business negotiation | negotiation skills | persuasion techniques | SPIN | objection handling | cross cultural | MBTI
What You Will Learn:
- Run a negotiation through SPIN, uncovering the situation, problem, implication and payoff instead of pitching
- Handle objections with LAER and Feel-Felt-Found rather than arguing, and close with a technique that fits the moment
- Build the argument before the meeting: evidence, logic, and the counter-argument the other side will actually use
- Catch anchoring and confirmation bias in your own preparation, which is where most negotiations are lost
- Write messages that get answered — job offers, proposals, follow-ups to people who have gone quiet
- Adjust your approach across cultures: high and low context, power distance, consensus against authority, and time
- Read the person across the table through DISC, PAEI and Big Five, and change your style rather than repeating yours
- Keep going with someone who has stopped replying, and know at which message it is time to stop
- Learn alongside Mike’s 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author’s experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
The No-Fluff Reality of Modern Deal-Making
Let’s be real for a second: most “negotiation” training out there feels like it was ripped straight out of a 1980s boiler room. It’s all about the “hard close” and “crushing the competition.” As someone who has spent a decade in the tech trenches, from mid-sized startups to enterprise-level SaaS, I can tell you that those tactics don’t just fail—they burn bridges. This is why I was genuinely surprised by Business Negotiation: Prepare, Persuade and Agree. Instead of teaching you how to be a shark, it teaches you how to be a psychologist and a strategist.
The core philosophy here isn’t about pitching your product until the other side gives up; it’s about architecting a conversation where the “yes” becomes the only logical conclusion. Mike’s background at companies like Preply and Wargaming shines through because the advice isn’t academic—it’s battle-tested. You aren’t just getting job-ready skills; you’re getting a mental framework for every high-stakes interaction you’ll ever have. It feels less like a lecture and more like a series of hands-on labs for your communication style, pushing you to move from beginner to advanced levels of influence.
Prerequisites
The beauty of this course is the low barrier to entry, though it definitely rewards those with some skin in the game. You don’t need an MBA or a background in sales. However, it helps immensely if you have at least one or two real-world projects under your belt where you’ve felt the sting of a deal falling through or a stakeholder going cold. If you’ve ever had a “perfect” proposal ignored, you’re ready for this.
Skills & Tools
This isn’t a course where you just watch videos and get a badge. It’s a deep dive into industry-standard tools for human interaction. You’ll master SPIN as a diagnostic tool, which completely changed how I handle discovery calls. Instead of showing off features, you’re uncovering the “Implication” of their problems.
The course also dives deep into LAER (Listen, Acknowledge, Explore, Respond), which is essentially certification prep for anyone who has to handle hostile objections without losing their cool. You’ll also get a crash course in psychometric profiling using DISC, PAEI, and the Big Five. Learning to read the person across the table—and more importantly, knowing how to pivot your own style to match theirs—is a superpower that separates the top 1% of performers from the rest.
Career Benefits & Job Roles
If you’re looking for career growth, this is the missing piece of the puzzle. We often focus so much on our technical stack that we forget that our salary, our project budgets, and our deadlines are all negotiated. This course is a goldmine for:
- Account Executives & Sales Leads: Who need to move beyond “selling” and start “consulting.”
- Product Managers: Who are constantly negotiating scope with engineering and features with stakeholders.
- Engineering Managers: Who need to “sell” their roadmap to leadership and handle cross-functional friction.
- Freelancers & Consultants: Who want to stop being treated as a commodity and start being viewed as a partner.
The job-ready skills you gain here are applicable the very next morning after you finish a module.
Pros
- The Psychology of the Follow-Up: One of the most practical sections is on writing messages that actually get answered. We’ve all had prospects go “ghost,” and Mike provides a specific cadence for when to keep pushing and, crucially, when to walk away with your dignity intact.
- Cross-Cultural Nuance: In our globalized tech economy, you’re rarely negotiating with someone from your own backyard. The breakdown of high-context vs. low-context cultures and power distances is worth the price of admission alone. It prevents those accidental “cultural “landmines” that kill international deals.
- Bias Detection: Most of us lose negotiations before they even start because of anchoring or confirmation bias. The course forces you to look at your own preparation process and identify where your ego is leading you into a trap.
- Massive Social Proof: Joining a community of 1.6 million students creates a sense of scale. The insights shared in the forums and the collective experience of the cohort add a layer of real-world project context you won’t find in smaller, siloed courses.
Cons
If I have one gripe, it’s that the section on personality profiling (DISC/Big Five) can feel a bit like drinking from a firehose. There is a lot of psychological theory packed into a short window, and it can be a bit overwhelming if you’re just looking for “quick tips.” You’ll likely need to watch those modules twice to truly bake them into your industry-standard tools kit, but the effort pays off if you’re committed to career growth.