Negotiation Services

Negotiation Advocacy » Conflict Resolution » Mediation » Negotiation Coaching » Training

CEO READY helps clients capitalize on negotiation opportunities, foster improved working relationships, and develop strategies for successful business-to-business collaboration. Our approach promotes both achieving better deals and building better relationships - focusing on one at the expense of the other inhibits the potential for gain in any business negotiation. Our negotiation consultants possess a combination of business negotiation experience in complex commercial negotiations, together with negotiating training and facilitation experience across many industries.

CEO READY offers clients a menu of services – including negotiation advocacy, conflict resolution, mediation, and professional training - designed to meet clients’ different negotiation and relationship management needs. We help business clients located throughout Southeast Michigan tackle some of their most important business challenges

Many times, our clients encounter major negotiations where they would like some professional help. CEO READY provides a full-range of coaching and consulting services to help our clients achieve their negotiating goals, including planning, overseeing, and even conducting the negotiation. Clients determine the extent of services, which can range from a single planning session to ongoing participation in the entire negotiation process.

Negotiation Advocacy

In this service, a CEO READY negotiation specialist works on a client’s behalf in order to achieve an agreement that benefits the client and protects its interests. This is done either by working collaboratively with the client at the negotiation table or by representing the client exclusively at the table, without the client’s active participation. In either context, our specialist functions as the client’s advocate, while preserving the client’s power to make decisions about potential outcomes.

We begin by meeting with the client to explore, fully understand, and appreciate the client’s needs and priorities. We then engage in research and preparation, both with the client and individually, to ensure that every advantage is realized at the negotiation table. Finally, we leverage our experience and expertise while employing the engagement-specific strategies in order to produce favorable deal terms for our client.

There are many benefits of utilizing an advocate. Among the most obvious is the increased likelihood of consummating a deal with favorable terms. But it is those that are less obvious – like the flexibility it affords the client to consider and evaluate proposed agreements without being pressured by the other side – that often prove themselves to be even more invaluable.

Conflict Resolution

Even in the best-functioning organizations, conflict is inevitable – between colleagues, between managers and their direct reports, between professionals and support staff – at all levels of hierarchy.

In most cases, the individuals involved are able to resolve their differences on their own. Yet, there are situations where the conflict is not addressed – where the parties are unable to surface, discuss, and resolve whatever issues are causing tension. Such situations often lead to lowered morale, reduced efficiency and productivity, and, if left unaddressed, to key personnel leaving the organization. As such, successful organizations realize that the expense associated with ignoring sources of conflict can be substantial, and that the savings achieved in using outside experts can translate directly to their bottom line

CEO READY professionals are experienced at helping individuals and organizations resolve interpersonal and other conflicts. CEO READY has helped resolve conflicts relating to disagreements among executives on the direction a business should take, difficult decisions around promotion of personnel, disparity of opinion regarding allocation of corporate resources, and many other organizational issues that cause conflict within an organization.

Negotiation Coaching

Although executives, managers, attorneys, salespeople, and other professionals negotiate all of the time, many have never engaged the task with a structured and rigorous approach. Moreover, many of them enter negotiations not knowing where their strengths and weaknesses lie, and are unsure as to whether they will produce an outcome that is the best that can been achieved.

Rather than leaving this essential business element to instinct and chance, CEO READY – through our coaching processes – helps clients prepare for and execute effective negotiations. During preparation sessions that are conducted either on a one-on-one basis or with a small group, our professionals work with clients to formulate a comprehensive strategy for a particular negotiation or series of negotiations.

The goal of this service is to help our clientele achieve superior negotiated outcomes that give them as much value as possible. We bring years of experience in all aspects of negotiation – from negotiation theory to practical strategies that have proven effective in many different contexts – to provide clients with competitive advantages in any negotiation context.

Training

We offer skills-building workshops in negotiation, mediation, conflict management, and related subjects. Our trainers bring a wide -range of experience and have worked with clients throughout a variety of industries. This broad experience allows us to tailor our training to each client’s needs through selection of appropriate training staff, choice of simulations and training exercises, and adaptation of our models to the specific challenges a company faces.

Learning negotiation, mediation, and communications skills requires practice. People learn through a combination of action and reflection. Consequently, our training format is highly interactive. Our methodology is based on a minimum of frontal lecturing, with emphasis on group participation, exercises and simulations, and facilitated discussions and analyses. All of our workshops utilize group interaction as the primary learning dynamic.

We have a variety of standard formats for training, from half-day to three-days, and we are proficient at accommodating individual needs. We administer our services at the client’s facilities or at an off-site location of the client’s choosing.

Some examples of our coaching and consulting activities include:

• Oversaw, planned and conducted a negotiation on behalf of four partners seeking to develop a joint venture with a major computer equipment leasing firm.

• Assisted a large retail organization in negotiating a six-year renewal of their lease.

• Worked with an organization to sell and license IT software products to firms with the technical ability to continue to develop and upgrade the programs and the marketing ability to effectively distribute it to an expanded series of markets.

• Assisted a manufacturing organization in negotiating a resolution to a serious conflict arising from the spin-off of a division and the prices that the acquiring company would pay the seller for the raw materials needed by the acquired division.

For more detailed information about our negotiations services, please contact us.