Tailored Negotiation Training

Best Negotiating Practices® Program

Your participants will reach a watershed moment – the turning point from which their negotiations will never be the same

Watershed’s training challenges habitual approaches with skill development that changes behaviors and improves negotiated results

Best Negotiating Practices® Learning Formats

Learn how we can serve your sales, procurement, project management, mixed function, and government teams.
Delivered in English and Spanish

Foundation Negotiation Workshop

The flagship workshop of the Best Negotiating Practices Program, "Create and Capture Value as You Negotiate," explores the fundamentals of negotiation process and strategy for business practitioners of all professions. Talented negotiators outpace their colleagues and competitors in business and in life because they build relationships that bring desired results. Watershed Associates researches your industry and interviews your team, developing negotiation case studies to address your challenges.

Who Should Attend?

The foundational workshop is designed for all professional functions.

Flexible Formats

Delivered live virtual and on-premise. Varying lengths (from 3 days to a 1⁄2 day) and timing aligned with your needs.

Participant-Centered Engagement

Training focuses on engaging participants through a variety of methods including: facilitated discussions, practical and relatable examples, role plays, creation of a company-specific concessions list, Hollywood movie clips debriefed, planning company-specific live negotiations, recaptured learning, and goal setting.

Role Plays
Brainstorming
Planning
Movie Clips
Review
Goal Setting
Skills Developed

Participants are introduced to the framework for negotiating. They overcome any reluctance to negotiate as they engage in exercises and role plays that demonstrate how to solve a party's interests rather than confront their position, and how to engage in bargaining that achieves creative solutions.

Key modules are bargaining, preparation, and information exchange and validation, with a focus on the most critical Best Negotiating Practices®. We also focus on the relevance of common tactics to collaborative negotiations – how to recognize them, when it is appropriate to use them, and how to defend against them. Participants are guided in their practice of planning, probing, and development of creative concessions.

A selection of optional modules that best meet the client’s needs, such as email and phone negotiations, cross-cultural negotiations, dealing with difficult, emotional and hostile negotiators, team negotiations, sources of power, internal negotiation for scarce resources, and negotiating styles assessment can be substituted in the workshop curriculum.

Continuous Learning

Job aids, e-tools, 3 months coaching for individuals and teams, ROI toolkit —
We support your learners’ continuous learning at their pace, designed to meet your goals.

Advanced Negotiation Workshop

Excellence in Negotiating + Applied (EIN+A) is an advanced negotiation workshop that focuses on application of negotiation strategies to your business. Confident and experienced negotiators have the opportunity to tackle negotiating strategies in complex situations and connect them to their work. Your negotiators become more strategic, and team leaders become more effective mentors and coaches. The approaches we use support enduring behavioral changes that strengthen your team’s competitive edge and ability to capture more value in their negotiations.

Who Should Attend?

Ideal participants have taken at least two days of negotiation coursework and have five or more years of on-the-job negotiating experience.

Flexible Formats

Delivered live virtual and on-premise. Varying lengths (from 2 to 3 days) and timing aligned with your needs).

Participant-Centered Engagement

Adding to the best practices in adult learning used in the foundation workshop, participants complete a pre-work live negotiation plan and bargaining styles self-assessment that fully connects the learning to their daily work and behaviors. With smaller groups and 3-day lengths, we also use video debrief of role playing to deepen participants’ reflection and insights, growing their negotiation competence.

Role Plays
Brainstorming
Movie Clips
Review
Goal Setting
Behavioral Coaching
Case Study
Planning Strategically
Video Coaching
Skills Developed

Designed with maximum flexibility of the content to meet your group’s business goals, negotiation challenges, class size, time commitment and budget. Participants typically submit pre-work, and experience an interactive refresher, strategic negotiation planning, behavioral coaching using role play, and live case study application. Specialty topics (hyperlink) are selected based on each group’s needs.

Continuous Learning

Participants receive Watershed’s Negotiator’s Field Guide and other job aids. The Field Guide is also available for system licensing and individual tablet download. Post-workshop support is available in the form of webinars, plan reviews, deal coaching, and individual and team coaching.

Specialty Topics

Optional modules that can be added to multi-day workshops or as stand-alone keynotes, webinars and refreshers. We address your team’s on the job challenges, industry, and market pressures.

What Challenges Do Your Negotiators Face?
Situation Awareness: 5 Negotiation Strategies
Legal Considerations in Negotiations
Strategic Preparation
Intra-Organizational Negotiations
Stakeholder Analysis
Ethics Guidelines for Win-Win Negotiating
Ethics Guidelines for Lawyers Negotiating
Recognize and Defend Hardnose Tactics
Strategies to Overcome Impasse
Dynamics of Opening Offers
Engaging in Difficult Conversations
Intro to Bargaining Across Cultures
Defense Against Backdoor Selling
Negotiator as Persuader
Sales Role: Messenger vs. Negotiator
Four Tools of Influence
Response to "Best Price” Requests
Managing Emotions as You Negotiate
Body Language in Negotiations
eNegotiating: Email, Webconf, and Phone
Quick-Prep for Non-Strategic Deals
Team Dynamics in Negotiations
Renegotiations
Gaining and Leveraging Power
Bargaining Styles and Self-Assessment
How Sales Approaches Negotiations
Single and Sole Source Negotiations
How Procurement Approaches Negotiations
The Truth about Lying in Negotiations
Power Words in Negotiation
Dealing with Irrational, Hardnose, and Difficult Negotiators
Apologies and Appreciation in Negotiations
Negotiating with Governments

Virtual Training

Virtual training can be effective to meet business constraints
When travel is limited or budgets are cut
To reach geographically dispersed audiences
For groups with limited time for full-day workshops
Zoom Video platform available to all attendees
Live Virtual Training

Interactive Workshops are available in live virtual classrooms

Engaging delivery with participants on video
Constant interaction in live discussion, polls, whiteboarding, chats, film clips and virtual breakouts
Session lengths and times scheduled to meet your teams’ needs
Webinars

Designed to meet the needs of a specific company, agency or organization, the Best Negotiating Practices® webinars delve deep into critical skill areas and focused topics of unique interest to your negotiators.

To refresh class-room learning and skills
For deep exploration of the nuances around a negotiation topic and strategy
For broadcasting learning to larger groups with polls, surveys and chat activities
Zoom Video
Live
On Demand
eTools

Keynotes

Watershed's expert negotiators inspire your audience to negotiate more effectively.

From general sessions to keynotes on negotiations, conference and meeting participants want the tools for conducting effective and efficient negotiations, and we deliver. Watershed’s Best Negotiating Practices® conference sessions inspire even the reluctant to use the negotiating process to develop trust and reach mutually beneficial agreements, with a safe environment to practice new negotiation skills.

Motivate seasoned negotiators to adopt more productive behaviors
Inspire reluctant negotiators to bargain with confidence
Tackle your team’s negotiation pain points
Why Meeting Planners Choose Watershed Speakers
Audiences are inspired by our high-energy presentations filled with stories they can relate to in their business and personal lives.
Participants retain what they learn from entertaining presentation, potent film clips, demonstration and quick practice, with a good dose of laughter.
Our speakers are negotiation experts with public speaking talent.
Clients love our specialty topics on negotiations and what we design for them.
Our speakers interact with the audience to establish rapport, engage them in skill building and leave them with take-away value.

Coaching

Watershed coaches negotiators in the workshops and beyond!

Developmental Coaching builds on your negotiators’ strengths.

Improves strategies with counterparts
Establishes goals and targets behaviors
Includes Check-ins to sustain progress toward goals
Teams: we work with your team to develop a strategy for specific critical negotiations
Individual: in private settings (by phone, web-meetings and in-person) we coach executives, key negotiators and those challenged with specific negotiation skill development
Tools: we provide the tools for your leaders to coach their teams

Recommended that negotiators participate in the Best Negotiating Practices® workshop before undergoing private negotiating coaching by Watershed. Our experience has proven this to be a more effective path to improve negotiation skills and develop strategies.

Let’s discuss how we can help your team strengthen their negotiation skills.

Please provide us with some details and we will be in touch soon!

How to Get in Touch with Watershed Associates