FREEZE!

Rishi Sunak threw quite a curveball last week when he called a General Election for July 4th. I don’t believe many people saw that coming (I know I didn’t).

This is particularly salient to anyone who is in the process of selling anything to the public sector in the UK. Projects that are in the process of being sourced or negotiated may very well be put on hold as government ministries and public sector bodies enter into the pre-election period, aka “Purdah” or “Heightened Sensitivity”. Looking at the longer term, elections have a way of shaking up public sector policies and priorities regardless of who wins.

So it’s quite possible that large swathes of your commercial teams came into work on May 23rd to find themselves in limbo. Public sector procurement is, to a large extent, going to be on hold until after the election. If you can’t book a last minute holiday, what do you do?

They say you should never ask a barber if you need a haircut and it’s just as true to say that a negotiation specialist would never tell you it’s a bad time to improve your commercial negotiation strategies, processes and capabilities but this really is a great time to invest in developing negotiation capabilities and strategies in your teams. Improve their capabilities with training or plan workshops to consider the strategic implications of likely changes that a new government (of any political persuasion) might implement and how you can prepare for them.

If you have commercial teams sitting on the bench for the next six weeks, the opportunity cost of getting them world class capability development is as low as it can possibly get, making the return on your investment even higher than the already very high return on investment that world class negotiation development delivers.

If you’re interested in learning more, drop me a note. I have school age kids, so there will be no last minute getaways to the sun for me!