genuinely impacting buyers' negotiating skills

Think! Inc. provides research-based negotiation training for buyers. We help Procurement professionals become more successful negotiators. All the countermeasures, tactics, behaviors, tips, tricks and gimmicks typically taught by negotiation "training" or other "experts" may be helpful hints, but they are not a blueprint for successful negotiating. In fact, they have few, if any, long-term, positive effects on the negotiating skills of an individual or the negotiating competency of an organization. A company training its Procurement professionals in such a traditional soft skills approach to negotiation cannot expect much improvement in negotiation effectiveness.

How many times do you hear your buyers say, "I can get the same thing cheaper..."? It's at the core of today's most pervasive problems in business-to-business negotiations. Focusing on price alone, wont achieve your savings goals or your serve your internal stakeholders well.

How your buyers blueprint a negotiation will determine if they fail -- or succeed. Just executing a buy is not a success if it doesn’t help to achieve your strategic goals and increase the overall value of the deal to your internal stakeholders. Think! teaches Procurement professionals how to deal objectively, factually and successfully while achieving improved deal value.

We are committed to identifying symptoms of a mal-functioning negotiation system within your organization and then determining its root causes. The most common symptoms are:

• unending deal cycles
• feeling powerless in single and sole source negotiations
• deteriorating supplier relationships
• lack of innovation and creativity in deals

Typical root causes include:

• buyers focused on price reductions only
• buyers who are disconnected from their internal stakeholders
• no understanding of how to expand the value of the deal
• lack of understanding of the supplier’s priorities
• inconsistency in the approach to buying across your organization

Think! helps you solve these problems because we define root causes, rather than describe symptoms - and then we prescribe a measurable, analytical  solution that complements your existing Procurement organization processes and strategies.

Instead of training your procurement staff to become tactical generalists or follow checklists of things to do during a negotiation, we help them achieve proficiency with the analytics that make a measurable and immediate impact on negotiations. By design and intent, they start the buying and negotiation process better prepared than the salespeople selling to them.

Think! gives Procurement professionals the courage to make better negotiating decisions by helping prepare for effective negotiation and mastering the skills of negotiation blueprinting.

We determine identifiable and measurable metrics for every deal. We quantify return on investment. To have an immediate business impact and achieve a measurable return on investment, a negotiation initiative must:

• tie directly to corporate strategy and stakeholder priorities
• be sponsored by senior management
• have coaches who measure and are measured

Think! integrates our analytical processes so buying and negotiating are seamless.

We encourage you to get in touch with us for a 15-20 minute conversation.  We can provide you with more information, ranging from our proprietary research findings to case histories, published data and professional references. We can conduct a confidential assessment of your negotiating environment or prepare a comprehensive report which benchmarks your firm's performance against industry standards. Or we will be happy to learn more about your unique situation and offer our perspective on how we can work together.

Think! can help you! Link to our website at: http://www.e-thinkincprocurement.com for additional information or send me an email at mdd@e-thinkinc.com.