X is a contract negotiator. He received final approved Clinical Trial Agreement (CTA) and budget templates and emailed them to a site for their first review. In a week, X didn’t receive any feedback from the site and sent another follow-up email. Another week has gone and still no news from the site, X emails another reminder. The project management is concerned on the lack of response but sees in the tracker that weekly follow-up is performed by X, so seems it is all stuck with the site.

Y is a contract negotiator. She received final approved Clinical Trial Agreement (CTA) and budget templates and emailed them to a site for their first review, next day Y called the site to check if they received her email and to know the estimated timelines for review. Y finds out that standard review timeline is 3 weeks, so she informs the site she will follow-up with them in 3 weeks. Y reports this to the Client and project management team, they acknowledge the timeline and plan their activities and priorities accordingly.

Whose negotiation tactic is correct in the two above cases? One can immediately answer Y is correct, but that would be a partially correct answer. Not contacting a site within three weeks even if that was a timeline provided by this site is some professional ‘unattainable luxury’ for a negotiator, and here is why:

• Site staff is always busy, so during these three weeks they can simply forget about your email and their promise they gave you;
• Review can actually take less than 3 weeks, but the site may wait for your follow-up to actually respond;
• Site may have queries during the review, but again due to other tasks they may wait for your follow-up to ask questions;
• Your site contact may be actually re-assigned for other tasks or even leave the site without performing proper handover.

This list can be long as human factor can create numerous circumstances.

So, there is no pain to give a short call to the site once a week to check how the review is going and if the site has any questions to you. It is also very important to keep this call-email balance. A call makes your communication with the site more personal; email formalizes it. If you negotiate over the phone, make sure to send after-call email to your site contact summarizing all your agreements – this will somehow document your talk and you will have a track of what was negotiated.

We hope this short article was useful for you, please be welcomed to share your thoughts and observations on the topic!