Tom Kinnaird is an experienced negotiation trainer and coach with 25 years’ experience as a procurement leader and professional commercial negotiator. For 15 years, he was Chief Procurement Officer at WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, where he led the global procurement team and ensured that WPP received value for money from its spend with external suppliers around the world.

Founder and Managing Director of Kinnaird Negotiation, Tom Kinnaird has been a procurement leader and professional commercial negotiator for over 25 years. For 15 years, Tom was Chief Procurement Officer at WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, with annual revenues of close to $20 billion, where he was responsible for leading the global procurement team, and ensuring that WPP delivered value for money from its spend with external suppliers around the world. While with WPP, Tom co-founded the Accord initiative, designed to uplift the negotiation, commercial and pricing skills of leadership teams and individuals across WPP’s highly complex world of multiple marketing communications agencies. Tom has over 10 years of experience of teaching negotiation and coaching leaders and pitch teams through difficult and complex negotiation challenges.

Particular areas of interest include:

• helping leaders to better understand Procurement in clients

• promoting game-changing moves in negotiation

• negotiation dynamics in competitive pitching

• conflict resolution (internal and external)

• exploring innovative ways of teaching negotiation (including on-line training)

• embedding negotiation learning and behaviours into organisations

Tom has drawn throughout his career on real-life experience and collaborated extensively with leading academic experts and training partners in the field of negotiation. Prior to joining WPP, Tom was on the Board of a specialist procurement consulting business, advising international blue chip clients on design and implementation of procurement change programmes. His early career was with SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals (later, GlaxoSmithKline), working in development chemistry, manufacturing and procurement / supply chain.

Based in London, he has an MBA, and a BSc (Chemistry).