Negotiation Training for Teams
Most team communication problems are not skill problems spread evenly across the group. They are usually a handful of recurring situations: the account manager who concedes too early, the technical lead whose accurate answers end conversations instead of opening them, the two departments that negotiate against each other harder than they negotiate with customers. Training a team works when it works on those actual situations.
Two formats for teams
| Format | Structure | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Open course seats | 3 consecutive days in St. Louis, 8 seats per session, $3,000 per person all inclusive | Sending one or two key people at a time; they return with techniques and a plan they execute the following week |
| The Corporate Program | 5 sessions delivered in your building, scoped on one call | Training a whole team on the same vocabulary at once, using the negotiations your company is actually inside |
Both follow the same Interest-Based Communication curriculum: identifying the interests beneath stated positions, mirroring under pressure, steelmanning the other side's argument, asking how instead of why, and structuring stories so people want to hear the idea. The difference is scale and setting.
Why in-house training changes the math
When one person takes a course, they come back speaking a language nobody else in the building speaks. When a team trains together, the vocabulary becomes shared infrastructure: someone can say "what's their interest here?" in a Tuesday meeting and everyone knows what to do next. That shared vocabulary is the compounding return on team training, and it is why the Corporate Program is delivered to intact teams rather than mixed public audiences.
Who teaches it
Vance Crowe was the Director of Millennial Engagement at Monsanto, where he engaged the company's fiercest critics face to face during the GMO controversies. Before that he was a communications strategist at the World Bank Group and a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. He holds a Master's in Cross-Cultural Negotiations from Seton Hall's School of Diplomacy, serves on the Board of Directors of FCS Financial, a seven-billion-dollar agricultural lending cooperative, and has spoken to more than 300,000 people across more than 200 keynotes. He created the Interest-Based Communication methodology, codified into a workbook and structured course materials; facilitator Heath Hunter also delivers the course.
What participants say
“I don't think I've learned more in a three-day period than I have throughout the course of a year.”
Charlie Gildehaus, Purdue University
“That interest-based communications course, which was phenomenal — we had a lot of people that attended the conference go ask about it.”
Shay Foulk, AgView Solutions
Upcoming St. Louis sessions
October 12 to 14, 2026 · November 9 to 11, 2026 · January 25 to 27, 2027 · March 22 to 24, 2027. Eight seats per session. Register at the course page below.
Common questions
- How many people can the Corporate Program train?
- The program is scoped on a single call based on your team's size and the situations you negotiate. Five sessions are delivered in your building.
- What does the Corporate Program cost?
- Pricing is scoped on the call, since team size and session design vary. The open course is a fixed $3,000 per seat if you prefer to start with one or two people.
- Can we preview the material before committing a team?
- Yes. Many organizations book a keynote or send one person to the open course first, then bring the Corporate Program in-house once they have seen the method.