By Karin Mugnaini
Negotiation is a strategic business driver with impact on value creation and performance. This article explores how companies can achieve consistent success by developing a negotiation mindset. It highlights key levers—training, alignment, role clarity, and structured frameworks—that enable organizations to negotiate effectively across all levels and functions.
Winning a negotiation is of course a great feat. However, one win may not always assure the next. How important really is negotiation today in business? And why is it critical to hone your and your company’s skills as much as possible to make your negotiations consistently successful?
Besides contributing qualitatively to business, negotiation offers quantitative advantages– value creation, cost savings, enhanced revenue, and risk mitigation. Although often difficult to measure, one commonly cited statistic is that companies that invest in improving their team’s skill sets can improve overall EBIT by 5 to 7%. Consequently, company negotiation training programs can yield strong returns for you and your firm. The learnings from such programs can help to uplift revenues through higher close rates and better pricing strategies; achieve improved terms and reduced discounting, yielding margin growth; give you the confidence to close more quickly with better-prepared teams, thus delivering efficiency gains; reduce your opportunity costs by speeding up cycles so you can consider additional deals, and deliver strategic benefits including enhanced customer lifetime value, more resilient partnerships, and sustained long-term growth.
Key here is the reference to both you the negotiator, and your organization. Mastering negotiation depends on the individual, the team and the company. It is important that the individual negotiator, the broader team and overall organization be skilled and aligned in negotiation. Set up in this way, strategic consistency becomes achievable, preparation and intelligence can be more easily shared, and both trust and confidence can be built– all of which lead to repeatedly better outcomes.
Many top negotiation consulting firms emphasize that individual “brilliance” of say, one top negotiator or one high performance negotiation team cannot substitute for organizational readiness. This readiness requires company-wide negotiation frameworks, aligned go/no-go criteria, and role clarity (who leads, who escalates, who approves). Such preparedness separates the good from the great, the transactional negotiators from the strategic negotiators. This organizational readiness is what we will herein refer to as the negotiation mindset.
Moving your organization towards a negotiation mindset is a smart step to future-proof your business. By instilling your company with a new negotiation mindset, you can avoid painful and costly misalignment or skill gaps—ones that can lead to inconsistent objectives, internal undermining, missed leverage and post-deal execution problems. No company can afford such outcomes in today’s challenging environment.
If we define mindset as set of beliefs, attitudes, and perspective that shapes how a company interprets situations, makes decisions, and responds to challenges, we can better understand how, even in today’s VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world, we can proactively shift towards growth and progress. American psychologist and Stanford Professor Carol Dweck’s research and writings on fixed versus growth mindsets is useful here. She explains that a fixed mindset is the belief that abilities are static and avoids challenges, in contrast to a growth mindset which represents the belief that abilities can develop and embraces learning. Dweck’s work has had major influence in education, leadership, coaching, and personal development worldwide and is also highly relevant to the push for a negotiation mindset transformation. Why? Because through repeated learning, companies can develop their abilities to negotiate—and this drives growth in business.
Achieving a real negotiation mindset switch in a company—shifting from reactive, transactional, or siloed behavior to proactive, strategic, integrated and value-driven negotiation—requires a deep cultural and structural transformation, not just training (NB: culture will not be covered in depth in this article, as it warrants a much deeper discussion).
So what does it take to start a negotiation mindset transformation? Some evident answers include seeing the negotiation as a relationship-building opportunity, not a battle; preparing thoroughly, not improvising; seeking understanding, not arguing; and looking for value-creating trade-offs, not rigid dig-ins. Negotiation mindset champions negotiate for results, embrace discomfort and negotiate to win.
One recommendation is to begin with the entire organization—from board, C-suite or executive leadership levels, senior management or operational leadership, to middle management, frontline or supervisory management and individual contributors or staff. Include all levels in the transformation so the company is aligned. Make sure the strategy set is understood by all, and the negotiation requirements and goals are clear throughout all hierarchical levels.
Next, assure that the right negotiation teams are created and that roles are clearly defined. Who is part of the team? Who is the ultimate decision-maker on the team? Who authorizes the negotiator to negotiate? Who supports the negotiator during the negotiation? What are the communication and reporting channels between these actors, and how and when are they to be used?
Now, as a company, build a disciplined roadmap and consistent framework that takes into account the strategy, the tactics, and even ways for overcoming power imbalances and difficult stakeholders. Elements of an effective framework that supports negotiation mindset transformation include executive sponsorship and role modeling; shared language; scheduled company-wide training and application; internal alignment on goals and negotiation mandates; embedding the appropriate technology, processes and metrics; a negotiation culture.
To succeed in today’s complex business environment, negotiations must be conducted in a coordinated and strategic way—across every level of your organization. This unified, company-wide approach to negotiation ensures that everyone speaks the same negotiation language – from preparation, to opening, with leadership and through deadlock.
