The Expert Negotiator’s New Secret Weapon

We just launched a new feature at Ozeki that gives negotiators a serious edge: the DealMap.  The new feature turns anyone into a super negotiator by allowing them to see a quantitative analysis of how any particular item to be negotiated over stacks up in terms of deal risk and an analysis of the material changes.  

What Makes a Great Negotiator?

In my experience, top negotiators do two things exceptionally well:

1. They know what is important to them or their clients.
2. They listen actively to the counterparty.

Knowing your priorities lets you focus energy on high-impact issues. Listening helps you uncover the other side’s priorities—so you can trade low-value concessions for high-value wins.

Effective Negotiations Strategies

But here’s the problem: most organizations don’t systematically track what matters in negotiating. Mapping and ranking deal-points is complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Knowing what’s important to you starts with knowing what your universe of deal-points is.  A deal-point is anything a party would want included in (or excluded from) an agreement. A deal-point can be pricing, shelf space, promotions, discounts, payment terms, or indemnification, literally anything you can give or take.  An expansive universe of deal-points can give you thousands of options to negotiate over, allowing you the flexibility to close any deal.  From there, you need to spend the time to figure out a ranking which deal-points are meaningful and which are not. However, that’s not a trivial task. When I ran legal at Cloudflare and Bitmovin, completing the same sort of analysis would cost between $15k and $30k per year.  This process is so onerous that most organizations don’t do it at all, leaving their negotiators to just “wing it” in their dealmaking.

Contract Data Analysis for Future Dealmaking

Have a look at the image below of the DealMap. It graphically represents four deal-points related to a vendor’s indemnification obligations in this agreement. Below is a detailed analysis of one permutation of the deal-point. The x-axis plots the 4 permutations of the deal-point’s favor ability to the vendor as measured by their template contract.  

Here’s how we created the DealMap: Ozeki’s AI analyzed 5 contracts automatically in just minutes.  The software then created a comprehensive negotiation strategy based on desirable trades.It parsed contracts into their component deal-points, derived an “importance weight” for each one, and created a summary for each deal-point explaining the reasoning for the importance weight.  The weight signifies how a new or negotiated deal-point aligns with or varies from the template in terms of meaning and contractual risk. Importance weight was derived by applying out proprietaryClauseVision technology to the deal-point and templated deal-point.  While the x-axis of the DealMap represents deal risk, the y-axis can be used to represent reward.  This can be in terms of ranges of deal value and creates a 4 quadrant graph of risk and reward. The DealMap will present a brand-new method for negotiations, allowing the negotiator to vectoring deal outcomes into the high-value, low risk quadrant of the DealMap.  Oh, and since Ozeki is designed to eliminate hallucination risk, you can enjoy the profound benefits of our latest breakthroughs in AI without the risks.

We’re now layering in richer signals like clause frequency across deals, pricing impact, and expert-defined priorities to make the favorability scores even smarter.

I can’t help you to be a better listener, but trust me, we’re working on it.