Early Preparation and Strategic Advantage: Insights from Marc Saris

Obstacles can be mapped out the same as stakeholders. They can be listed. And what we always advise our clients to do is start building a record of obstacles. Every negotiation that you've gone through, write down the obstacles that occurred and start making a overview of obstacles. Then, when you're planning for your next negotiation, take these obstacles or risks or however you want to call them, and start thinking, how likely would it be that this obstacle may occur from my negotiation? And then here comes the beautiful part, which is the scenario planning is how are we going to react if it does occur? And what you notice is that people are creatures of habit. People have the tendency and organizations have also this collective memory that they tend to respond to the obstacles always the same way.

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So I think, I mean, in terms of what we do, working with our clients. Clients, you read pretty much in every negotiation book or any topic. You hear people always mention preparation and it's this kind of broken record. Negotiations go hand in hand with preparation.

Right.

What I oftentimes find with clients is they just don't know what to prepare and they lack the structure, they lack the A approach, they lack depth where they get into sticky situations because if their planning is poor, their execution is going to be poor and they're constantly going back to the drawing board. And what you see is just following kind of a very step side approach that you can, you can really predict a lot of the things that are going to happen in your negotiation through proper preparation. Hence the whole scenario planning bit. So you can do a lot of the work as long as you start in time, as long as you have the internal alignments, as long as you've clear objectives, you've got your foundations down, you pretty much kind of visualize where the negotiations are going to head and what to prepare for.

Tell me what you think about this as we game plan. What about we kind of, we think about it in terms of splitting this episode in half and so the first half is like the biggest mistakes you've seen in preparation, where people think they're prepared and then they're not. Then we kind of, it's kind of reconceptualizing preparation. So don't even think about it as preparation. Let's think about it as scenario planning.

Awesome. I mean, nice. That comment just triggered immediately something as the biggest pitfall I literally see in every negotiation.

Oh, let's go. Okay, this is good. This is good. Well, let's keep this. Let's, let's, let's hit it while it's hot, while the energy is blowing. Awesome, man.

If we get brought in with either too late in the process while negotiations have been going on, or when we kind of do a postmortem of a negotiation that has gone bad, or just doing a postmortem in general and we ask what happened or where could you improve? The number one thing that I would say is the biggest pitfall in large complex negotiation is stakeholders, management, engagement, alignment, kind of. Stakeholder management is a term that gets thrown around a lot in different business settings. You hear stakeholder Management, when you go to your studies, it's a topic as always discussed. But in negotiation it's critical to success. And what you notice in a lot of negotiations they haven't aligned properly with their internal stakeholder. So you've got this negotiation going on between a select group of individuals which are representing their parties. So you've got one or two negotiators representing your company and then you've got two or three at the other side. They're just the speaking on behalf of a much wider system of individuals or stakeholders that have an opinion, that have priorities, that have interests usually in the outcome of this negotiation. So when I say the biggest pitfall is when you're trying to get to a deal and you have an align internally, these stakeholders can actually be your number one blocker of getting that negotiation going. A very concrete example which literally happened three weeks ago is we were supporting a union negotiation. So employee relations, they were negotiating for better salary, for better terms and we were supporting the company side, the HR function in that they shook hands with the union representatives, they had a deal and everything was there, it was done, it was dusted and all of a sudden they were asked to say, it's just a formality, but we have to go to vote on this topic. And the thing was that the union rep, he actually was very neutral in his communications to his. Yeah, his supporters or his union members and he voted against whilst they had a good deal. Now that was shocking because both parties felt we have a great deal. Even the negotiators were saying, right, this is an amazing deal. They still voted against. And what you see going on right now, we're still in the middle of it, is that there are signals that they have regrets. So the members are regretting, voting against, but are communicating, saying, we didn't know what we were voting on, we weren't informed properly. We felt that we were being screwed. And it is actually really, really funny that I was listening to another podcast with William Urie and he was giving a similar explanation of 40 years ago with a coal miner negotiation, similar a union where the exact same thing happened and we had all of our stakeholders aligned, the other party didn't. And that just goes to show that in terms of preparation, you're not just preparing for yourself, you're not preparing for your priorities and interests as an individual. You are representing a collective, you are representing your company. And your company is made up of a lot of individuals, a lot of individuals that have authority and power and oftentimes a say. So when we get into, when we get into preparations, the very first thing we start asking is, who are your stakeholders? Who's involved? Who has a say, Whose priorities, whose interests are we meeting? And we categorize them. So we go through the process of saying, right, let's list out all of the internal customers of this deal, of this outcome of this negotiation, who's going to be involved, who may put up a roadblock, whose opinion is going to matter? And let's just get those opinions out in the open. Let's get their objectives out in the open and let's. It's oftentimes they are conflicting. That's the other thing is if you ask your finance department or your legal department to give their objectives or their interest as an outcome of the negotiation, negotiation, they're going to be all over the place. And if you don't confront them with it, if you don't align them before you even get to the negotiation table, it is going to cause a problem and you will lose credibility during the negotiation itself.

Absolutely. And I love the story for so many reasons, because even though this is a big negotiation, we're talking about unions, we're talking about companies, somebody might be listening and saying, well, this isn't for me because I don't negotiate deals that big. I guarantee you, whoever you are, whatever the, the negotiations or difficult conversations you're having, there are going to be stakeholders that will be impacted by the agreement that you make. If you happen to have a significant other, just know the agreements you make will impact other people. And it's so important. And I think there are times where people are so eager to jump into the deal that they just genuinely don't consider it. They move into it. And in this case, they thought they could negotiate a good deal and they did, but they were unfortunately incorrect because they didn't consider the stakeholders. And then sometimes, Mark, I think they say to themselves, you know what? I do not want the hassle of having to deal with these people because they are all over the place. Let me just do it right now and ask for forgiveness later. And then like you said, chaos ensues, you lose credibility and the deal falls apart.

Well, that's, that's taking a shortcut and it may work out sometimes. So in deals that are, well, less of importance, you may get away with it until that one time that you really get confronted with it, and then you will regret it because, a, you don't just lose credibility towards the other party, you lose credibility as a negotiator towards your internal organization. As well. And the worst thing you can do is piss off some senior stakeholders that thought, hey, why did you not engage me on this beforehand? And that can be a career killing move. I mean, you do not want to get into those situations, but it is besides that part. So right at the very start of your preparation, mapping out your stakeholders, identifying clearly, right, who are my decision makers, who are my key authorities, who are my key influencers, and who are the operators who are having to live with the deal. The second part comes from keeping them informed, because it's all good and well to kind of get them aligned and get them all looking at the same direction, getting your ducks in a row. There is still that risk that over time, especially if the negotiations takes a longer period, there might be things that are happening or changing. So you also want to regularly keep them informed about your progress, about the challenges that your faces, because even at those moments that you thought there's absolutely clear internal alignment, it may still go wrong throughout the negotiation. So it's a key priority to just constantly keep them informed. What are you doing? What are your plans? How are you going to approach the negotiation such that A, they're informed, but B, there's a second risk they might get escalated to the other party may have access, they may go behind you and talk to these individuals and if you haven't informed them, they may be saying different things and that may also hit your credibility.

I think the listeners out here who are in procurement and project management are having flashbacks right now as you say all these things, because sometimes those are the most frustrating situations to find yourself in. And I think one just simple principle of life strategy in general is considering what is a better mistake to make. So I think back to when I was younger and my tennis coach was teaching me how to play. And he says, I would prefer for you to miss the ball out of bounds rather than miss it into the net, because if it goes into the net, you never had a chance. And when you're going through this preparation process, consider what types of mistakes you're willing to make. So as we're mapping out the stakeholders, a simple question you can ask yourself is, who else? So we write down a handful of stakeholders. A lot of times people just go through this as just like a checkbox type of thing. They take five or ten minutes. Just test yourself, who else, who else? Who else? You will. It's a better mistake to consider more people than too few people. And then also when we're thinking about keeping people informed, we might say, oh, this is such a minor update. I don't need to keep them informed. Well, what's a better mistake to make? Let me keep them informed. And then they tell me, oh, it's okay, you didn't need to tell me that one versus how dare you not keep me in the loop through this process.

Spot on. So that's, that's basic preparation in my view. Getting your stakeholders mapped out, aligned. Once you start getting into organizations that are really embedding proper negotiation processes, you see, or at least what we try and implement with the clients that we work for, is that once they've got their internal mapping clear, we start continuously mapping the counterparty. And especially with deals that are already kind of reoccurring deals, or that you're working regularly with the same type of customer. We advise any kind of key account manager or anyone dealing with a client or on the procurement side, map out as much as you can on the other side. And also then map out who do you have access to? Because that's the other thing that oftentimes gets ignored. I was working with another client and they were saying, yeah, we just cannot, cannot. We're always in these competitive, transactional type of negotiations. And a simple question, and I know this is a lot of procurement people are going to hate me for saying this, but they were saying, and it's always about price. These procurement people, always talking about price. You cannot talk anything else about them. And I was in procurement, I know how it is. It is extremely difficult to move away from that if all of your KPIs are pointing towards price. Now, bunch of theory, a completely different topic to go into. But then I asked them is, who else do you know? Who else do you deal with? Who else do you have access to? And he said, well, we only get to talk to procurement. Well, okay, what have you done about it? Have you mapped out how their organization works? No, no. If we escalate, we always escalate within procurement to the CPO said, well, but are you delivering a service to procurement? And the biggest mistake a lot of salespeople make is that they think procurement is their client. No, procurement is a function, is a facilitator of internal clients. They are working on behalf of someone else. They are doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of negotiations, contracting and work, but they're not doing it for themselves. I haven't met a procurement person buying stuff for themselves that they're going to be using. So I said, there's a whole world of stakeholders behind this procurement people. And frankly, they're getting shit from both sides, from you, as well as from their internal stakeholders. So they always have these dual hats, negotiating internally and externally. Now your job as a key account manager or as a commercial professional is you need to start mapping out their stakeholders, their stakeholders and how you can start getting access to them. And that doesn't mean you need to have direct access, but you can use your own stakeholder mapping to see how you can make bridges to their stakeholders. And the moment you've done that, you can start extracting information or planting information. So that is next level stakeholder management. And that opens the door to preconditioning, as we discussed last time. It opens the door to influencing from multiple channels. It opens the door to so many more insights that when we talk about the distributive competitive type of negotiations, getting more stakeholders involved, getting more interests going into this negotiation actually allows you to go to the more collaborative big picture type of negotiations.

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Oh, spot on. Kind of controlling the flow of information, getting aligned, actually instructing. We expect you to not say this. You are allowed to share this, but this is the instructions that you're getting with is crucial because they will be, I mean the good negotiators will try and identify those weaklings and they'll try and exploit it. And why, I mean it's logical, right? If you can have access to the budget holder and bypass procurement. Oh, I would, having been in procurement, I would never hold it against them because I would have done the same thing.

Absolutely, absolutely. And, and now what we're seeing here, Mark, is just how much negotiation has to occur before the actual negotiation even occurs. And a lot of times, especially in these really complicated and complex negotiations, those internal negotiations are the most challenging and frustrating parts of the process.

They're oftentimes the most difficult because they then you get really into conflicting interests. And it's very unfortunate that organizations still haven't figured out that. A very simple example. How can you expect procurement to have the same objectives if their KPIs are cost saving or third party spend savings as a lot of companies so beautifully call it, it's like, well, hold on, if that is my personal objective that I'm being sent out, but my, my internal clients have the objective of 100% quality, no disruptions, etc. Then that's conflicting. And without kind of having those internal negotiations, bringing that up to the front, bringing that in open air, you're going to have a very tough time throughout the entire negotiation.

Absolutely. And so when we're thinking about this preparation process, we have the scenario mapping, we have the stakeholder analysis and things like that. What are some other things that you see people typically miss that hold them back in the actual negotiation?

So if we look at the way that we look at negotiation preparation, we actually apply our methodology. We call the impact planning house. And that fundamentally starts with identifying the stakeholders. Because the next step is objective setting. And what we say is the whole kind of looking at interests, looking at objectives, what do you actually want? What is kind of the best case, what is your worst acceptable, what are your BATNAs? That objective setting. And that ties back into the whole stakeholder alignment. If that isn't done properly, and that's why we call it a house, if that whole objective setting part is not done correctly, you're building a negotiation plan, a negotiation house, on a weak foundation. And the beautiful thing is, if you've done that correctly, if you've got your strong foundation set, if you've got it aligned, the rest of the preparation becomes a piece of cake because the rest of your building just piles on top of your objective setting. And then talking about power analysis, about your obstacle, scenario planning, your tactics. If you've got your objectives right, the rest flows really easily.

Yeah. And Mark, when we talk about understanding our objectives, I think typically, and you tell me if I'm off on this, typically, people do a pretty solid job of understanding their objectives, more or less. I feel like they often struggle when it comes to understanding the objectives as the other side. So when you think about just bias in general, you have. What is it called? Out Group homogeneity. So within your in group, you can see the different voices and the diversity. It's interesting. But with the out group, it's like they're all the same. And so within our own organization, within our own team, we can see, hey, there are competing interests. And a lot of times we just look at the other side and we look at them as just one ubiquitous blob and they all, and they all want the exact same thing. So in our planning beforehand, as we're preparing, how can we push ourselves to, in a little bit more of a nuanced way about the competing objectives that might exist within the other organization?

I think you're, you're spot on in, in how you described the perception of a lot of individuals just seeing a entity, seeing a big kind of client as their shell, their bp, their Amazon, whatever. But no, you're spot on. There are different objectives. The first thing I would say is kind of this awareness bit. And that awareness comes with. Well, the easy thing is we just been discussing is mapping out stakeholders. And the moment you start thinking about individuals, then the logical brain would tell you, well, individuals have individual needs, they have individual desires, they have individual interests. And the moment that you start shifting the mindset of actually going through the process and thinking about their priorities. And that's the other, the fun thing. When I was working with this client about implementing a preparation process and we started talking about the other party and they mentioned, well, we only get to talk to procurement. And I said, let me guess, what do they ask for and what are the priorities that you think of every single time? Cost. I'm like, well, that's a no brainer. But what about the plant manager? What about the marketing manager? Because your services and goods actually impact those two more. And those are their internal clients. Have you thought about what they want? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. Well, we don't really talk to them. I said, well, they have different needs and their needs a lot of times are a lot stronger than those of procurement. So you need to start thinking about their needs. Because it's very easy to say cost as being the number one driver of an interest. But if I look at their annual report, which is another source that you can go into, what are they actually communicating? Are they having ambitions to be the most sustainable company in their industry? Well, how does that influence their negotiation? And once you get a procurement professional across from you who's just hammering on price, you can actually confront them with that fact saying, hey, hold on, but how does that align with your ambitions of becoming the most sustainable company in the world? Because if you actually just purely focus on price, you can get the services and the goods a lot cheaper if you don't look at sustainability. And we can actually do something for you on that front. But when you're asking me to be sustainable and produce sustainable goods for you, which I know your marketing manager and your plant manager and your sustainable officer wants, and even your CEO because he promised it to his shareholders, let's have a different conversation because you're not Aligned, it seems. And that kind of thinking, that awareness that there are multiple people having different interests, different stakes, is just a starting point.

Absolutely. And I think it requires a little bit of creativity in this process as well. I remember one time I was working with a client and they were saying, we're not exactly sure what their interests are. We're just thinking about it purely from the numbers perspective. And let's be be honest, a lot of times when you are in these high stress situations, it's almost like a fear response. You get tunnel big vision on the biggest threat. And so I got an idea of who everybody was on the negotiation team. They had some more senior people, and then all the way to people who were more junior, who were just mainly observing. And so what we ended up doing was taking one of the more junior people and then saying, hey, just have a meeting with somebody else in that organization at that location, spend the day there, get to know them, talk to people. And so then that person essentially acted as a scout and came back with a much richer picture of what was actually happening beneath the surface. And it's not always obvious from the outside looking in. All we can do is hypothesize. But if you're going to get creative about how you can gather more information, that information can help you. Because at the end of the day, negotiation is an information game. The better information you have, the better you're going to be at the negotiation table.

Yeah, 100%. I would actually add to that saying that the moment you're in the negotiation, if the first offers have already been communicated, if you've already gone through the process of sitting at the table, defenses go up. I mean, it's. It's like that, that drawbridge has been pulled up. You're not getting into this fortress, because of course, they're also aware. And the moment that you signal, hey, my dear friend or my colleague wants to go and have a day outing at your plant, they're going to say, what the hell for? No, you can hold on there. No. And that's why preparation is also time sensitive. And you need to take your time for preparation. Starting six months to nine months or even a year in advance is not crazy. It's smart. It's really careful planning. Because when you're trying to access that type of information, you need to be smart about it. You need to be constantly looking for it, and you need to do it outside of the negotiation. Because then the guards are down.

Absolutely. Because think about it. Sometimes somebody might say, well, Kwame, I started Asking these questions and they weren't giving you giving me answers. Okay, well, duh. First of all, you think about. We all, we all have those friends where they, they call us or text us, and we look at them and we roll our eyes. We're like, oh, what does this person want? And then they're really nice at that moment. Well, you've never been nice to me before. What's happening? And a lot of times our information gathering endeavors and the preparation we're doing, and it just becomes incredibly transparent and very transactional. And I think if you do a good job of maintaining a somewhat decent working relationship with them, this whole preparation process can happen a lot more organically earlier on in the process. But again, a lot of times we just sit on our laurels and then we have a situation where we say, oh my gosh, the negotiation is in three months. Let's get moving now. Well, you're already playing from behind.

Yeah. And it just shows genuine interest. Right. Well, and that's the, that's probably the other thing. You need to be genuinely interesting as a negotiator. I've worked for organizations or I've been taught methodologies that kind of fake it, Pretend to be someone else that you're not, adapt behaviors that are not supposed to be really you. And I've really come back from that saying that's not how you're supposed to negotiate. You need to always be genuine to yourself. But you also, as a negotiator need to be genuinely interested. If you're not interested in finding out about the client or the supplier, they're going to have a really tough time extracting information because anything that you're going to ask will come across as being part of an agenda. And the moment people. And people sense that, I mean, you've. I can guarantee everyone listening here has been in that situation where you thought, why are they saying that? Why are they asking that? What's behind that? And then again, defenses go up. So that's. Be generally interested.

Absolutely. And so we, we've gone through first few stages here. And you said the, the scenario planning, stakeholder analysis, this last part of process, what was it the objective planning here? That's about 80%, and I agree. And when you think about the last 20% that often could potentially be overlooked by people in prep, what does that look like?

Well, so that's, that's when you get into scenario planning and a kind of obstacle. Scenario planning. If you go into an organization and you analyze their past, let's say three years of negotiations. And you ask them what has gone wrong in your negotiation. You have to name one thing per negotiation, what has gone wrong. You get a list of obstacles that have occurred. And once you start looking back far enough, you can start seeing that these obstacles are oftentimes reoccurring because they oftentimes are industry related or situation related. But you can pretty much assess with, I would say 85, 90% accuracy what obstacles may impact your negotiation. And the obstacle pair definition may not happen. It's, it's a risk that it happens. So it's not guaranteed to happen. That's why we call it an obstacle. If you know that it's going to happen, then you need to just account for it in your plan. But if an obstacle may occur and there's a probability that it may occur, then you need to start scenario planning it. Now you have Chris Voss with his Black Swan group. We're not talking Black Swan events. You cannot really prepare for black Swans. You need to be adaptive. You need to be kind of a, a skilled negotiator to handle those situations. But for the rest, obstacles can be mapped out the same as stakeholders. They can be listed. And what we always advise our clients to do is start building a record of obstacles. Every negotiation that you've gone through, write down the obstacles that occurred and start making a overview of obstacles. Then when you're planning for your next negotiation, take these obstacles or risks or however you want to call them, and start thinking, how likely would it be that this obstacle may occur from my negotiation? And then here comes the beautiful part, which is the scenario planning is how are we going to react if it does occur? And what you notice is that people are creatures of habit. People have the tendency and organizations have also this collective memory that they tend to respond to the obstacles always the same way.

There are a couple of layers of analysis here for you, for the listeners here. So if you are a leader of a team, one of the things that you should pay attention to here. Here is just the benefit of institutional knowledge, like you said, Mark, these obstacles, oftentimes they are recurring. So if you can start to map out and just keep a log somehow of all of the obstacles that you've ever encountered in this role. Now you have this incredible manifesto of all of the things that may or may not come up so your team can be more prepared going forward. The next thing too is to bring in another bias. We have optimism bias. So interesting thing, they, it turns out that people who are chronically late are optimist. So they are typically very optimistic. So when they're thinking about how long it takes to get there, they say, oh, it will take me 25 minutes to get there. And they never one time consider that something bad might happen, you know, a red light. Mine too. I tell Whitney sometimes, I was like Whitney when I was growing up. My dad, sometimes when I was running late, he would say, you have no concept of time. He would say it and it was hyperbolic. But with you, I genuinely don't know, you understand how time works. So we relate on that. And so when we think about these scenarios in negotiations, we say, all right, yeah, the best case will occur. We don't consider all of the obstacles. And then sometimes we consider the obstacles and then we use what I like to call a hope based strategy. We say, well, man, I hope that.

Just go away by itself.

Exactly right. No, we have to think through it. And I love the fact that you talked about the psychology of this, because when we are hit with this obstacle in the moment and we're not prepared, we will usually defer to our lowest common denominator of response. We'll respond with a threat. We will might make an inappropriate concession. We might give away information that we shouldn't have given away. So we have to think through this. It becomes an if, then proposition. If we run into this obstacle, then I know what I'm going to do. This, I'm going to say that. And that allows you to flow a lot more organically in the moment too.

Well, a concrete example. So I'm not sure if retail in the US applies this a lot, but in delisting strategies where. Well, they probably will, because I'm assuming. But a lot of European retailers, when negotiating with FMCGs, if negotiations get heated, they have a very powerful threat and then they can actually execute on that threat. And that is we will delist your products. So we will take your products off the shelf. Now, common occurrence, I mean, this is going back decades that retailers have this power and they're not afraid to utilize this power. So when we're preparing with our FMCG clients and we ask them, saying, all right, have you considered, I mean, your objectives that you want to achieve are ambitions, they're not impossible. But this may get into a fistfight with the retailer and it may get very confrontational. Have you considered what would happen to you if they delist you? What are you willing to accept? And if they're poorly prepared and you have that conversation one month before their negotiation, then the reaction that you're going to Get. And what we've often got is, no, no, no, we cannot get into that situation at all. So there, my logical brain says, right, so if that scenario occurs, you're going to concede or even capitulate. And the answer is yes. And of course, with a lot of answer is always yes in the end. I mean, you, you kind of keep probing and then in the end it's like, yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll put our pants down. Okay, great. Now let's. We settled that. Next year, let's have the same conversation, but let's have that conversation a year in advance or not. The moment the negotiation ends, we're going to have that same conversation and then we're going to prepare you for it. And preparing for that means allocating budget for it, predicting how long the delisting may, may go on for. We call it going to war, because you actually need a war chest. And the fun thing is the clients that we work with, that we actually steer to a delisting strategy or that we kind of called out the retailer to delist. We were prepared, and our client was prepared to go on for delisting for three months. They budgeted that in. So they've taken into account. They even took down stock levels so that they were not sitting with a lot of obsolete stocks. But then we were also thinking about, right, how do you properly then get this in place? And one of the nice things that came up was, well, we need to prevent them from preparing. And one way the retailers prepare is by bulking up inventory. So if they are planning to delist, you'll actually see in their order forms the months in advance, them stocking up, ordering twice as much as they normally would. And then we said, right, if that occurs, it's a clear signal that they are willing to go to war. And you block their request, saying that you cannot handle the extra volumes so that you go against it. This is not possible if you haven't thought about that scenario, if you haven't planned for it. And they did delist. And after three weeks, the retailers knocked on the door crying, saying, all right, let's get back to the table. Because if you have an AAA label not listed and you thought you could go to war with them, but they were prepared, they're going to come back with a tail between their legs.

This is so great, Mark. And I mean, we were, I was planning on landing the plane, but we just, it's. We're taking it back off for another pass, my friend, because now we, we bring in the power dynamics, because a lot of times we don't do a great job of analyzing the power because we don't appreciate the fact that power is dynamic, it's not static. So we have to get a better understanding of the difference between power and leverage. So when we think about power, this is authority or a position that allows somebody to influence you to give concessions. But then when we think about leverage, leverage is strategic advantage. So somebody might have power, but you have more lever leverage because of your strategic advantage. But if you are able to plan early enough, you can recognize that they have power over you and that's putting you in a bad position. And then you can do make some maneuvers like you said, starting to prepare, building up a war chest and, and all of those things. And also forecast to see, oh wait, they're doing something that makes me think they're about to do something bad to me.

Right.

So I can start to see what's coming down the pike. So now the other side might have at the beginning, if had we not prepared, had both power and leverage. But you take away some of that leverage through your preparation and that preparation might start a year or more in advance.

Yeah. And actually to go full circle, imagine a conversation that a country director or GM or even a plan GM has to have to kind of say to their corporate headquarters, dear headquarters, as part of my budgeting, I'm planning to go to war. Well, I love to be a fly on the walls on those conversations because usually they do not go easy. But if you start early enough, if you share your thinking about it and you actually tell them that yes, it is a crappy situation to go into, but it's going to happen, let's at least make the best out of it. It, let's incorporate it in our budgeting. And that just shows really good skill. But it also then shows that making those decisions actually sit at a much higher level because that country's short term financials will be impacted. And it takes a great leader to see the greater good. And especially in the European dynamics, you have buying alliances and cross country kind of dynamics with suppliers and retailers, you need to be very aware of that because ultimately the responsibility sits at one kind of European executive vice president or something. And ultimately these type of discussions oftentimes escalate to that person and usually too late. So preparation, again, key. Stakeholder mapping, involvement, alignment, key. And it's all intertwined. And that's why people oftentimes take preparation too lightly in a negotiation.

Absolutely. And now, now we can come back in for the landing here. And we will, we will land this plane with a bit of an infomercial because really especially with that last story that you told that demonstrates the power of not just having a negotiation expert, a negotiation consultant, but also somebody who has specific expertise in your industry. Because I'm a negotiation consultant and a negotiation expert considered by some, but I don't know about those details of retail like you did. Right. And so when you need a high level negotiation expertise and it's a specialized industry, then you should go with somebody who knows. And with that, Mark, remind the listeners before we go about your company and how they can get in touch.

Right. Well, we're Impact Negotiation Group and you can get in touch through our website, impact negotiationgroup.com we're active in all of Europe. We do offer services in multiple languages, German, Dutch, French. And we've got expertise in all those markets as well in France, Germany, the Netherlands. And I really like what you just said because the external perspective and if we go back to kind of that internal alignment, having that conversation with your executive vice president at European level, it's a wise idea to have an external say that because if they shoot you down, they might just call you an idiot whilst they just can then call the external party an idiot, which is great for you as well.

Absolutely. That's a really good point, Mark. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming back on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

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I'll catch you later.