About ThePreparedNegotiator
ThePreparedNegotiator was founded to fill a hole for negotiations and strategy skills development in the procurement community. While the sales side at the negotiations table has been surrounded and supported by a highly mature ecosystem of expert-led sales courses, negotiations seminars, and even formal certificate programs, the procurement side has largely had to limp by with generic third-party negotiations training that contains equal parts fluff, theory, and thinly veiled sales-side techniques.
Alternatively, sourcing and procurement orgs could engage a big-name consulting company to deliver a six-figure training engagement that barely moves the needles.
Or, as an individual student, you could take every negotiation and strategy course you could find, read dozens of (highly repetitive) books, and suffer through every rando on YouTube who thinks they’re an expert because they got a good deal on a car once.
The good news? TPN has done all of those things so you don’t have to. We’ve condensed every truly best “best practice” we’ve encountered into a densely packed no-bull training experience. We know what works, and what doesn’t, because we’ve been applying these processes and techniques for three decades over the full spectrum of negotiations from cooperative to adversarial, and ranging from tiny purchases to billion-dollar deals.
About Our Chief Instructor
Our Chief Instructor, Lance Westerlund, is a highly experienced negotiations practitioner and strategic sourcing expert. He has over thirty years of experience at the negotiations table. He holds a Master’s in Business Administration from UCLA and is both a Certified Purchasing Manager (C.P.M.) and a Project Management Professional (PMP).
Upon graduating from the United States Naval Academy with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in History, Lance served five years in the US Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer with a nuclear engineering specialty. Since joining the private sector, Lance has worked as a strategic sourcing professional, category manager, global procurement director, management consultant, and a corporate trainer across a wide range of sectors and industries including Aerospace and Defense, Capital Equipment, Bio-Technology, Footwear and Apparel, Consulting, Banking and Insurance, and Government. He’s led some of the nation’s largest outsourcing deals, was a founding director of Gartner Consulting’s Strategic Sourcing practice, was Global Procurement Director at Nike, and has been both CPO and COO of a $50M dollar start-up. And despite all of that, he’s an engaging presenter who’s very entertaining and pretty dang funny.
He’s lost count of how many classes he’s taught and students he’s trained, but he’s provided training to many Fortune 100 teams, across four continents with many encore performances.