The Negotiation Edge: How to Win Buy-In and Budget for Learning Programs & Software

You’ve seen the impact of a great mentoring or learning program. You know what’s possible. But getting leadership to say yes and actually invest in the technology you need to run and scale it effectively is a different skill entirely.

L&D and HR leaders are under more pressure than ever to prove ROI before a dollar is spent, navigate skeptical stakeholders, and make the case for programs that don’t always have neat metrics.  Meanwhile, training and programs that actually engage employees, change behavior, and meaningfully shift organizational performance over time can be challenging to justify in the language of spreadsheets. 

This discussion brings together negotiation experts and mentoring experts who work closely with customers every day to help them win buy-in and budget for their learning programs — whether that’s software, training, or something else. You’ll walk away with practical strategies to make your case, handle objections, and turn internal skeptics into allies, all while improving your negotiation skills.

What You’ll Learn

• How to apply negotiation principles to internal conversations about employee development budgets and buy-in
• The most common objections you’re likely to hear and how to prepare for them
• What “stakeholder navigation” actually looks like from the inside, with real examples

Who Should Attend

• L&D, HR, and Talent leaders seeking budget or executive support for learning programs or technology
• Program managers who need to build the internal case for mentoring or development initiatives
• Anyone who’s ever felt like they’re selling upward and wished they had a better playbook

Speakers

Mark Mirra is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aligned Negotiation, the company changing how the world negotiates. With more than a decade of experience training leaders and teams, Mark is known for making negotiation practical, human, and immediately usable. He helps enterprise organizations build real negotiation capability through Aligned’s Strategic Framework – a clear, repeatable approach to modern negotiation. 

As Vice President of Customer Success, Rebekah leads a team of passionate Customer Success and Account Managers who understand the impact mentoring can have on both the individual and the organization. Rebekah is responsible for developing long-term strategies to strengthen client relationships and scale, as well as grow an organization’s mentoring footprint.

Prior to Chronus, Rebekah held leadership positions at SaaS companies, Marchex and Rosetta Stone with a focus on the customer journey, from onboarding to renewal. In her previous roles, she delivered enterprise programs for global Fortune 500 organizations and successfully integrated technology into thousands of customer endpoints.

As a Learning & Development and Change Leader, Nikki’s drive is to be a Talent Force Multiplier — helping leaders, teams, and organizations unlock human capability. With a passion for building high-trust, human-centered, and technology-enabled organizations, she brings a blend of strategic vision, systems-thinking, and people-first design to every challenge, empowering those around her to thrive in an ever-evolving world of work.

With over 25 years of experience across technology, healthcare, energy, and beyond, Nikki has built and transformed people functions at some of the world’s most recognized organizations. Her career spans global learning and development, change leadership, talent strategy, and organizational design — with a consistent track record of turning people investment into measurable business performance.