Mastering Financial Negotiations

Program description & objectives

Program description & objectives Every year millions of dollars change hands on mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, alliances, management buyouts, share issues and financial restructuring. The high stakes, extreme time pressure and psychological stress involved in these negotiations can and does cause mistakes, misunderstandings and destroy potential deals. These deadlocks and stifled opportunities can and do result in money being left on the table. This course aims to provide insights into the methods adopted by outstanding negotiators with the aim that you will learn to reduce your risk of failure whilst at the same time greatly enhancing the potential of signing mutually beneficial agreements. Delegates to this program would learn contemporary best practices and strategies necessary in today’s competitive and dynamic environment. Specifically, delegates would: - Learn how to apply the key psychological principles involved in achieving win/win financial negotiations - Master a simple ten-step method for planning financial negotiations - Learn how to frame and use the power of suggestion for maximum impact - Discover how to break negotiations deadlocks - Learn to neutralize the underhanded tricks used by unscrupulous negotiators - Learn best practices regarding the psychology of negotiation and bargaining - Gain skills that will help resolve interpersonal, intergroup, and cross-cultural conflicts, and learn how to best deal with difficult people.

Venues, Dates & Cost

VenuesDublinLondonDubaiEdmonton (CAN)Lagos/Abuja
DatesTBDTBDTBDTBDTBD
Cost$3,900 per participant(=N=)

For Whom

  • Investment Bankers, Project Financiers and Syndicators
  • Traders and Sales Directors / Managers
  • Board Directors
  • Heads of Business divisions
  • Business Development Executives
  • M&A Strategic Planning Executives
  • Lawyers, Corporate Financiers and Consultants
  • Sales Professionals
  • Any professional involved in face-to-face negotiations

Snapshot of Course Content

Fundamentals of negotiation – The basics

  • The bilateral nature of negotiations
  • Understanding the role of concessions
  • Creating value in a negotiation
  • The different types of conflict that you are likely to encounter
  • What makes some conflicts more difficult to resolve than others
  • Tools for the effective management of conflicts
  • The importance of distributive bargaining
  • Distributive bargaining
  • Settlement point
  • Discovering and influence the other side’s resistance point
  • The importance of first impressions
  • Walking away from commitments
  • When should you make the opening offer
  • Closing a deal
  • Hardball tactics

Using an integrative negotiation approach

  • Integrative negotiation
  • Discovering your counterparty’s needs
  • The difference between needs and demands
  • Finding a common objective
  • What to do when you suspect that other person has several objectives
  • The importance of planning for a negotiation
  • The difference between tactics and strategy
  • Unilateral negotiations
  • Bilateral negotiations
  • A ten-step planning process
  • BATNA – Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement
  • Understanding the negotiation process

Biases of the Mind

  • Understanding what is perception
  • How to distort someone’s perception
  • Framing
  • Prospect theory and its effect on perception
  • Avoiding irrational escalation of commitment
  • Dispelling the fixed-pie illusion
  • The impact of anchoring on the other person’s BATNA
  • Avoiding the winner’s curse
  • The negative role of hubris
  • Exploiting the endowment effect
  • Reading and reacting to the other person’s mood and emotions

Using power in a negotiation

  • What is power and how do you know who has it
  • Understanding the sources of power
  • What to do when the other person has much more power
  • Influencing others, while resisting their influence
  • The difference between the content and the delivery of the content
  • The two routes to influence someone
  • Resisting influence

Relationships in negotiation

  • Reputation
  • Building trust
  • The notion of justice in a negotiation
  • Patching up a broken relationship
  • Using an agent
  • How an agent changes a negotiation
  • When to employ an agent
  • Building coalitions
  • Coalitions, how they form, and how they impact negotiations
  • Using a coalition to get what you need
  • Tips for building strong coalitions
  • Negotiating in teams

Managing differences of personality

  • Personalities and Negotiation
  • Emotional intelligence
  • The five principal personality traits
  • Machiavellianism and how you neutralize it
  • Recognizing “problem” personalities
  • Dealing with “problem” personalities so they don’t ruin the negotiation

Negotiation across cultures

  • Cross-cultural negotiations
  • What is culture and how is it learned
  • The impact of culture on negotiations
  • Etiquette and how it varies across cultures
  • Ethics and negotiation
  • Integrity and why it is so important
  • Resolving cultural differences
  • Dealing with cultures that you don’t understand very well
  • The difference between a lie of omission and commission
  • Dealing with someone that you believe is unethical
  • Case: Negotiating on Thin Ice: The 2004-2005 NHL dispute

Negotiating skills

  • Avoiding negotiation impasses
  • The causes of negotiation impasses
  • Avoiding common mistakes that cause impasses
  • Effective tools to work your way out of an impasse
  • Creating common ground
  • Relieving the pressure and reducing tension in an impasse
  • Dealing with the use of undue force
  • The difference between power moves and process moves
  • The best way to deal with an ultimatum
  • Dealing with a bully
  • Alternative dispute resolution
  • When to use arbitration
  • How do deal with a mediator
  • Best practices in negotiations
  • Tips for dealing with difficult people, and difficult situations
  • Exercise: Negotiation role-play
  • Summary & close of course