Picture the scene: You’re neck deep in a negotiation course, and you’ve meticulously crafted a well-earned agreement after a tough negotiation. You raise your gaze to the facilitator, eager to hear lessons that will propel you to greater levels of success in the business world. How did you do? The facilitator shares a few anecdotal notes she scribbled while dashing between paired negotiators. She then delivers some general feedback based on a few negotiators’ final agreements. Some of the highlighted points are useful and relevant. However, you are left feeling frustrated as there was virtually no direct feedback on what you did well, where you went wrong, and any blind spots you may have.

As with so many innovations, the sim game journey was sparked from a frustration with the old-fashioned model of negotiation training. Thanks to gamification, The Negotiation Experts can now track every single offer negotiators make without impeding their natural conversational flow. So, while no human facilitator can see or hear everything, the sim doesn’t miss a beat. Negotiators also use the sim as a tool to improve their decision-making.

The Negotiation Experts are using gamification to revolutionize how their clients train to lock in deals. The most popular part of their innovative training model is the combination of sim games tailored around their clients’ commercial reality, together with the detailed feedback all negotiators enjoy. Their negotiation sim game platform is by far the most advanced globally and has come a long way since its first outing seven years ago with their client Cisco in Silicon Valley.

For the first time all negotiators not only know how they scored, but they can also compare and track their performance against colleagues using leaderboards that track their levels of crafting an optimal win-win or a competitive win-lose or lose-win deal. Learners pinpoint their success habits and their fertile grounds for improvement. Negotiators accelerate their learning curve further by learning from Negotiation Expert feedback on their colleagues. The cherry on this cake is the cost per participant coming down, thanks to the sim enabling class sizes of up to 20 participants.

The Negotiation Experts measure their success not so much from the course feedback forms, but from measuring graduates’ usage and retention, and the business results their graduates achieve months after the training.

Honeywell’s Global Director of Sales Excellent Brent Vick attested that “It was the customized sim game role plays, based on our team’s products and business reality that played a key role in this course leading to our record-beating success in the market.”

“Five years later, we had doubled the size of the business and improved profitability. We saw a significant advantage in winning new business because of the negotiation skills,” Ewald Braith – President, Emerson Global Telecommunications.

“How do you know the impact of your training unless you’re measuring?” asks The Negotiation Experts CEO Calum Coburn. “We’re the only company globally that measures your negotiators before, during and after our training. Our pre-training diagnostic tool compares your team to other organizations in our database. This approach enables us to customize your negotiation solution and pinpoint low hanging fruits, and to make the best choices as we customize your negotiation solution. We have proven the value of consulting your learners before the course in order to clearly demonstrate to everyone that the course directly meets their needs. This is one of our secrets to boosting engagement and long-term retention.”

To graduate, several months after the training, participants must pass a scored online assessment. Each learner receives their personalized report and certificate, while leadership is debriefed on their team’s report. This includes advice on who needs support and in which areas. One interesting lesson their data has revealed is that highly engaging virtual gamified learning as well as blended learning delivers measurably higher retention rates as compared with classroom training alone.

In 2018 and 2019, Honeywell Aerospace achieved a 4480X ROI in revenue (2019 $14.1B) and a 2766X ROI in margin. Honeywell’s graduates named Negotiation Experts’ customised courses their number one reason for their achievements

When data scientists sifted through the sim game history of completed deals, they discovered the main drivers for over 90% of negotiation success and failure. This lays to rest the debate as to whether negotiation is an art or a science. The Negotiation Experts share these discoveries in a one-hour webinar.

Here are some of the main reasons negotiators end up with the short end of the stick, as shared in The Negotiation Experts’ one-hour webinar:
•Lack of ambition and poor anchoring of opening offers
•neglecting to control the deal cycle
•not consciously steering the style of negotiations
•ineffective use of teams
•compromising instead of using leverage for optimal exchanges
•incrementing unconsciously
•lack of time-outs
•not defining or not sticking to walkaways
•grabbing at the first deal in sight
•no pre-meetings or ineffective pre-meetings
•lack of early wins momentum

Negotiation goals differ across the organization. For leadership, it’s about closing complex higher stakes deals. For sales, it’s revenue and margin growth. For procurement, it’s cost savings, favourable terms, and securing materials. For project managers, it’s about variation orders for scope increases and avoiding risk and liability.

“Whether we’re training leaders, sales, procurement, or project managers, we want to ensure that learning is fun. For almost two decades clients have described our courses as intense and challenging – but the fun factor provides the sugar coating. We’re proud when negotiators graduate with a higher level of confidence, and a clear plan for their areas of further improvement”, says CEO Calum Coburn.