Successful Example Box

A large Global IT organisation with a focus on the Telecommunication Sector found the size of the deals that they were negotiating increasing substantially due to the underlying technology infrastructure moving from an analogue format to a digital format. Suddenly, the deals being done by the sales teams escalated from a value of around 1 10 million to 300 million plus, because the solutions now had relevance on a regional and national basis as opposed to only a local level.

This necessitated a change in the way that negotiations were conducted on all levels including with suppliers, partners, manufacturing, clients and other internal and external stakeholders. All of a sudden, there was a lot more complexity and risk involved in deal making on both the buy & sell side of the organisation.

Early diagnosis of the problem led to the engagement of expert help to facilitate the definition of an organisational level negotiation strategy and the design and deployment of a supporting negotiation process. The negotiation process was designed in such a way as to support both the relevant purchasing and sales strategies and training is currently being rolled out across the enterprise to instil a corporate negotiation capability with a specific focus on two things:

- maximising margins and savings on purchasing budgets
- identifying and mitigating risks
- A key requirement of the negotiation process was the ability to integrate with the company standard purchasing and sales processes to ensure the most effective deployment of resources.

Early results are pointing to enhanced returns resulting from agreements as a result of:

- an improvement in the skills level of all negotiators due to best practice based negotiation skills training
- the application of a uniform negotiation process which allows for the dissemination of relevant information on a uniform basis
- a common negotiation vocabulary and a best practice cross cultural negotiation approach across territories
- individual negotiation competency, preference & style analysis
- optimal negotiation team composition & role definition
- best practice based negotiation debriefing & refinement
- Having reduced losses associated with an ad hoc approach to negotiation, the organisation is now gearing up to roll out the negotiation programme on a global basis.