Marina Akchurina, Author at Aksconsult

Cross-Functional Negotiation: Why Training Should Go Beyond Sales

Marina Akchurina — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:12:58 +0000

Sales teams are the obvious candidates for negotiation training because their negotiations are visible and the results are relatively easy to measure. But negotiation happens throughout an organization, often without being recognized as such. Project managers, operations leads, HR managers, and other professionals regularly negotiate over resources, deadlines, scope, priorities, and exceptions, and when those conversations become difficult, the problem is often seen as poor communication rather than a lack of negotiation skills.

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The Founder’s Negotiation Trap: When Personal Identity Drives Business Decisions

Marina Akchurina — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:22:36 +0000

Most founders explain a bad negotiation by pointing to the market, the investor, or a lack of leverage. Often the real problem is something else: the negotiation has stopped being about the business and started feeling like a judgment of the founder. Once that happens, decisions are no longer driven by what the deal requires, but by what the founder needs to prove to themselves.

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When Mediation Is the Right Tool for a Commercial Dispute, and When It Isn’t

Marina Akchurina — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:52:47 +0000

Standard advice tells every in-house team to try mediation before anything else. That advice holds often enough to become reflexive, and reflexive advice is exactly where good judgment stops. Certain disputes are structurally unsuited to mediation, whatever a step clause requires, or whatever the applicable procedural rule requires. Recognizing which ones early saves the one advantage mediation actually offers: timing.

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Renegotiating an Existing Contract Doesn’t Damage Trust (Being Unprepared for It Does)

Marina Akchurina — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:54:51 +0000

Most executives approach renegotiating an existing contract with caution, softening the request and ready to retreat at the first sign of pushback. That instinct gets the risk backwards. What the other side is actually reading is not the request itself, but whether the business making it still looks reliable under pressure. Preparation is what answers that question.

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Why Negotiation Training Doesn’t Stick (And What L&D Leaders Are Beginning to Change)

Marina Akchurina — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:04:27 +0000

Most negotiation training builds competence: vocabulary, frameworks, a temporary lift in confidence. Far fewer programs change how a participant relates to the negotiation itself, especially when conflict is involved. That shift, not better case studies or longer follow-up, is the real test of whether training actually worked.

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When the Other Side Stops Replying: Reading Silence in a Negotiation

Marina Akchurina — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:39:13 +0000

When a counterparty stops responding in a negotiation, most people interpret it as bad news. It rarely is that simple. Silence in a business negotiation carries information, but the information depends entirely on what kind of silence it is. Reading it correctly, rather than reacting to it, is what separates a stalled negotiation from one that simply slowed down.

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The Cost of Avoiding a Difficult Conversation in Business

Marina Akchurina — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:02:15 +0000

Most managers and business owners who avoid a difficult conversation believe they are protecting the relationship. The evidence points in the other direction. Postponed conversations do not preserve the status quo. They accumulate dysfunction along a predictable curve, and by the time the conversation finally happens, the options available have narrowed considerably.

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How to Choose a Mediator for a Commercial Dispute: What Actually Matters

Marina Akchurina — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:13:11 +0000

When in-house counsel select a mediator for a commercial dispute, the default approach is to check credentials, confirm neutrality, and move on. This misses the question that determines outcome: does this mediator have the commercial experience and substantive depth to do more than manage dialogue, and can they manage decision-makers who are not in the room?

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How Counterparts Test You in the First Twenty Minutes

Marina Akchurina — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:07:00 +0000

The first twenty minutes of a commercial negotiation are not relationship-building. They are diagnostic. Experienced negotiators use routine opening moves to test your preparation, urgency, alternatives, and process awareness. Most people miss this entirely. By the time the parties start discussing substance, the information asymmetry is already in place.

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Negotiating from a Weaker Position: Recurring Mistakes in Asymmetric Commercial Negotiations

Marina Akchurina — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:54:15 +0000

When the other side holds most of the formal power, the weaker party's outcome is determined less by that asymmetry than by a small number of recurring, self-inflicted mistakes. Stronger counterparties rarely need to win the negotiation. They need the weaker side to lose ground unnecessarily, and most of the time it does.

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