The Methodology

The Cruz Protocol

Four stages. Run in order. Every time.

Read → Disarm → Steer → Close. The FBI's crisis-negotiation toolkit, sequenced into something a sales floor can actually execute on a Tuesday morning without the trainer in the room.

See the four stages ↓ Bring it to your team

Why This Exists

Motivation is a mood. A protocol is infrastructure.

I owe a lot to the motivational world. It taught me that state matters — that how you carry yourself into a room changes what comes out of it. I still believe that.

But I kept watching the same thing happen. A team goes to a two-day event. They come back electric. They make more calls that week than the previous three combined. And then, somewhere around day 20, it's gone — and nobody can say exactly what they were supposed to be doing differently. They were given a feeling, not a sequence.

You can't run a feeling on a Tuesday when the deal is bad and you didn't sleep.

Crisis negotiators solved this problem decades ago, because they had to. When you're on a phone line and someone's life is the variable, "get in a peak state" is not a plan. So they built a sequence: diagnose, defuse, redirect, resolve. Same order, every call. It works when the negotiator is exhausted, scared, or brand new — which is the entire point.

The Cruz Protocol takes that structure and points it at commercial negotiation: your renewal, your listing, your claim, your enterprise contract. Same discipline. Same order. Measured the same way — not by how the room felt, but by whether the rep can execute it on tape.

The Difference

Same energy. Actual scaffolding.

Motivation-based training
The Cruz Protocol
Peak state — which decays in about 72 hours.
A four-stage sequence you run whether or not you're fired up.
Success is how the room felt at the end.
Success is a recorded rep, scored against the stage you were in.
Reframe your own beliefs.
Name their emotion, out loud, before you ask for anything.
One charismatic voice, on a stage, that you can't take home.
Tools your team keeps running after I've left the building.
You leave inspired.
You leave with word-for-word scripts and a laminated cheat sheet.
Abstract, proprietary, unfalsifiable.
Derived from published crisis-negotiation practice and pressure-tested on live deals.
The follow-up is the next ticket they sell you.
Thirty-day follow-up is included in the immersive — four calls, no upsell.

To be clear: this isn't a knock on getting people fired up. Energy opens the door. Structure is what walks through it.

The Protocol

Four stages, run in order

Skipping a stage is the single most common failure I see in the field — and it's almost always someone jumping straight to Steer because they're in a hurry to fix it.

Stage 01
Read

Diagnose the emotional state in the room before a single ask leaves your mouth. You cannot steer a car you haven't looked at.

Emotion Wheel · Labels · Silence
Stage 02
Disarm

Say the worst thing they're thinking before they have to. Resistance you name out loud stops being ammunition.

Accusation Audit · Mirrors
Stage 03
Steer

Move them with questions instead of pressure. "How" and "What" do the work that "Why" and "You need to" can't.

Calibrated Questions · Summaries
Stage 04
Close

Let them talk themselves into it, then stop talking. The close is mostly restraint — and almost nobody trains restraint.

No-Oriented Questions · Silence

Stage by Stage

What each stage actually involves

1

Read

Diagnose

Most negotiators walk in with a number and a hope. The Protocol starts one step earlier: what is the other side actually feeling, and can you name it precisely enough to say it out loud?

Precision matters here more than people expect. "Frustrated" and "cornered" produce completely different next moves. We work off a structured emotion vocabulary — seven core states branching into dozens of specific ones — so your team stops reaching for the same three adjectives.

Tools
Emotion Wheel, Labels, tactical silence
The drill
Three minutes of a recorded call. Say nothing. Write down three emotions with evidence for each.
Scored on
Specificity, and whether the label lands without the other side correcting you.
Label — points at them, never starts with "I" "It seems like this timeline has put you in a rough spot with your own team."
What you're listening for "That's right." — or a correction, which is just as useful. Either way they're now explaining instead of defending.
Failure mode: solving before diagnosing. The instant you offer a fix, you've told them you weren't listening, and every concession after that reads as pressure rather than good faith.
2

Disarm

Defuse

Every negotiation has a list of things the other side believes about you and hasn't said. Your price is insulting. You've done this before and they haven't. You're going to disappear after signing.

You say that list first. Out loud, in your own words, before they get to use it. An objection you've already voiced can't be deployed against you — and volunteering it buys you a category of credibility that no amount of enthusiasm will.

Tools
Accusation Audit, Mirrors
The drill
Write the five worst things the other side privately thinks about your offer. Rank by how much it would hurt if said. Open with the top two.
Scored on
Whether you can deliver it without flinching or immediately defending.
Accusation audit — front-load the negatives "You're probably thinking we're another vendor who'll be attentive until the contract's signed and then hand you off to a queue. And the number I'm about to say is higher than the two quotes already on your desk."
Mirror — repeat their last three words, then stop Them: "...it's really a budget issue this quarter."  →  You: "A budget issue this quarter?"
Failure mode: defending. The audit only works if you name the negative and then hold still. Rushing to rebut it converts the disarm back into an argument — and now you're arguing a point they never had to make.
3

Steer

Redirect

Now you move them — and you do it by handing them the problem instead of an instruction. Calibrated questions transfer the work of solving to the other side, which is also how they end up owning the answer.

The grammar is strict: "How" and "What." Never "Why." "Why did you go that direction?" is heard as an accusation in every language I've tested it in. "What made that the right call?" asks the same thing and gets a real answer.

Tools
Calibrated Questions, summaries, deliberate pacing
The drill
Take ten demands you make in a normal week. Rewrite every one as a How or What question. Say them out loud until they stop sounding awkward.
Scored on
Talk-time ratio. If you're over 40% you're presenting, not steering.
Instead of an ultimatum "How am I supposed to make that work on my end?"
To surface the real constraint "What's the hardest part of this for you?"  ·  "What would have to change for this to be easy to approve?"
Failure mode: asking a calibrated question and then answering it yourself because the pause got uncomfortable. The silence after the question is the tool. Three seconds feels like thirty. Let it run.
4

Close

Resolve

The close is the most over-taught and least-practiced stage in the industry. Almost every technique out there is about applying more pressure at the end. The Protocol does the opposite: you make agreement the comfortable option and then get out of the way.

Questions where "no" is the safe answer do the heavy lifting. "Is this a bad time?" gets a real response. "Do you have a few minutes?" gets a defensive one. Then you summarise their position back so accurately that they say "that's right" — and you stop.

Tools
No-Oriented Questions, summaries, silence
The drill
Ask, then hold six full seconds. Timed. On camera. Most people cannot do it on the first attempt.
Scored on
Concessions made after the other side went quiet. Target is zero.
No-oriented — "no" is the safe answer "Is it ridiculous to get this signed before the end of the month?"
Summary — you're aiming for "that's right" "So the timeline is the real risk, procurement is the bottleneck, and if we can't start before the quarter closes the whole thing slips to next year."
Failure mode: negotiating against yourself in the silence. The other side goes quiet, the rep panics, and discounts something nobody asked them to discount. This is the single most expensive habit on most sales floors — and it's fixable in about forty minutes of drilling.

Accountability

How you know it worked

This is the part motivational training can't offer, because you can't score a feeling. Every engagement produces artifacts you can audit after I'm gone.

🎥

Recorded reps

Every practice round is on tape. Your team can rewatch their own Stage-2 attempt and see exactly where they started defending.

📊

Stage scorecard

Each rep is scored per stage — did they label before asking, did they hold the silence, what was their talk-time ratio.

🗂️

Your scripts, not mine

Scripts get built from your actual pipeline and your industry's real objections, so nothing needs translating on Monday.

🔁

Thirty-day follow-up

Four weekly calls in the multi-day immersive. This is where the habit either sets or dies, so it's included rather than sold.

🃏

Free practice app

MixMatch lets the team run structured sessions between engagements — all 31 tools, no seat count, no expiry.

📘

The written manual

A published 33-chapter reference, so the method outlives anyone's memory of the training day.

Straight Answers

The questions I actually get asked

Is this just Chris Voss's material repackaged?
No, and I'd tell you if it were. The tools — labels, mirrors, calibrated questions, accusation audits — come from published FBI crisis-negotiation practice, and I don't pretend to have invented them. What I built is the sequencing, the drills, and the scoring: the order you run them in, how you rehearse each one, and how you measure whether a rep can actually do it under pressure. Reading a book about labels and being able to deliver one to an angry buyer are different skills. The gap between them is what I get paid to close.
My team already went to a big motivational event. Why do this too?
Honestly, those two things stack well. The event handles belief and energy. The Protocol handles the part where somebody has to open their mouth on a live call and say a specific sentence in a specific order. If your team came back fired up but can't tell you what they're doing differently in a negotiation, that's the gap this fills.
Does this work outside sales?
Yes — the mechanics are the same anywhere you need to move a person from where they are to where you need them. It's been run with real estate, insurance claims, construction, legal, call centers, procurement, and internal leadership teams. Mediators tend to pick it up fastest because Stage 1 is already how they think.
What if my people think roleplay is cringe?
Most of them do, for about the first twenty minutes. Then someone gets mirrored on their own objection and the room changes. I don't do theatre exercises — we run your deals with your objections, which is a different thing than pretending to buy a stapler from a colleague.
Can you guarantee results?
I won't put a revenue number in writing — anyone who does is guessing at your pipeline. What I'll commit to is this: every attendee leaves able to execute all four stages on tape, with scripts written for your deals. If a training day ends and your team can't run the Protocol on camera, tell me and we'll fix it before I invoice the follow-up.
How big can the room be?
One-day intensives cap at 30. Multi-day immersives cap at 20, because individual coaching rounds with recordings don't scale past that. Keynotes have no cap — but a keynote is exposure to the method, not installation of it. Be honest with yourself about which one you're buying.

Run the Protocol on your own pipeline.

Fifteen-minute call. No pitch. We talk about your people, your deals, and whether a training day is the right move — or whether you should start with the free app and the book.

Book the call → Or go straight to Calendly · calendly.com/negotiatorsondemand/corporate-training

Practice the Protocol before you pay for the training.

MixMatch is the free 31-tool practice app. Open it before our call. If your team can run a three-stage session in twelve minutes, you'll know whether the live training lands — and if it doesn't, don't book it.

Open MixMatch → 🏆 Trophy Room