["TESOL Quarterly, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nTeaching Business English (BE) is experiencing a paradigm shift to reflect the communicative needs of the global workplace. With the majority of interactions in English now taking place among multilingual speakers, there are increasing calls to integrate perspectives of English as a business lingua franca (BELF) into English language and business communication teaching. Particularly, the teaching of BELF pragmatics is lacking in theoretical discussion and in tested, practical solutions to be applied in the classroom. To address this gap, we have capitalized on virtual exchanges (VE) and built an online negotiation activity targeted at practicing BELF‐pragmatic strategies. This paper reports on the process of developing the activity through an action research project over three semesters into a viable and pedagogically meaningful teaching component. It synthesizes best‐practice recommendations for teachers aspiring to develop BELF‐informed teaching activities and concludes that even a single‐session VE collaboration, when carefully designed to integrate BELF pragmatics, business discourse and rapport‐building, can facilitate transformational learning. Additionally, our study meets a need for research‐led BE teaching while demonstrating the value of action research for ensuring robust pedagogical solutions.\n"]