You're navigating vendor relationships during negotiations. How can you keep things positive and productive?

Trust is the bedrock of any successful negotiation, so that needs to be built and respected at all times. The parties want their needs and issues to be heard, so active listening is essential. The aim is to have a win win focus with co-operation at its heart. Negotiations in order to go through need some amount of flexibility since rigidness can stall them. Clear communications from the start to the end are very important with no scope for ambiguity. Lastly to make sure that the points agreed in the negotiations are correctly reflected in a contract.

There is nothing like Vendor, approach remains the same while conversing with a purpose of getting the best deal for the business as well as self. Transparency, best of information regarding the subject getting discussed, and with no intent of having an upper hand. Convince, and convince, with logic, facts, and empathy.

Contract negotiations are an audition for the relationship. -People should be on best behavior. -Hostility at this stage is a warning sign. -Don’t hesitate to walk away. It won’t work out.

I’d take this one step farther - not only do you need to actively listen to the deal terms at hand, you need to carefully compare that to the written words. Does everything match perfectly? Don’t presume just because there’s a meeting of the minds in terms of the deal understandings that it matches the contract provisions, go through them carefully and thoughtfully. Agreements are meant for when things go bad, and a changing of the guard could change the interpretation if it’s not carefully written and accurately distilled in the agreement.

It’s not always about money. It’s about value. Don’t forget about the non-monetary terms. They make the deal run smoother.

So often legal v. legal teams in each side carefully hash out terms, like confidentiality, just to hand it over to the business who doesn’t understand the sensitivity and doesn’t follow the requirements. Get everyone on the same page and consider using a vendor "cheat sheet” with the main terms and requirements outlined in plain English - this helps ensure the terms are followed and that the business understands the relationship, if for nothing else, for when the time comes to renegotiate or consider a new vendor who may allow more favorable terms.