Negotiation preparation: the three sheets a commercial conversation runs on
Three sheets for preparing a commercial conversation: what you actually know and where you got it, who decides behind the person you are talking to, and what each thing you plan to offer is supposed to buy back.
What these sheets are for
Most commercial conversations are lost at a desk rather than in a room. You walk in with a number you cannot justify, a fact you cannot show, and a person who turns out not to be able to agree to anything. None of those three is a failure of nerve. They are three pieces of paperwork that were never done.
These sheets are the smallest structure that does them. The first separates what you know from what you are guessing, and asks where each thing came from. The second asks who has to agree, what the person in front of you can actually sign, and which dates are real. The third asks, for each thing you plan to give away, what it is supposed to buy.
They are blank. They are not a script. There is no phrase on any of them, no tactic, and nothing at all about the person across the table, because the sheets record evidence and evidence is not a personality.
What your planned moves add up to
Live arithmeticFive moves, as an example. The names are fixed; the two figures on each row are yours to change.
Try a sequence
1 A longer commitment period
Shown in $. The arithmetic is identical in any single currency.
2 A larger first order
3 Fewer delivery windows
4 Naming them in a reference
5 Taking the packaging spec as offered
The three sheets
The two columns that do most of the work
Two columns on these sheets do most of the work, and both of them are the kind of thing people skip because it feels like admin.
Where it came from. Beside every fact on the first sheet there is a cell for its source. It is not there for tidiness. A preparation sheet fills up quickly with things that are true, things that were true last year, and things somebody said confidently on a call, and after a week on the page all three look identical. The source cell is what keeps them apart, and the block underneath it exists so a guess has somewhere to live that is not the facts table.
What shows it. On the second sheet, beside every question about what the person in front of you can do, there are two cells rather than one: what you were told, and what shows it. Asking somebody whether they can sign establishes what they say about signing. That is worth writing down and it is not the same thing, and the deal that dies three weeks later usually dies in the gap between those two cells.
The rest of both sheets is ordinary. These two are the ones to fill in properly.
Printing these
Each sheet opens as a page and prints as one A4 side. Use your browser's print dialogue and choose your printer, or choose to save as PDF. The sheet is the same either way.
Print the one sheet once for each conversation, the decision network once for each organisation rather than each meeting, and the ledger once for each round of offers. Backgrounds are off and every line on these sheets is a real border, so they print correctly with backgrounds disabled and they cost you almost no ink.
They are for a pen. A sheet you can correct while somebody is still talking is the point.
Where this method came from
Where the structure came from
Two sources arrive at nearly the same artefact from opposite directions, which is the reason this kit exists in this shape rather than another.
Chris Voss with Tahl Raz, writing about hostage and commercial negotiation, put a single brief at the end of the book and argued that its value is the discipline rather than the form: getting the goal, what you already know, what you are still asking, and the boundary you will not cross onto one page you can see at once. The three preparation gaps that brief is built to expose are an undefined target, an untested authority, and a concession with no reciprocal value attached to it, and those three are what sheets one, two and three are respectively for.
Arjan J. van Weele, writing about industrial purchasing, reached the same place from procurement practice: a negotiation is not ready until the goals, the authority and the knowledge are all three in hand, and a session that opens without one of them opens anyway and pays for it later. He is also the more explicit of the two about the ledger, holding that a concession is exchanged for value rather than given in isolation. That sentence is the whole of sheet three.
Neither text is reproduced here in any form. The field blocks are written in this page's own words, and the one place the two sources disagree in emphasis, which is how much a stated authority can be relied on, is resolved on sheet two by giving it two columns instead of one.
Source: Chris Voss with Tahl Raz, on preparing a single brief. Arjan J. van Weele, Purchasing and Supply Chain Management, third edition, 2002, on negotiation readiness.
One walked example, with figures and no deal in it
Five moves are planned. A longer commitment period costs you 4,000 and you plan to ask 6,000 back for it. A larger first order costs 9,000 and you plan to ask 3,000. Fewer delivery windows cost 2,000 against 2,500 asked. Naming them in a reference costs 1,000 and asks nothing. Taking the packaging spec as offered costs 3,500 against 7,000 asked.
Added up, you plan to offer 19,500 and to ask back 18,500. The sequence nets to 1,000 against you, which is close enough to level that most people stop reading there.
Now look down the rows. The larger first order costs 9,000 and asks 3,000, so 6,000 of it is unpaired: six times the imbalance of the whole sequence, sitting on one line. The total looks level only because the first and fifth moves ask back more than they cost, and they are covering for it.
Take the fourth move off the ledger entirely, the one that costs 1,000 and asks nothing. Now the sequence balances exactly: 18,500 offered against 18,500 asked, a delta of zero. The 6,000 has not moved. A ledger that balances to the pound still has an unpaired move on it, and the total was never going to tell you.
The fix is on the second move rather than in the total. Ask 9,000 back for the larger first order instead of 3,000 and the largest unpaired figure on the sheet falls from 6,000 to 1,000, and moves to the row that asks for nothing at all.
What this does not do
It does not tell you what to say. There is no phrase, no question to ask, no opening, no ladder of decreasing offers and no percentage anywhere in this kit, and the one published concession ladder in the literature behind it says in its own words that its numbers should not be turned into a default rule.
It does not describe anybody. There is no field for a style, a type, a temperament or a read on a person, and the behavioural half of the source material has been left off the sheets deliberately. What a role needs from a deal is a fact about a deal. What somebody is like is not on this page.
It does not price anything. The panel subtracts two numbers you typed. It does not value a payment term, discount a cash flow, build a landed cost or convert a currency, and it never recomputes anything another page on this site computes.
It has no walk away number, no best alternative and no zone of agreement, and that gap is real rather than stylistic: the reading behind this page covers preparation thoroughly and covers the analysis of alternatives not at all, so the sheet asks for the limit and what sets it and does no arithmetic on either. A limits calculator here would be an authority this page does not have.
It has no score, no weighting, no total across the three sheets and no readiness percentage. A sheet with an empty authority column is not a failing score; it is one specific thing to go and find out, which is more use than a number.
Blank method sheets, printed from your own browser. The structure is described from Chris Voss with Tahl Raz on preparing a single brief, and independently from Arjan J. van Weele on negotiation readiness, and no text from either appears here; both are named where their mechanism is used and the third edition of the purchasing text dates from 2002. The panel on this page subtracts figures you typed and does nothing else: it does not price a payment term, build a cost, convert a currency or value anything, and every figure on it is your own assertion. Nothing here recommends a tactic, and nothing here describes, scores or characterises any person, which is a deliberate limit rather than an omission. These sheets do not tell you what to say, what to offer, or whether to agree, and a preparation sheet is the beginning of due diligence rather than any part of it.
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