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Strategic Negotiations

Vantage provides advisory services for high-stakes negotiations using a proven joint problem-solving approach.

Over the past 30 years, Vantage has advised clients on thousands of negotiations ranging in value from millions to billions of dollars. Our advisory services address a broad range of situations, including those below:

Commercial Negotiations

Commercial Negotiations

Vantage is typically engaged in the development of negotiation strategies for complex, high-stakes negotiations where the deal is often the beginning of something rather than its conclusion. We help enable our client’s success during and beyond the negotiation, bringing our methodologies, experience, and objectivity to help clients align around a plan and prepare for its execution.

Multi-Party Negotiations

Multi-Party Negotiations

When there are more than two parties in a negotiation, process choices become even more critical. They require careful analysis of different scenarios involving potentially diverging paths by each party, and development of strategies that are not only about the deal but also about effecting agreement and gaining buy-in.

Internal Negotiation and Alignment

Internal Negotiation and Alignment

Without effective internal collaboration, no commercial strategy can succeed. Vantage supports negotiations between and among business units and corporate functions, recognizing they require not only resolution of whatever the policy, process, resource, or planning issue might be, but also of the underlying tension requiring the need for organizational change.

Labor Negotiations

Labor Negotiations

Negotiations between labor and management are often about the terms of a contract for a specific term, but they are also about decision making, respect, and the ability to respond to market forces. They fall apart most often over failures of communication and of imagination about ways to resolve managerial and resource disputes; we help our clients find better ways to solve problems together.

Procurement Negotiations

Procurement Negotiations

Whether it is a sole source supplier with significant leverage, or business leaders reluctant to support a supplier consolidation effort, procurement professionals negotiate all the time. Vantage helps our clients build the capabilities to negotiate well internally and externally, and apply them to achieve critical objectives.

Partner/Joint Venture Negotiation

Partner/Joint Venture Negotiation

Partnership negotiations are “deals where implementation matters” and Vantage literally wrote the book on how to negotiate differently when the signature is just the beginning of the process. We advise and support clients through partnering negotiations, with an eye to enabling a rapid launch and operationalization of the new relationship.

Our work leverages insights from the fields of game theory, psychology, and behavioral economics, as well as The Seven Elements framework, developed by our colleagues at the Harvard Negotiation Project.

A unique approach to how we collaborate with our clients.

Our starting point is joint problem-solving.

Vantage employs joint problem-solving to help clients frame the negotiation situation and lead them to a more successful long-term outcome. And we tailor our coaching and advisory support to the client’s specific situation, their strategic interests, and their definition of long-term success.

What we bring to the table.

We’ve worked with iconic brands in a wide variety of industries — Fortune 100 companies with billions of dollars at stake. When a situation requires a seasoned advisor with experience working in the C-Suite and senior leaders, our clients call us in to address their toughest negotiation challenges.

And since our forte is big and complex negotiations, our clients appreciate the attention we provide to the smallest details, realizing that every high-stakes negotiation has many moving parts, multiple stakeholders (and counterparts), and a variety of “what-if” scenarios that must be considered. Our negotiators have an average of 20+ years of negotiation advisory experience and detailed knowledge of over 30 industries, from arts and entertainment to industrial, high technology, healthcare, and professional services.

Our first conversation is always to understand the context, stakes, and the strategic goals behind the negotiation. We’re proud of the results we’ve achieved for our clients and the opportunity they’ve given us to work with them over many negotiations.

Contact us to learn more about our Negotiation Advisory Services.

Examples of our recent client work.

Vantage designed and facilitated a process to help a global information technology company identify large multi-year deals at risk prior to end of term, to forestall the deals going out to bid. Vantage facilitated workshops around the world, helping account teams develop stakeholder engagement, value creation, and negotiation strategies to retain and renew billions of dollars in revenue at risk.

Vantage provided strategic negotiation advisory to a multinational medical equipment manufacturer to prepare the company to respond as the incumbent, to a major RFP issued by a consortium of hospital systems. This RFP threatened the bulk of the market share in the region. We challenged our client to look beyond procurement to identify all hidden stakeholders and determine how they measured value, and conducted a series of simulations of alternate strategies. Incorporating this knowledge, the client successfully engaged skeptical procurement counterparts, and not only defended the business but grew revenue beyond the original contract.

Vantage advised a preeminent hospitality and entertainment company on how best to negotiate with a strategic beverage supplier for a more attractive deal. They simply had neither more volume to offer the supplier nor other sources of leverage. We worked with the company’s senior managers to identify stakeholders beyond the supplier’s sales team, and ways to work together to create more opportunity for themselves and the supplier. The resulting contract not only included attractive pricing, but addressed our client’s needs for talent and marketing support to fill venues, and drove greater foot traffic and consumption, to the benefit of both companies.

Over a number of years, Vantage rolled out a multi-faceted negotiation curriculum, training literally thousands of negotiators across multiple functions of an integrated fuels and chemicals company. Vantage also supported them in a number of specific negotiations, including:

  • Working with team comprised of Procurement, Legal, and the Business Line to gain alignment on the terms of a Master Services Agreement in preparation for a negotiation with one of their most significant sole source suppliers
  • Supporting a multi-stakeholder bargaining team to prepare for union/organized labor negotiations; and
  • Developing a Strategic Value Reappraisal process, allowing them to explore whether they captured the full value of an agreement after the deal closed, and to use this knowledge in negotiating future deals.

Vantage worked with the CEO, General Counsel and CFO of an emerging ISP to negotiate with a more powerful global technology company to renew an agreement that provided well more than 50% of their revenue. We developed a strategy incorporating the exploration and validation of a previously unthinkable BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) which was ultimately successful in reaching a nine-figure deal at five times the prior contract.

Instilling negotiation skills as a corporate-wide capability.

While our advisory work addresses a specific negotiation, we also believe negotiation is an  essential skill that should be pervasive throughout an organization. Almost every function engages in negotiations on a regular basis — some internally, and some externally with a variety of “adversaries.”

We help organizations train employees at all levels to be skillful and strategic negotiators. And we believe that negotiation is a process, not an event. Maximizing value across many negotiations requires your company to systematize the negotiation process and equip negotiators with the information and tools they need to be effective.

Turning-Negotiation-into-a-Corporate-Capability


Turning Negotiation into a Corporate Capability
by Danny Ertel

Explore our negotiation thought leadership.

Our work is published in leading journals including Harvard Business Review.

Extreme-Negotiations


Extreme Negotiations
by Jeff Weiss, Aram Donigan, and Jonathan Hughes

Extreme-Negotiations-with-Customers


Extreme Negotiations with Customers
by Jonathan Hughes, Ben Siddall, and David Chapnick

HBRs-Guide-to-Negotiating


Harvard Business Review's Guide to Negotiating
by Jeff Weiss

Implementing-Strategies-in-Extreme-Negotiations


Implementing Strategies in Extreme Negotiations
by Jeff Weiss and Jonathan Hughes

Getting-to-YES


Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, and Bruce Patton

Let's discuss how we can help.

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