Company Negotiation Performance Review
Contracting is a key corporate capability that lies at the heart of value creation and competitive advantage. It is unlikely that any business can survive, let alone prosper, without financially successful contracts. Given the importance of contracts to company success, evaluating negotiations and contract performance is essential.
The ultimate question during an evaluation is whether the contract was performed successfully. While many factors play a role in determining success, your negotiation strategy is especially important. As a result, you should have a process in place for reviewing your negotiations and for sharing the results with negotiators throughout your organization, regardless of whether they are on the sell side or the buy side.
Your review should take place immediately after negotiations are completed, whether or not they result in a contract. Because negotiations that produce a contract (and appear to be successful) occasionally fail at the implementation stage, you should revisit your review following performance of the contract.
During your review, you should consider the following questions. For additional detail, see Chapter 10, “Perform and Evaluate Your Agreement,” in Negotiating for Success:
- Did we achieve our goal? Negotiation Planning Checklist #1
- If not, what caused failure to reach our goal?
- Did we use an effective BATNA strategy during the negotiation? Negotiation Planning Checklist #2-7
- Was our final agreement better than our BATNA?
- When planning for the negotiation, did we identify all key issues that were likely to arise? Negotiation Planning Checklist #8
- Was our concession strategy successful? Negotiation Planning Checklist #8
- Were we successful in building a relationship with the other side during the negotiation? Negotiation Planning Checklist #9
- Did we identify opportunities to create value for both sides during the negotiation? Negotiation Planning Checklist #10
- Did we prepare a price strategy and analysis before the negotiation? Negotiation Planning Checklist #11-14
- Was our price strategy effective during the negotiation?
- How can we encourage our deal makers to focus more on implementation?
- How can we generally improve the negotiation process?
