Scoping call · for category managers, buyers & the directors they report to

Your team has already been to negotiation training.
They still fold in the room that matters.

That isn’t a knowledge problem, and another course won’t touch it. Book a 30-minute scoping call with Ruth Shlossman and bring one live deal: a renewal, a sole-source price demand, an increase you’re expected to absorb. You’ll leave with:

✓Where that deal is most likely leaking money, and roughly how much
✓Which of the four games your team keeps losing
✓A straight recommendation — including “not us,” if that’s the answer
✓What it would cost. One number, not a range

Nothing is quoted until eight questions are answered. That’s what the 30 minutes is for.

Book a scoping call →

Any engagement that follows is backed by the No Regret Guarantee™

30 minutes · free · no pitch · engagements start at $12,500, and we’ll tell you where you’d land

After 30 minutes, you’ll know

✓The agreement your team is most likely to regret
✓Which of the four games you’re currently losing
✓Why your best negotiators still lose avoidable deals
✓Whether the first move is a half-day Risk Reset or a full engagement
✓What that costs — one number, built line by line
✓Or that we’re the wrong people, and who to call instead

Trusted by teams at

Observation

The training worked.
The behaviour didn’t change.
That gap is the whole problem.

Negotiation is already the most-delivered training in procurement. Your team has had it, probably twice. They can recite BAM, should-cost and the walk-away. Then an engineer promises a supplier something before anyone asks, a vendor sets a Friday deadline, and every bit of it goes out of the room.

That’s not a capability gap. Nobody trained them for the other three games running in every deal, and nobody gave them the reps to hold a position while someone senior is undercutting it.

Enterprises spend millions teaching people how to negotiate.

Almost nobody teaches them how to see a negotiation.

Pattern · what your team was never trained to see

Every negotiation is four games,
played at once.

01 The Commercial Game

What’s actually on the table?

Price, terms, risk. The game your team’s training covered, and the only one most negotiators ever see.

Terrain

What losing three of the four games looks like by Tuesday.

We find this pattern inside strong procurement functions: the skills are there, the outcomes aren’t. The human game, the political game, the systems game — that’s the gap where deals go sideways.

If more than two of these read like last quarter, the problem isn’t skill. It’s sight.

[×]The executive bypass. A stakeholder goes around the team “just this once,” and the once becomes the norm.
[×]The Friday deadline. Vendors set the tempo, and your team inherits urgency it never created.
[×]The invisible win. Prevented disasters never hit the P&L, so the function is measured only on the savings line.
[×]The squeezed supplier. Short-term pressure degrading the exact capability you’ll need in the next crisis.
[×]The blame rotation. When a contract goes wrong, the team that flagged the risk is the team that wears it.

Exhibit D: The executive bypass, mappedthe most expensive line in your org chart

EVERY BYPASS IS A NEGOTIATION YOUR ENTERPRISE RUNS UNPREPARED. A MANDATE CAN’T CLOSE THAT ARC. A TEAM WORTH ROUTING THROUGH CAN.

Bring the bypass that’s happening in your function right now to the scoping call.

Doctrine

The old way ran on Commercial Myopia.
The Diplomat way runs on sight.

This is the shift the engagement installs — not a new script for your team to recite, but a different question at the top of every deal.

The old way	The Diplomat way
“What do they want?”	“What are they protecting?”
Negotiate the price	Negotiate the terrain
React to urgency	Diagnose urgency as a signal
Split the pie	Expand the pie
Win the meeting	Prevent the crisis the meeting was about
Procurement as cost center	Procurement as stewardship

The instrument · inside a full engagement

If it’s a fit, every engagement ends with this document, filled in.

The HIPPO Diplomatic Brief™: the preparation instrument every Procurement Diplomat completes before a major negotiation.

Your team completes it live, in the room, on a deal they are facing this quarter. Not a case study. Theirs.

Objectives. Stakeholders. The Four Games. Shadow Shark Watch. The Bigger Pie search. A named walk-away position.

And at the top of the page, the question that reorganizes everything beneath it: what regret is this deal capable of creating, and how do we prevent it?

Deal / counterparty

Logistics master agreement, renewal, FY27

1 · Objective, the enterprise interest we are protecting

Freight capability through two peak seasons; not “best price”

2 · Stakeholder map

Ops VP · CFO · vendor account lead · vendor’s regional director · plant managers ×3

3 · The Four Games

Commercial: rate + fuel clause · Human: account lead fears losing the logo · Political: their Q3 volume target · Systems: what this precedent makes normal

5 · Shadow Shark watch

Expect: false deadline (“expires Friday”) + artificial scarcity on capacity

6 · Bigger Pie search

Volume commitment ↔ rate lock + service tier upgrade

9 · Prevented Regret target

A 5-year rate we’d regret by month 7

Prepared · Before posture

Intervention · if we’re a fit

A brief look at what a full engagement includes.

The scoping call decides whether this is worth designing at all. If it is, each engagement is scoped to your team’s size and stakes — a single high-value renewal, or a full function rebuild. Every participant gets the on-demand course as pre-work, included, so day one starts with practice instead of catch-up.

For many teams, one prepared negotiation pays for the entire engagement.

It keeps three working instruments:

Artifact 01

Completed HIPPO Briefs™

One per participating team, each on a live deal — not a binder, a working document.

Artifact 02

Driver Mapping Canvas™

Customized to your industry and supplier base. Its center column is the one most teams never fill in: not what each stakeholder is asking for — what they’re protecting.

Artifact 03

Prevented Regret Debrief™

A post-negotiation process your team runs independently, forever. This is the mechanism that finally makes prevention visible to your CFO.

Also included, every engagement

A year inside Ruth’s tactics library.

27 videos, indexed by the moment your team is actually in — not a syllabus to work through. Plus six months of coaching access: email to Ruth on live deals, and monthly Zoom debriefs with the team.

When a counterpart turns rude or dismissive

A sole-source supplier applying pressure

Planning a negotiation you’re dreading

Building a real Plan B

27 videos total · 1 year of access · included, not upsold

Outcome · documented in participant debriefs

Prevented Regret, Documented.

Every bar below is one participant’s reported outcome after Castle Negotiations training — in their own written debrief, in their very next negotiation. Each one is a single deal, by a single person, in a single category — which is the comparison to hold against the fee.

$3.7M Automotive procurement lead · Michigan

In piece price across 7 rounds, sourced 1.5% above the target the team had set.

€800K VP Procurement · DexKo Global

Protected on a sole-source relocation where the supplier opened at double the price.

$600K Participant debrief · 2017 cohort

Saved in testing by identifying the issues and opening from a prepared position.

$500K+ Participant debrief · 2017 cohort

In contract spend, negotiated with confidence. “Suppliers take you more seriously after.”

€250K Category lead · AL-KO Vehicle Technology

Per year, after a Driver Map revealed the supplier’s true interest was more orders, not a 20% increase.

Also on file: a customer demanded a 25% price rollback. The prepared team settled at 6% — a 19-point swing. Director of Sales · Dexter Axle

All figures reported by participants in written debriefs after Castle Negotiations engagements. Euro amounts drawn at dollar parity for scale. We log missions, not marketing claims.

If this page was forwarded to you

You’re probably the one who’d approve it, so here’s the whole thing. The call is free and nobody signs anything on it. If your team wants proof before committing to a programme, a $7,500 half-day Risk Reset takes one live deal apart and ends in a written number; book an engagement within 90 days and that fee comes off it in full. The engagement itself starts at $12,500. One to three days, in-person or virtual, 8 to 30 people, six months of coaching access afterwards. The figures above this paragraph are single deals, by single people, in single categories. And if we’re not right for this, Ruth says so on the call and tells you who is.

Evidence · declassified

Anatomy of an €800K save.

The supplier who wanted double.

The setup. A sole-sourced product. No short-term alternative supplier. The vendor announces they are closing the production site, and offers to relocate production to France if the price doubles. A textbook Shadow Shark opening: real leverage, theatrical framing.

The old-way instinct. Panic math. Accept 2× as the anchor, fight to land at 1.7×, call it a win, and quietly absorb the requalification costs.

The Diplomat move. Bernd’s team refused the anchor entirely. They established common ground, reversed the hardball framing, and rebuilt the number from raw-material reality instead of from the vendor’s opening position.

The prevented regret. A price increase below half of what was demanded, roughly €800,000 protected, plus every qualification, testing, and travel cost that never had to exist.

“Instead of agreeing to double the price, we secured an increase below 50%.”
Bernd Holzinger · VP Procurement, DexKo Global

Regret · Prevented

Debrief · cross-functional rollout

“Ruth trained a cross-functional, cross-generational group in conflict management. Everyone, from Associate to SVP, uses her tools now. There’s even a waitlist for the next round.”

Stephanie Lind · Founder & CEO, ESA (ex-Impossible Foods)

Debrief · the consultant’s consultant

“I have hired Ruth as a third party to train clients my firm is working for, because she does such a good job.”

Brett Meyer · Partner, AlixPartners

Debrief · function-level ROI

“Hundreds of employees trained… both sales and procurement functions improved outcomes by a large margin. ROI in Ruth is extremely high.”

David Peck · Head of Supply Chain, Dunes Point Capital

Debrief · reading difficult rooms

“What is truly special about her was her ability to effortlessly customize her material on the fly to the needs of the specific, and in most cases difficult, people and situation.”

Tom Jacobson · Managing Director, Accenture

The Cartographer’s record

Ruth Shlossman has spent 25 years
mapping rooms like yours.

Harvard-trained M.Ed. Founder & CEO of Castle Negotiations Consulting Group. Her clients call her the Ted Lasso of negotiating: warm on the surface, ruthless about preparation underneath. She delivers every engagement herself.

$1B+in value created, protected, and captured through stronger agreements

10K+professionals trained, from new hires to senior executives

25+years as a front-line negotiator and strategist in live deals

In the field with: BAE SystemsAccentureAlixPartnersKPS Capital PartnersChart IndustriesInstitute for Management Studies

What happens after you book

Book the call. Here’s exactly what happens next.

A scoping call is scoping. Ruth asks eight questions, you answer them, and nothing gets quoted until all eight are done. At the end you get a recommendation and a number — or the honest answer that we’re not the right people, which happens often enough that we built it into the process.

Preparation is profit. We practise the doctrine we teach, starting with how we scope.

30 minutes · free · no obligation

The scoping call

What deal triggered this. Who’s in the room and what they’re called. What training they’ve already had and what they thought of it. What the people in that room control in annual spend. Who signs. What happens in month two. Written recap within 48 hours, yours to forward.

Optional · half a day · $7,500

The Risk Reset, if you want proof first

Most teams don’t want to buy a three-day programme off one call, and shouldn’t have to. So: half a day on one live deal, ending in a written leakage finding. If you then book an engagement within 90 days, the whole $7,500 comes off it.

Scoped: 1–3 days · in-person or virtual

The engagement

Built around the four games. Ends with every team completing a live HIPPO Diplomatic Brief™ on a real, current deal, and a debrief process your CFO will actually see — plus the tactics video library and six months of coaching access.

Asked and answered

The five questions everyone asks before booking.

“Is the call actually free, or a sales pitch in a trench coat?”

It’s a scoping call, and it’s called that on purpose. Ruth is working out whether there’s a fit here and what it would cost. You’re working out the same thing about her. You leave with a written recap and a real number either way. And if the fit isn’t there, she says so on the call and points you somewhere else. That answer is free too, and it gets given more often than people expect.

“We already have negotiation training.”

Almost everyone does. That’s the point. Ask the harder question instead: did anyone’s behaviour change? Most negotiation training hands over knowledge, and knowledge isn’t what fails in the room. It’s forgotten by Thursday. What fails is holding a position while an engineer undercuts you and a supplier leans on you. That takes rehearsal and a debrief honest enough to be uncomfortable, which most programmes treat as filler and we treat as the product.

“Budget’s tight and the savings target went up anyway.”

Then price the alternative rather than the training. One escalator clause nobody caught will outrun the entire fee over the life of that contract. And if a full engagement isn’t fundable this quarter, the $7,500 Risk Reset exists for exactly this situation. It’s a diagnostic on one live deal, it usually sits under a director’s sign-off ceiling rather than needing a budget round, and the fee credits back in full if you go further within 90 days.

“No time. We’re drowning.”

We believe you, and it’s why the work gets tied to a deal already on your calendar. Nobody practises on invented case studies here. Your team fills in the brief on a live negotiation they were going to have to prepare for anyway, so the training is the preparation rather than another thing stacked on top of it.

“This sounds like old concepts with new names.”

Fair, and we’d be suspicious too. The honest answer: there aren’t many tricks you can play in a negotiation, and we don’t claim otherwise. We can’t manufacture leverage you don’t have. What we do is find the leverage you already have and aren’t using — should-cost, preparation, the question nobody asked, mapping what the other side is protecting rather than what they’re demanding. If that’s already how your team works, you don’t need us, and the call will establish that in about ten minutes.

The calendar, plainly

There is no countdown on this page.
Here is the actual constraint.

We teach a profession to recognise false urgency, so using it here would disprove the curriculum. What’s true instead: Ruth delivers every engagement herself, which caps her at about six a quarter. Scoping call to delivery runs roughly six weeks, most of it discovery and customising the materials to your industry before anyone books a room. Windows get assigned in the order the calls happen, not by who pushes hardest.

Which makes the only real urgency here arithmetic. Book a call in the next fortnight and you’re looking at the following quarter; leave it three months and you’re looking at the one after that. If we’re full, you’ll hear the first open window on the call itself, not buried in a proposal three weeks later.

Q4 2026 · delivery windows

OCT · W1-2Held

OCT · W3-4Held

NOV · W1-2Open

NOV · W3-4Open

DEC · W1-2Open

DEC · W3Open

Four windows open for the rest of 2026. Current as of 27 July 2026 — this block is updated by hand, and it’s the only scarcity claim on the page.

The first move

Bring the deal you’re dreading.

Thirty minutes with Ruth, spent taking one live negotiation apart. You’ll get a straight recommendation and a real number, and no obligation to do anything with either of them.