Navigating & Negotiating Pandemic Events
Put your hand up if you've been negotiating and re-strategizing events for the last 18 months! 👋🏻
In a period of ample change and postponements, we've had to leverage our negotiating and communications skills, building relationships for better outcomes and ensuring positive results for our clients and teams.
As such, we've compiled our top tips for managing the re-doing and negotiating process of events.
Here's the scoop:
1️⃣ Go where you have relationships
This is a business philosophy. We balance our desire to build new relationships with partners and venues, along with leveraging existing ones. Treating your wider team like important parts of your process will serve you when the need to negotiate arises.
2️⃣ Maintain open communication - always
Bring your partners and venues into the mindset of your client organizations early and often. This information-sharing will aid in your future change management conversations.
3️⃣ Prepare your wish list
This is a private exercise between us and our clients. What do we want out of this change? What is our best case scenario? What is the likelihood of those outcomes? Identify and weigh your chips, as they say, before you begin wider negotiations.
4️⃣ Vulnerability is key
Share the true impacts of a positive negotiation on the organization AND its mission. Together, we can go much farther than if stay within our bubble. Ask your partners the same questions - how does this change impact you?
5️⃣ Outcomes, not results
Enter into your dialogues about cancellations or date changes committed to a positive outcome for your clients (hot tip ✨ revisit # 3!) as versus a specific result. Negotiations that lead to the best mutual results are fluid but clear.
Send us a direct message by clicking the Connect button. We’d love to talk shop and discuss your challenges and opportunities for the future of your events portfolio!
