After working for a large training organization for seven years, you have spent the past couple of years developing your own practice. You have steady training work with a few corporate clients and teach as an adjunct lecturer at a community college. Most of your work, though, is in instructional design: putting together training packages, curriculum and material which other trainers, or companies' in-house organizational development people, can use on their own. In particular, you are beginning to gain a reputation as a designer of online courses. Your particular niche is developing 'fire and forget' courses, in which the content is all online and automated, and the student interacts only with their computer screen and the software, and not with a human instructor. You either upload the course onto the client's own server, or host it on your own, as the client wishes. Either way - course participants access the course online, on their own time and at their own convenience, log on, and study. Most established training organizations are still wary of automated online training. Instead, they prefer to offer online courses conducted, monitored and facilitated by the organization's trainers, who interact with the course's participants online. One reason that they prefer this method is that it allows them to sell not only course design services but also trainers' hours. A couple of days ago, you were contacted by someone from AuraCall, a company dealing in mobile telecommunications. They asked you if you would be interested, in principle, in designing a 40 hour online course on negotiation skills for their employees. You said you would be happy to hear more details, and were promised that the manager of the relevant department - a regional customer service center - would be in contact with you by email within a few days. This is right up your alley. You have conducted many workshops on negotiation for corporate clients, and figuring out the best way to teach that in a fully automated online course sounds like an interesting challenge. In addition, you have taught and designed workshops on several related topics that might interest the client, such as interpersonal communication, telephone communication and conflict management. All of the design work would be conducted online, so there would be none of the costs and hassle that go with travel.

There are two ways to design this type of online course. The first involves teaching general concepts only, using off-the-shelf material to produce a generic course on negotiation. You don't like to work this way, preferring the second design process: investing time learning about the customer's needs and about the specific contexts and situations in which their staff need to improve their negotiation skills, and custom- designing the course for the client organization. You ordinarily aim to receive about $8-9,000 for designing courses of this type and scale. You know that this price puts you towards the high end, price-wise, of designers on the market - and this is just fine by you. You know that other designers ask for prices in the $6-7,000 range for generic courses of this scale, and in the $7-8,000 range for custom-designed courses such as you produce. From your experience, you know that corporate clients sometimes attempt to solve urgent problems through training courses such as this one. If the AuraCall manager sounds under pressure and asks for a rush job, you might try to ask for more money. Once, you were paid $12,000 to put a training course together in a couple of weeks! If AuraCall offers you a low price, you might counter by offering them a generic course and not one tailored to their specific needs - however, you would prefer not to do that, as you are building your reputation around custom-designed courses. At any rate, you will not accept less than $7,000. You could earn this much by agreeing to teach two online courses the dean of your community college has been pushing you to teach this coming semester. You figure that teaching these two courses would entail putting in roughly the same amount of work-hours as the course design project - and with far less pressure. As you don't want an overly hectic schedule, you figure you will choose to do the course-design project, or teach the classes - but not both. The dean has asked you for your final answer by Friday night at 10:00 pm CT so you need to wrap your negotiation with AuraCall up, one way or another, by then. You look forward to receiving the email from the call center manager, so you can move forward in your deliberations and decisionmaking.

2. What are your TRIP goals for this negotiation? (tip - you should be listing at least 4 goals here)
3. What is your BATNA in this negotiation?
4. What is your resistance point in this negotiation?
5. What is your aspiration point in this negotiation?