We’ve probably all been there. You work hard with your team to develop and present your proposal to a customer or supplier. Then you turn up for the first meeting only to receive an arrogant and dismissive reception. You find that instead of a reasonable or at least rational set of people on the other side of the table, there is either a customer that seems intent on making its bidders suffer and accept ridiculous levels of risk, or maybe a supplier so confident in its technology that it refuses to accept anything other than very limited changes to its standard terms.
I have been fortunate not to be in this position for a few years, but I do vividly remember one such occasion. I was acting as a lawyer for a supplier and we travelled somewhere up north for an initial negotiation meeting on a major full outsourcing contract with a large customer that had its offices in grand parklands with every facility you can imagine. Except it was not a negotiation. There was no attempt at a meeting of minds. Instead we were told what the customer’s position was on everything and our views were seemingly irrelevant and apparently, if their city lawyers’ attitude was anything to go by, we were really impertinent, almost impudent for daring to question their, extremely, one sided contract.
We eventually dropped out of the bidding. My client’s senior management had seen enough and simply did not want to contract with such an intransigent and difficult business. The approach and attitude foretold a disastrous relationship and failed contract. Ironically, I learnt some years later in a very roundabout way that this particular customer had eventually contracted for these services at a cut price with an offshore supplier which I assume accepted all of the one-sided terms – and then could not deliver. The last I heard this blue-chip company had had to pay another very reputable and expensive UK supplier a lot of money to dig themselves out of this catastrophic contract.
Such renegotiations are complex and difficult and best avoided in the first place. Here is a Harvard Law School article on How to Renegotiate a Bad Deal which cites as an example a 75 year parking deal in the City of Chicago that went seriously wrong. This blog also addresses the difficulties of negotiating with people who will not budge commenting Unfortunately, the ‘no change’ approach is sometimes stubbornly stuck to even when you’ve pushed. The answer to this is that you, equally, have to be stubborn about this approach being unreasonable.
It may help to work out whether you are really dealing with an intransigent organisation or with difficult people – or maybe with one set of difficult people say the lawyers or procurement advisers. If that is the case, there are ways of managing the situation and keeping the deal afloat. See, for example, this Forbes article A Guide to Dealing with Difficult People.
This can all relate to extremely serious commercial situations, and there is nothing wrong with establishing a strong position in order to negotiate. Winston Churchill said in the 1930’s I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.
But at the end of the day if one side won’t negotiate the other side should seriously consider pulling out of what is almost certainly going to prove to be a disastrous relationship. As John F Kennedy said in a radio and television address to the American people on the Berlin crisis in 1961 We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.
I have been fortunate not to be in this position for a few years, but I do vividly remember one such occasion. I was acting as a lawyer for a supplier and we travelled somewhere up north for an initial negotiation meeting on a major full outsourcing contract with a large customer that had its offices in grand parklands with every facility you can imagine. Except it was not a negotiation. There was no attempt at a meeting of minds. Instead we were told what the customer’s position was on everything and our views were seemingly irrelevant and apparently, if their city lawyers’ attitude was anything to go by, we were really impertinent, almost impudent for daring to question their, extremely, one sided contract.
We eventually dropped out of the bidding. My client’s senior management had seen enough and simply did not want to contract with such an intransigent and difficult business. The approach and attitude foretold a disastrous relationship and failed contract. Ironically, I learnt some years later in a very roundabout way that this particular customer had eventually contracted for these services at a cut price with an offshore supplier which I assume accepted all of the one-sided terms – and then could not deliver. The last I heard this blue-chip company had had to pay another very reputable and expensive UK supplier a lot of money to dig themselves out of this catastrophic contract.
Such renegotiations are complex and difficult and best avoided in the first place. Here is a Harvard Law School article on How to Renegotiate a Bad Deal which cites as an example a 75 year parking deal in the City of Chicago that went seriously wrong. This blog also addresses the difficulties of negotiating with people who will not budge commenting Unfortunately, the ‘no change’ approach is sometimes stubbornly stuck to even when you’ve pushed. The answer to this is that you, equally, have to be stubborn about this approach being unreasonable.
It may help to work out whether you are really dealing with an intransigent organisation or with difficult people – or maybe with one set of difficult people say the lawyers or procurement advisers. If that is the case, there are ways of managing the situation and keeping the deal afloat. See, for example, this Forbes article A Guide to Dealing with Difficult People.
This can all relate to extremely serious commercial situations, and there is nothing wrong with establishing a strong position in order to negotiate. Winston Churchill said in the 1930’s I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.
But at the end of the day if one side won’t negotiate the other side should seriously consider pulling out of what is almost certainly going to prove to be a disastrous relationship. As John F Kennedy said in a radio and television address to the American people on the Berlin crisis in 1961 We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.
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