Negotiating Contracts

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This interactive one-day seminar will provide you with strategies, tactics, and a deeper understanding of contracts necessary to improve your contract negotiating skills – whether you’re on the purchasing or sales side of the table.

The skills and techniques of effective negotiation can be mastered; no one is born with a “negotiating gene.”

During the seminar, participants will engage in practical, hands-on exercises designed to become more effective in the contract negotiation process by going through these process steps:

  • Review of Legal Issues and Contract Language: Review of legal and contract terminology, associated contract language, and the buyer’s and seller’s perspectives.
  • Ensuring the Contract Matches the Deal: Discussions of how to expedite the contract process. Exercises in identifying and agreeing upon the deal points before exchanging contract language.
  • Reviewing and Modifying the Contract: Class exercises in reviewing language to determine if the contract reflects the parties’ deal.  Approaches to modifying the language to capture the deal points.
  • Defining Your Goals: Discussions and exercises in determining not only the company’s short term goals, but the long term business goals as well.
  • Identifying Worst Case Scenarios: Learn to identify “worst case” scenarios, discuss with your counterpart and write contract language that serves as operating guidelines if the worst case occurs.
  • Identifying the Other Party’s Goals and Interests: The importance of taking the other party’s goals and interests into consideration. Approaches to understanding the other party’s perspective and addressing their concerns.
  • Effective Negotiation Strategies: Discussions and exercises regarding effective negotiation strategies.
  • Establishing Your Alternatives. Discussion of bottom lines:  What is negotiable and what is not?  Class exercises in determining what you are willing and unwilling to concede.

At conclusion of the seminar, attendees will be better able to:

  • Be fully prepared to engage in contract negotiations
  • Better define the contract issues/ and their objectives
  • Ask better questions of the other party and avoid pitfalls of being backed into a corner
  • Be more comfortable with the negotiation process
  • Set the stage for more efficient/ productive contract negotiations

Attendees are encouraged to bring examples from their own negotiation experiences for discussion.

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