Your employees are more important than your customers. Some managers may not agree with this notion.  However, the fact remains that a company’s workforce is the business asset which is most responsible for attracting and retaining customers. Without employees, you can’t deliver products or services with a consistently high level of customer satisfaction.

Train to Retain

Business managers often complain about how difficult it is to find and retain skilled negotiators. In fact, poor employee retention is a major problem which spans multiple industries and job functions.  According to one government source, roughly three million employees voluntarily leave their jobs each month.

One reason why employees quit their jobs is the absence of meaningful professional development opportunities. According to a report published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, small companies only provide 24 minutes of employee training each year. Surprisingly, companies with up to 500 employees provide even less:  just 12 minutes of employee training annually.

Michael Sayed, a business owner who completed an advanced negotiation training in LA reflected that: “When my company instituted a well-structured professional development program, employee retention improved.  I believe that employees want to work for a company that enables workers to regularly expand their skill sets through formal training.”  

The availability of high-quality training helps firms to retain employees, and increase these workers’ productivity and motivation. Additionally, good professional development programs can enable companies to promote from within by creating an internal pipeline of highly-qualified professionals.

Negotiation Training Promise

An owner who attended an LA negotiation training wrote: While there are many skills that your employees need, the one skill that most lack is the ability to negotiate effectively.  Handily, negotiation training delivers bottomline results immediately, which no other training can promise.

Negotiation training benefits all employees, most especially those who must regularly negotiate with prospective customers and vendors. The availability of negotiation training is, therefore, the single most important professional development opportunity and route to increase profit margins.

Negotiation Defined

When conducted expertly, negotiation is not about convincing the counterparty to agree to your terms. Rather, it is  “a process where two or more parties with different needs and goals discuss an issue to find a mutually acceptable solution, according to The Negotiation Experts.

Negotiation is a skill that anyone can learn and refine with the help of the right negotiation training. As described below, good negotiation skills have several benefits.

Benefits of Negotiation Training

Helps To Build Relationships

Negotiation workshops will teach your employees how to control their emotions.  By remaining calm during negotiations, they’ll be able to craft better solutions to a counterparty’s business problems than they can when they’ve become mentally distracted by a counterparty’s aberrant behavior.  The ability to remain calm will also demonstrate the respect and concern for a counterparty which supports the development of long-term business relationships.

Provides For Win-Win Solutions

Negotiation training equips employees with the skills needed to create a negotiation strategy that will yield mutually beneficial solutions.  These types of solutions move both parties closer to their respective goals. Consequently, the mutually beneficial deal gives both parties greater satisfaction and positive closure.

Preserves the Opportunity for Future Business Deals

Poorly executed negotiations can lead to client dissatisfaction and increase the likelihood of losing both the deal at hand and future business.  A counterparty may even consent to a deal which meets its business goal but obviously gives your firm a greater share of the deal’s financial and non-financial benefits.  However, such a win-lose deal leaves the counterparty less inclined to do business with your firm in the future. To maximize the potential for repeat business, employees need to learn how to negotiate in a way which yields a 50-50 split of all benefits between both counterparties.

The Importance of Employee Training

Improved Satisfaction Among Employees

A study conducted by Middlesex University for Work Based Learning illustrated how important professional training can be to workers.  Roughly 74% of employees surveyed agreed that a lack of training could prevent them from working at their best level. A similar percentage of employees agreed that access to training would help them reach their career goals.  In fact, 76% were even willing to change employers for better training opportunities. Employees also agreed that their level of job satisfaction is positively correlated to the type and amount of training provided by their employers.

Training can equip employees to advance within the company, expanding the pipeline of qualified candidates available for promotion from within.  By investing in the professional development of its employees, a firm may ultimately reduce its executive search expenses and reduce corporate culture conflicts by staffing more positions internally.  For the employee, negotiation training can increase the potential for higher compensation based on (1) improved job performance, and (2) the addition of negotiation skill mastery to the employee’s set of core competencies.

Better Engagement Rate

Reportedly, the minds of only 13% of employees stay fully engaged while they work.   An estimated 25% maintain poor mental engagement while working. A low level of employee mental engagement can significantly reduce a company’s productivity.

One good way to counter this is to provide employee training. Once employees learn the skills that they need to do their jobs, they tend to be more productive and engaged.  Negotiation training equips employees with the tools needed to perform this aspect of their work competently and confidently. Negotiation classes can extinguish the insecurity and stress which stem from ignorance about the negotiation process.  Instead, workers can sustain the mental focus needed to craft an effective solution to the counterparty’s business problem.

Conclusion

Employees who receive negotiation training are better able to conduct business at the negotiation table.  With formal training and realistic practice scenarios, employees can begin to achieve results which create shareholder value for both counterparties.   Find a training company that works with firms in your industry, and get started today.