Industry
Independent Creative Agency
How a creative agency stopped letting negotiations happen to them
Client:
Independent, full-service creative advertising agency
Size:
50+ people
Engagement:
Foundational negotiation training with the leadership team
The Situation
This creative agency competes in one of the least forgiving corners of B2B: mid-market creative services, where clients arrive with a budget already set, a laundry list already written, and the belief that another agency will say yes tomorrow.
The leadership team came into the session negotiating well by instinct, but not by design. More telling was how differently the two founders felt about the whole activity.
"We've pitched and won. We've done all this work and my fear is that it comes down to, we picked the other agency, because you guys didn't agree to a bullet point or something."
- Co-Founder 1
"To me, a good contract is future me saving me from today. And the worst thing is a contract that’s badly negotiated and has scope creep. It can kill an account and the relationship."
- Co-Founder 2
Neither founder had a process that resolved the tension, so every negotiation was improvised, and every improvisation ran back through the two of them.
What Aligned did
Aligned ran the leadership team through three foundational concepts: the frameworks and mindsets underneath any negotiation, how to use concessions sustainably, and how to take the counterparty's perspective rather than guess at it.
Three things landed hardest:
Negotiation types. Bargaining, trading, creating, partnering, and the discipline of assessing each deal on its own rather than treating a client as one fixed category. The team immediately started re-sorting its own book of business, and found they'd been playing several relationships in the wrong mode.
The communication phase. Aligned's argument that the phase before the proposal is where the deal is actually won or lost was, for the creative agency, the single biggest reframe. Explore the trade first then demand it with specificity once the table is set. The creative agency had been skipping straight to the paperwork.
Zones and ranking. For every term — price, revisions, payment terms, contract length, scope — define the goal, the range the team is pre-authorized to move within, the range that requires justification, and the point where you walk. Then rank the terms against each other so the trades are decided in advance instead of in the room.
What changed
"Aligned’s negotiation training was totally practical for us. The material is tactical. There are things we could action in the next week or two that would change how we negotiate."
- Co-Founder 1
The zones exercise solved a problem the founders hadn't quite named: everything ran through them. With terms mapped and ranked, the account leads can negotiate inside a defined perimeter without a phone call.
As Co-Founder 1 put it during the session, the work could now be handled while a founder was on vacation — because the scope, the ranking, and the trade-offs are written down rather than held in two people's heads.
It also gave the two founders a shared language. Where Co-Founder 1’s instinct is to get over the line and Co-Founders 2;s is to protect the work, a ranked list of terms turns a difference in temperament into a decision rule.
Most of all, the team stopped treating "non-negotiable" as a fact about the world.
It's an opening position — and there is almost always another lever.
"We used to just send the MSA over and see what redlines came back. There was no conversation before that. Now we go in knowing what we want, what we'll trade for it, and where we stop. The negotiation doesn't just happen to us anymore."
- Co-Founder 1
