Client: Specialist Financial Consultancy

Challenge

The client was a consultancy business selling to the financial industry. Their clients were frequently trying to commoditise their relationship. Increasingly they were being forced to negotiate with procurement departments who were significantly more demanding than their contacts had historically been.

Objective

Most of the executives had not had any formal negotiation training so they did not have a “company way” of doing things when it came to negotiation. There were two key objectives:

Implement a methodology to improve their negotiation outcomes.
Ensure that future negotiations were not just focused on “day rate”.

Approach

I ran a number of workshops to explain both the fundamentals of negotiation and to identify how value was being created or destroyed in the negotiations – as well as identifying other issues that were important to be including the negotiations other than price. There were a number of difficult negotiations that were pending with large customers, and I worked with the managing director on a one-to-one basis over a period of time to not only improve his skill but also to help in structuring these negotiations.

Result

The outcome of the negotiations was acknowledged as being better than they would have expected and the business is now focusing clearly on ensuring that they do not give away unnecessary concessions and made sure that the negotiations were constructed as collaboratively as they could be. The procurement executives continue to be as challenging as ever but the client is not now “pushed around” – more they focus on making sure the win is not just one-sided.