and account for what the other party holds.
Tactics, Tricks, and Traps Framework: Gives negotiators a working reference for recognizing and responding to the manipulative moves most commonly used against them — including anchoring, good cop/bad cop, false timelines, and fictional competitors — so surprise does not become disadvantage.
Negotiation Pitfalls Checklist: Helps negotiators audit their own approach before and after a negotiation, identifying the ten most common errors — from narrow focus on price to negotiating with the wrong people — so patterns of weakness get addressed rather than repeated.
Head/Heart/Hands Persuasion Framework: Helps negotiators build persuasive arguments that work on three levels simultaneously — logic and evidence, emotional connection, and practical next steps — so the case they make reaches the full range of how people actually decide.
Persuasion Planning Playbook: Gives negotiators a structured planning tool for building and sequencing a persuasive case before a high-stakes conversation, so the argument is deliberate rather than improvised.
Six Principles of Influence: Gives negotiators a research-based framework for understanding the psychological triggers — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity — that shape how people respond to proposals and requests.
Johari Window: Helps negotiators understand the relationship between what they know about themselves, what others see, and what remains hidden on both sides of a negotiation, so they can use disclosure strategically to build trust and surface useful information.
ABCV Framework: Gives negotiators a way to assess and strengthen their influence by examining four dimensions — aptitude, behavior, credibility, and values — that determine how much weight their words and proposals carry with the other party.
Heartland Health Network Case Study: Places negotiators inside a complex healthcare acquisition scenario with competing organizational priorities, sustainability pressures, and vendor relationships that require both strategic thinking and relationship management to navigate successfully.
Rubberband Exercise: Uses a fast-moving trading activity to surface how participants approach value creation, multi-party deals, and concession strategy when resources are limited and time is short.
Twenty Dollar Exercise: Gives negotiators a simple but revealing scenario that exposes assumptions about fairness, competition, and walkaway positions before those assumptions drive a real negotiation in the wrong direction.
Robert Eastwood Negotiation Simulation: Places participants on opposite sides of a talent negotiation with clear constraints and competing interests, requiring them to apply preparation, style awareness, and closing skills in a realistic role-play format.
The catalog covers a wide range of negotiation situations — vendor and procurement negotiations, internal negotiations with colleagues and leadership, client and contract negotiations, salary and resource discussions, and high-stakes negotiations involving multiple parties or competing interests. Some programs are built for specific audiences such as buyers, sellers, or professionals navigating complex organizational dynamics. If you are not sure which program fits your situation, a conversation with us will point you in the right direction.
Yes, and this comes up often. Most professionals think of negotiation as something salespeople do, but the reality is that negotiation shows up across nearly every professional role — securing budget, aligning stakeholders, setting scope with internal clients, managing vendor relationships, and working through disagreements about priorities, timelines, and resources. None of those situations requires a sales title. They all require the ability to understand what the other party needs, communicate what you need, and find a path to agreement. Our programs address negotiation as a professional skill, not a sales skill, and the participants who get the most out of them are often the ones who never thought the topic applied to them.
They address different problems. Conflict resolution training focuses on repairing relationships, managing emotion, and working through disagreements that have already become damaging. Negotiation training focuses on reaching agreements — in situations that may involve no conflict at all, just competing interests and limited resources. A negotiation can be entirely collaborative and still require skill. Conflict resolution assumes something has gone wrong. Negotiation training assumes you are trying to get somewhere. The two areas overlap when negotiations break down or when unresolved conflict is making it harder to reach agreement, and some of our programs address that intersection directly.
Yes, and that specificity tends to produce better results than a general program. A procurement team negotiating long-term vendor contracts has different needs than a consulting firm navigating scope and pricing conversations with clients, and both have different needs than a healthcare organization working through acquisition discussions. When we know the context, we can build scenarios, examples, and practice cases around the negotiations participants are actually facing rather than generic situations that approximate the real thing. The pre-session conversation we have with every client is where that focus gets worked out.
Several programs in the catalog are designed for professionals who have moved past fundamentals and want to work with more sophistication. The advanced work focuses on influence and persuasion strategy, reading and adapting to the other party's style and motivations, managing complex multi-party negotiations, using narrative and storytelling to shift the terms of a discussion, and recognizing and countering the tactics skilled negotiators use against you. If your team can already run a basic negotiation competently, the question is what is limiting their results at the margin — and that is usually preparation depth, influence strategy, or the ability to read what is actually happening across the table.
Power in negotiation is more fluid than it appears, and one of the most useful things skilled negotiators learn is that perceived power and actual power are not the same thing. Our programs address this directly — how to identify all the sources of power in a negotiation rather than just the obvious ones, how to strengthen your own position through better preparation and a stronger BATNA, how to reframe the negotiation in ways that shift the dynamic, and how to avoid the common mistakes that give away leverage before the conversation even begins. Participants who walk in feeling like the weaker party often discover they have more to work with than they assumed.