What it is
Negotiation support is preparation, strategy and, where you want it, someone at the table with your team.
The premise is simple: negotiation outcomes are mostly decided before anyone sits down. The side with the better fact base, clearer objectives and a genuine walk-away position wins more than the side with better technique. Technique matters at the margin. Preparation decides the range.
Most negotiations are lost in the preparation
The common failure is not weak tactics. It is showing up with a price target and no basis for it.
A supplier knows their cost to serve, their margin on your account, what you have historically accepted and how much your volume matters to them. If you arrive knowing only what you currently pay and what you would like to pay, you are negotiating against someone holding more information, and the outcome reflects that.
So the first deliverable is the fact base: what you buy, what you pay across sites and units, what the market pays, what it plausibly costs to serve you, how much of their revenue you represent, and what your alternatives genuinely are.
Objectives, ranked and priced
Teams routinely enter negotiations with a list of things they want and no agreement on which matter. Then they trade badly under time pressure, giving away a three-year term, worth real money, to win a discount worth less.
Before any meeting, we rank objectives and price the trade-offs. What is a year of term worth? What is payment terms worth in cash? What would you genuinely give to cap annual uplift? Once those numbers exist, concessions become decisions instead of instincts.
A walk-away position that means something
A walk-away agreed in the room is not a walk-away. It has to be decided in advance, with the people who would have to live with it, and it has to be real. That means knowing what actually happens if you switch: transition cost, timeline, internal disruption, risk.
Sometimes that work concludes you cannot credibly walk away. That is worth knowing before the meeting rather than during it, because it changes the strategy from leverage to relationship.
At the table
How we show up depends on what the relationship needs. We lead where you want distance from the hard positions. We co-lead where your team is building capability and learning on live work. We prepare and coach where your people should own the room.
That last one is often the most valuable, because the capability stays after we have gone.
The terms that decide whether the price holds
A negotiated price is a forecast until the mechanisms around it are right. Uplift caps and indexation, volume tiers and what happens when volume misses, payment terms in practice rather than on paper, service credits that can actually be claimed, exit rights priced while you still have leverage.
These get less attention than headline price and frequently matter more over a contract term.
Outcomes we target
- A documented fact base that outlasts this negotiation
- Objectives ranked and trade-offs priced before the first meeting
- A walk-away position agreed internally and tested for credibility
- Commercial mechanisms that protect the price for the full term
- A team that negotiates better next time, because they saw how it was built
What you receive
Signed off before the first meetingCFO + Legal
Agreed and signed off before the first meeting, so concessions are priced rather than improvised.
- A negotiation fact base with sourcing and benchmarks documented
- Objectives ranked, with trade-offs priced rather than improvised
- An agreed walk-away position, signed off before the first meeting
- A concession plan mapping what you give and what you get for it
- Redlines on the terms that decide whether the price holds
- A written outcome summary with what was agreed and who owns delivery
Frequently asked questions
Do you negotiate for us or with us?
Either. Some clients want us leading with their team present; some want us preparing and coaching while their people run the room; and occasionally the right structure is for us to take the hard commercial position so the internal relationship stays intact. We agree which before we start.
Will this damage our supplier relationships?
Well-run negotiation usually improves them. What damages relationships is surprise, moving requirements and decisions that cannot be explained. A supplier presented with an evidenced position and a clear process generally respects it, even when they concede.
What if we have no benchmarks?
Most organizations do not, which is why the fact base is the first deliverable rather than an assumed input. We build it from your own transaction history, market research, should-cost analysis and comparable engagements. An internal benchmark across your own sites or business units is often the most persuasive number in the room.
How late is too late to bring you in?
Preparation is where the value is, so earlier is better, ideally before the supplier knows a negotiation is coming. That said, we are often brought into a renewal already in motion or an increase already tabled, and there is usually more room in those than the timeline suggests.
How is this different from strategic sourcing?
Strategic sourcing runs a competitive process across a market. Negotiation support applies where competition is limited, the incumbent is staying, or you are responding to a demand rather than running an event, such as a renewal, a price increase or a contract restructure.