I stopped writing notes before a meeting. I built the thing that gets me ready.

Dear Negotiation Explorer,

Welcome to week five of us building the NegoAI platform in the open.

A company got in touch. They want AI and negotiation training, three sessions are booked, and before any of it I get forty-five minutes with the woman who called me.

Then I looked at what we hold on them. The transcript of one meeting, on 30 May. That is the only thing we have, and the part about this company is eight lines long. So everything about how those three sessions should run comes out of forty-five minutes with somebody I know almost nothing about.

We had never built anything for that meeting. We build for the negotiation, and this is the conversation that comes before it, with somebody whose business you do not understand yet. Sellers have it every week. Buyers have it before they know what they are really buying.

So this week we built it. Brama, my partner in Claude Code, did the building. We call it the cockpit.

It is one page on my laptop. Nine sections, and only one of them on screen at a time, so I am never scrolling past her face looking for something. A box to tick when a section is done. A place to type what she says, next to the thing I believed before she said it.

The first screen is the four things I have to physically walk out of that room holding.

A specific event that made her start looking for this. A deal, a complaint, an instruction from above. Not a general wish to be more modern.

A sentence in her own words about what would be different three months after the last session.

The name of somebody in that company who actually negotiates, whether they sell or buy, or her agreement to arrange it.

A date on the questions about their own AI tool, and the name of whoever is answering them.

Most of us prepare a list of subjects to cover. You talk about each one, you tick it off, and the meeting feels like it went well. I have come out of meetings like that with nothing written down that I could use the next day.

These four are different, because each one is either in my hand or it is not. I have her sentence or I do not. I have a name or I do not. There is nothing in between, so I know before I reach the car whether the meeting worked.

Ten, ten, ten, ten, five. Each block says who is doing the talking, and four of the five say her.

Four questions, and under each one, two or three follow-ups I only use if the answer does not arrive on its own. What made you start looking for this. Who are the sessions for. Three months after the last session, what would have to be different for you to say this was money well spent. Who else should I be talking to before we start.

The third one is the question I would steal if I saw it on somebody else's page. Ask a client what their objectives are and they read you the line from the form they filled in to get the money approved. Ask them what would have to be different in three months, and nobody has that answer ready. They have to stop and look at their own situation.

Two documents.

I need to know how they actually sell, and how they actually buy, because I do not yet know which of the two those sessions are for. And nobody can answer that from an empty page. Ask anyone to describe how their company sells and you get a blank stare, or the diagram from the induction pack.

So we do not ask. We send them somebody else's process and ask them to correct it.

Ten stages, from the lead arriving to the year after signature, taken from a completely different industry on purpose: hospital scanning equipment, and the hospital groups buying it. Cross out what does not happen here. Change the job titles where ours are wrong. Write in the margin where yours is different. Nothing needs to be tidy.

Writing your own process from a blank page is hard. Correcting someone else's is easy.

Eight of the ten stages are on white. Two are printed black, because that is where the deal is really decided. On the selling side they are putting your own offer together inside your own company, which everybody calls admin, and the moment a customer puts a cheaper number on the table. On the buying side they are writing the specification, and comparing offers that were never built the same way.

The page does not stop when the meeting does.

The last part of it is what happens next. Seven things I have to do afterwards, each with the date it has to be done by. And four things that are still not decided, each with the name of the person who decides it, so nothing sits there waiting for nobody.

Then all of it goes into Alex's record of that company, the same day, with a note of where each piece came from.

Today that record is eight lines. After the meeting it also has the reason they called, her own words on what would count as this working, the name of somebody who negotiates there, and two processes with their own corrections written on them.

So the next time I sit down with them, I am not starting from what I remember. And the next new client starts from a page that has already been used once.

Getting ready is not a document you write the night before. It is something you build once and use every time.

Build yours this week. Write the three or four things you have to walk out holding. A name. A date. A number. A sentence in their words.

Cut the time up and decide who is talking in each part. Decide what you send before, and what you do after, with a date on each one.

Put all of it on one page. Then use that page again next month, and the month after, and change it only where it let you down.

The autumn lightning lesson series opens in September. Four sessions, and one registration covers all four: 10 and 24 September, 8 and 22 October, Thursdays at 18:30 Rome time.

https://maven.com/lls/e1658a

What do you have to walk out of your next first meeting actually holding?

Just hit reply and tell me. I read and answer every one.

#Negotiation #NegotiationSkills #NegoAI #AI #AIAgents #AugmentedNegotiator