Negotiations Without Borders: What Training Across Four Continents Has Taught Us

USA, Mexico, Germany, Spain, India, Thailand. Eveneum negotiation training sessions are delivered across multiple continents. Different companies, different industries, different functions, sales teams and engineers negotiating with customers, procurement teams negotiating with suppliers, and teams negotiating internally within their own organizations. Each time, a different country and different participants, yet surprisingly similar challenges.

USA: Negotiations and New Vocabulary

The training session in Charlotte was not only about intensive work on negotiation skills, but also about numerous informal conversations in which participants were just as eager to share their own negotiation experiences as they were to exchange insights with the trainer. These conversations sometimes lead to unexpected takeaways, such as the humorous acronym ETD, understood not as Estimated Time of Dispatch, but as Estimated Time to Disaster. It is hard to find a better comment on what the day-to-day reality of procurement and sales teams can sometimes look like when schedules collide with reality.

Germany and Spain: The Power of Preparation

During the training sessions in Germany and Spain, we returned to the foundation of every successful negotiation: preparation. There is a reason why it is often said that 90% of negotiation success is determined before anyone even sits down at the negotiating table. We discussed analytics that give buyers a genuine negotiating advantage. Hard data provides powerful negotiation leverage - both in sales and procurement negotiations.

India: Automotive and Participants’ Real-Life Challenges

The training sessions in India brought together a group of experienced participants from India, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. A significant part of the sessions was devoted to challenges in the automotive industry, particularly in the Indian market. This is a great example of what we value most about delivering training: the moment when participants bring their real, current business challenges into the training room. That is when training stops being theoretical and becomes a collaborative effort to solve specific, real-world situations.

What Do All These Training Rooms Have in Common?

Regardless of the continent, industry or language, one recurring topic emerged in discussions during these training sessions, rooted in participants’ everyday work: small requests.

“Could you do this small favor for us?” A minor design change, an additional analysis, a faster response, one more meeting, additional engineering support. None of these requests seems like a major issue on its own, so the answer is usually “yes”. Especially when the request goes to the technical team rather than the commercial team.

The problem is that there is never just one favour. A few hours of an engineer’s time here, an additional meeting there, a minor schedule adjustment somewhere else. Over time, these elements accumulate, and their combined value can exceed the value of the claim or price increase being discussed in a formal negotiation lasting several weeks.

That is why, instead of automatically saying “yes” or “no”, it is worth considering a third response: "it depends".This answer creates space to understand the consequences of the request, discuss the conditions, explore alternatives, and ultimately negotiate. Can we agree to a concession? It depends on what we receive in return.

Three Questions Before Agreeing to a Customer’s Request

In many organizations, these small concessions are almost invisible. The customer asks, the team delivers, and no one measures the cumulative impact. Value is lost not because of one poorly conducted commercial negotiation, but because of dozens of small decisions that no one connects with one another.

Collaboration and relationship building are important. Making concessions consciously is even more important.

• What exactly are we giving?
• What is the real cost of this decision to our organisation?
• What are we getting in return?

Because even the smallest concession is still a concession. And if it is given away for free, it has no value.

This is one of those lessons that comes up on every continent, in every industry, and in every training room. And that is precisely why it is best learned together, through real-life examples from participants’ day-to-day work.