In this episode of The Confident Negotiator Podcast, we're joined by Andreas Buergi, a Switzerland-based seasoned RED BEAR international faculty member with a wealth of experience in coaching and training over 30,000 sales and business professionals across more than 30 countries. Andreas dives deep into the RED BEAR Negotiation Model, a powerful framework that has transformed how negotiators approach complex deals, helping them achieve remarkable results. Whether you're a seasoned negotiator or just starting, this conversation offers valuable insights into leveraging tension to unlock creative solutions and drive successful outcomes.
Andreas shares real-world examples from his extensive experience, including how the RED BEAR approach helped save a multi-million-dollar deal and turned a contentious relationship into a strategic partnership. He also discusses the importance of managing conflict effectively, using "Stage Two Questions" to uncover true motives, and the critical role of cross-cultural understanding in global negotiations. This episode is packed with practical advice and strategies that can elevate your negotiation skills to the next level.
Transcription of the Video:
Rob Cox: Hello everyone and welcome to The Confident Negotiator Podcast. I'm Rob Cox, and with me today is RED BEAR international faculty member, Andreas Buergi. Andreas, thank you so much for joining us today.
Andreas Buergi: Well, Rob, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
Rob Cox: Excellent. It's a pleasure to have you on. Andreas, you have advised, coached and trained over 30,000 sales and business professionals in over 30 countries around the world. You've been training negotiators in different languages for RED BEAR all over the world for many years now. I know everyone's excited to hear from you today, so let's dive right in. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you help RED BEAR customers become world-class negotiators.
Andreas Buergi: Alrighty. Well, I'm half British and half Swiss. I'm based here in Switzerland, close to Zurich actually here. I'm a former partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers and for many, many years I was teaching negotiation, but when I met RED BEAR, when I started working with RED BEAR, that really changed the game for me because some of the models that we teach here are quite unique. They're quite special, and so today I normally coach and train and work with CEOs of large corporations, I work with global sales directors on ways to improve their sales revenue, but also on how to make major business transformation projects work. Even there I found that these RED BEAR models really work well. It's that RED BEAR triangle we'll be talking about in a moment, but also how to change the way people think, how they actually develop decisions and strategies that I found fascinating and that's why I'm very happy to be a RED BEAR instructor.
I usually help RED BEAR customers, and especially the participants in the classes I teach, to become world-class negotiators, by teaching them advanced psychological negotiation techniques with a focus on directly applying these techniques to the participant's real-life negotiation challenges. What I like about this, especially at RED BEAR now, is we work with real-life situations, so that increases the return on investment of the participants dramatically. I mean, we at RED BEAR have on average an ROI of 50-to-one, so for every dollar a company spends with RED BEAR on our training and coaching programs, they make at least $50 in additional savings or additional sales revenue, which is quite unique in the industry.
Rob Cox: Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you for sharing that ROI number with us, Andreas. Like you said, you've been doing this for many years at RED BEAR now you receive a lot of feedback in your workshops. You hear from negotiators who are early on in their careers and more seasoned professionals as well. What feedback about our workshops really stands out to you?
Andreas Buergi: Well, there's maybe two or three things. I think even the highly seasoned and experienced negotiators that come to these classes, whether they're category managers in procurement like large corporations, or heads of sales, they found that the highly tailored mode in which we develop case studies and situations and exercises for them really works well for them. It's just much more relevant if we're working on real life cases, real life challenges, than working with the more stale academic case studies. So that really stands out. And part participants always tell me that they really appreciate the fact that our trainings are hands-on, they're pragmatic and practical. So about 85% of the RED BEAR trainings and seminars, the time we spend there are spent preparing for engaging in or debriefing a negotiation case, exercise or simulation. It's very application focused and as a result, again, the ROI and the perceived relevance are much higher. So for newbies and for seasoned negotiators, this very practical hands-on approach, I think is what makes RED BEAR stand out.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Thank you for sharing the feedback on the customized training. Again, 85% of the workshops being spent either preparing for or engaging in a negotiation or debriefing on one and then of course ROI that our customers see from that. That's fantastic. You talked a little bit about the RED BEAR negotiation model. I know you're very excited to talk about this. I'm excited to hear you talk about it. RED BEAR's negotiation model has made quite an impact on you. Tell us about the negotiation model, how it has impacted you and the impact you see it make on RED BEAR workshop attendees.
Andreas Buergi: Yeah, well interestingly, I learned this model about 30 years ago, 35 years even, from my mentor, but we didn't have a model. He just showed me how to do this stuff and I was very excited when I actually saw this then at RED BEAR. This triangle model, what some people call the dialectic principle, the RED BEAR way of using it is very, very powerful. Most people that I meet in the negotiation classes I teach, stay on a continuum between what I would call the collaborative dimension, which is focused on relationship management and the competitive dimension, which is more price-centric, trying to protect your self-interest. And it's somewhere along that continuum between win-lose and win-win that most people stay, and I have found if you always do the same thing the same way, you always get the same results, which is quite boring over time.
And what I've found is a lot of people in negotiations, they stay in that default mode of negotiation where they don't really have to think very much. And so what RED BEAR does differently here is that they disrupt or interrupt that default, habitual way of thinking by adding additional dimension, where instead of just looking at, "How can I divide up a finite pie? How much do you get? How much do I get? Win-win or win-lose?," RED BEAR says, "Look, if we add in some cognitive tension here where we say, 'Why don't we try to be collaborative and competitive at the same time,'" what happens is, for most people their brain goes, tilt, tilt, tilt, "I could do this or that. But both together is hard," and it creates cognitive tension. Now this cognitive tension or this conflict is actually the key to creativity, which leads us up to the top of the triangle. Instead of staying down at the bottom of the continuum, this takes us up to the dimension that we call the creative dimension or the breakthrough dimension.
Now, for me, 35 years ago when I learned this, my mentor at the time took me by the hand and said, "You've got way too many academic degrees, but let me show you how this works." I don't think he had an academic degree, but he had street smarts. And so he said, "Look, instead of doing this dividing up of the finite pie, what you should do is bake a bigger, better cake." And you know what? I had a budget there. Every year they would set a budget for me, revenue budget, sales budget, and I was able to 10X that really fast, way before people started talking about 10X.
Rob Cox: Wow, that's excellent. So you 10-Xed your goal and you learned how to expand the value of the pie using the RED BEAR Negotiation Model. Got the collaborative and competitive aspects. That's fantastic. It's a great story about how it affected you personally. Are there any stories that you have about how you've seen the negotiation model affect RED BEAR customers?
Andreas Buergi: Well, it's maybe not 10X, but it's quite impressive. One company I was asked to work with, they were in a bit of a tizz. Well, it was a bit of a fight with one of their major end customers. It was in a place where, really, they were fighting so hard and were so frustrated with each other, they wanted to end the relationship and end the negotiation. This deal that they were negotiating about was worth several hundred million dollars. I said, "Look, you can't just walk away from this." And the people I was coaching there said, "Absolutely, we can. We'll do..." I said, "You can't do this. You can't replace this piece of business fast enough. Why don't we have a workshop, just a four-hour workshop? Just give me the time of day for four hours. Let's sit down together. We'll use this RED BEAR approach and see whether this cognitive tension actually helps us to refocus and redirect the relationship."
A little bit grudgingly, they sat down with me, the key decision makers from both sides, from both parties, and I can tell you I took them way out of their comfort zone. It was tough, but they didn't like me. They had a bit of a fight. It got quite loud. But over time, during those four hours, they got to a place where they had sort of got it off their chest and they started being more constructive and they co-developed and jointly designed a way forward and very specific steps and roles and responsibilities to a place where they didn't need me anymore. Basically, they are now in a strategic partnership together and feedback from one of the participants was interesting. He said that this was probably the best business meeting he had ever been in. So four hours of negotiation coaching saved several hundred million dollars worth of business. I found that quite impressive.
Rob Cox: Wow. So you took them from about to end their relationship all the way over to being strategic partners today. That's fantastic. Absolutely excellent.
Andreas Buergi: That's the power of the RED BEAR Triangle. A lot of people, when they look at the triangle, they go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen that before," but they haven't seen it yet.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Let's talk about Stage Two Questions. What are Stage Two Questions and how do they help people negotiate?
Andreas Buergi: Well, most people, they usually go blank when we talk about Stage Two Questions. "What are you talking about?" What I've found is most people that I engage with at the CEO level or at very senior levels in the organization, but also professional procurement specialists, they don't have an appetite or time for the game of 20 questions that many salespeople want them to go through. So these stage two questions are quite unique, where in three or four questions, you get to a very profound, a very deep conversation with your counterpart, the people you're negotiating with, to a point where you can elicit and find out their true motives, their fundamental needs, and also their priorities.
Now, that sounds basic, but the fun thing that happens is invariably when we have this conversation, I find that the people we do this with, the stage two questions, it changes their perspective as well. So if I'm a seller and I'm negotiating with a professional buyer, a procurement specialist, after three or four questions, what happens with these stage two questions, is that they start gaining a new perspective on their situation, their reality, they understand themselves and their business better, which especially in procurement, I find important because sometimes people in procurement are tasked to purchase things that they don't fully and completely understand and so this puts them into a better place, not just with us in the conversation, but also internally. And these stage two questions help them to understand themselves better, but it also helps them to make much better decisions. So I have found that is one of the most powerful techniques. If you combine the RED BEAR triangle and these Stage Two Questions, it really helps to change the dynamics of the negotiation dramatically.
Rob Cox: Excellent. So finding true motives and needs and making better decisions through those Stage Two Questions. And then you've also compared that with engaging in that tension and the RED BEAR Model, so excellent, excellent. Now, you're located in Switzerland. Are there any stereotypes that Americans or anyone else get wrong when they're negotiating with Europeans or vice versa?
Andreas Buergi: Americans? Okay. Is there such a thing as "The American." I mean, are we talking about a Texan or somebody from California, a New Yorker or a Latina from Miami? I think we, in Europe, we often have this stereotype about the American, but actually I think that doesn't really exist. So we need to be careful in negotiations that we don't fall into this trap of stereotyping too much. Having said all that, I find that very often when I talk to European clients of mine, they find that Americans are sometimes too quick in trying to cut to the chase. They maybe are too task-oriented and very focused on getting results, sometimes not spending enough time building relationships, building trust, building mutual respect and also commitment.
So they might be able to cut to the chase and cut a deal, but then the commitment level to that deal might be very low. And so what I've found is a piece of advice to Americans would be, if you're negotiating with people from Europe or Latin America, Africa or Asia, it's a good idea to spend a little bit more time upfront just building that level of relationship and respect and trust before you then go into the task of negotiating a deal.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Well, Andreas, you've been very generous with your time. You've talked about a lot of the things that RED BEAR attendees can learn in our workshops: the RED BEAR Negotiation Model, Stage Two Questions, what are they and how do you use them to get a bigger piece of the pie, and then a little bit about Cross-Cultural Negotiation there too. So I know that all three are passionate topics for you, so thank you much.
Andreas Buergi: Yeah, you bet.
Rob Cox: Before I let you go, is there anything else that you'd like to say before we wrap up?
Andreas Buergi: Well, there's that aha moment that I'd like to share with you. An aha moment that I had when I saw this RED BEAR triangle model, but also the aha moment a lot of participants in our classes, in our seminars and workshops, seem to have, and they share this as the most important insight they take away, which is that cognitive tension is good. And most people shy away from conflict or tension. They might get too nice, especially if they're a procurement specialist up against a single source, or they might get too tough and aggressive, and what the RED BEAR model shares and shows is how to manage and leverage tension and conflict in a way that is assertive and that leads to a real breakthrough and that breakthrough, that aha moment where suddenly you go, "Oh, that's something I didn't see coming," I think that's the most powerful thing about these programs.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Well, Andreas, thank you again very much for your time. This has been The Confident Negotiator podcast. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.
Andreas Buergi: Thank you.
