Category Archives: Negotiations

An Interesting Piece on Physical vs. Virtual Negotiation

Last summer, eSide ran an interesting article on how (and where) you negotiate matters that overviewed different types of negotiation techniques and which work best in person, over the phone, and through e-mail. Given the amount of time that one spends on the phone, and, particularly, online (using e-mail and instant message communication) using a modern strategic sourcing system, this is now basic information that every Supply Management professional needs to know.

The article starts off by noting that negotiations are generally most productive when conducted in person, which is obvious when you consider that behavioural researchers say we lose 75% of the (nonverbal) communication content when speaking on the phone. The take-away from this is that all critical / high-value negotiations that are expected to result in the signing of a contract should be conducted in person. This doesn’t mean that all aspects of the negotiations need to be conducted in person, as you could conduct the initial rounds of a multi-round negotiation by phone or e-mail as you are working your way through the process to select a vendor of choice, but that the final negotiation should generally be in person.

Then it notes that there is strength in numbers. A team will always have an advantage over a single opponent as different members can play key roles that make the approach highly effective. However, it does not that there is an optimal team-size, and that a team that is too big can hinder as much as it helps. (It also has to have an empowered leader whose final say is final.)

For a telephone negotiation to be effective, you have to be prepared. Good interrogatives/questions draw information out from the other party during the discovery phase of the negotiation process. Inversely, bad interrogatives/questions don’t.

E-mail negotiations give the impression that you want the relationship to be arm’s length. If this is not the case, then you probably shouldn’t use e-mail for anything more than to gather information as a precursor to a telephone and/or in-person negotiation.

If you do use e-mail, remember the following:

  • once you give your position in writing, it’s harder to change it,
  • email encourages prompt, direct response, leaving little wiggle room,
  • it could indicate that you aren’t comfortable negotiating in person, that you can’t make decisions without consulting with someone else, or that you don’t have the time for the recipient,
  • it can put you at a nonverbal disadvantage (depending on the situation), and
  • it can be used to bypass you!

The advantages and disadvantages of e-mail work both ways! Just like a supplier can be at a disadvantage if they commit their position to writing first, you can put yourself at a disadvantage if you commit your position first. Similarly, just like a supplier will be at a disadvantage if he’s not used to e-mail negotiations, you can be at the disadvantage if the supplier is an expert at e-mail based negotiations, phrasing, and legalese and you’re not. Finally, and most important, just like you can use it to bypass a low-level supplier sales rep and get right to the VP, you can be bypassed if the supplier get’s a hold of your stakeholder’s direct e-mail! So while the article might focus on the advantages of e-mail based negotiations, it’s more important to keep the disadvantages in mind as one-slip up and you’ve given the supplier the upper hand.

But the most important thing to remember when negotiating by e-mail:
you may, technically, put a legally binding contract in place by agreeing to something the other party offers in an e-mail! Certain bodies of law (including the most recent changes to Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code) now explicitly regard electronic correspondence as being “in writing”. (See 2-211 [3] in particular, for example.) Take heed!

Intesource – A Strong Sourcing Solution for Mid-Market Supply Management

When we last covered Intesource almost three years ago in 2010 in this post about intelligent sourcing through Intesource, we noted that this full-service offering eSourcing provider had a fully-featured e-Negotiation platform with SIM, document/contract management, and a relatively unique integration with Microsoft Sharepoint for those clients that ran on a Microsoft back-office and wanted to use these solutions to collaborative author documents and track changes.

Besides integration with the Microsoft platform, which is very common in the mid-market that can’t always afford, and often doesn’t need, the massive ERP solutions found in the Fortune 1000/Global 3000, other unique differentiators at the time were their massive template library for e-Negotiation events, integrated feeds from over 160 market exchanges for up-to-date raw material and commodity price information, and hands-on experience running tens of thousands of events. This put them in a restricted group of providers.

Since then, they have continued development work on the platform and added additional functionality that not only enhances the end-to-end strength of the platform, but narrows the group of competitors that can say the same. Three particular enhancements stand out — award analysis, market price centre, and mobile interfaces. We will describe each in turn.

Intesource has added an award optimization component that, while not true strategic sourcing decision optimization, is a very useful analytic component that will allow a buyer to determine a near-optimal, if not optimal, award for non-complex sourcing events. In the new component, buyers can create multiple award scenarios based on pre-defined rules, such as low-quote (which selects, for each item, the supplier with the lowest bid), low-group (which selects, for each group, the supplier with the total lowest cost for a group, or bucket, of item), or low program (which selects the supplier(s) with the lowest cost based upon a program specification, which could be to select suppliers with the highest quality, shortest-lead time, or MWBE specification where possible); or by hand-picking suppliers for each item and/or group. Then, the buyers can compare each scenario side-by-side to see how the different scenarios compare and what is gained for each price sacrifice.

Intesource‘s award optimization module is not true optimization in that there is no underlying model, it doesn’t support cross-item / group rebate / discount bids, specification of capacity is currently limited to the event level and the specification of macro-qualitative constraints is limited, and you can’t yet re-run a scenario to see what would change if a supplier increased/decreased prices/quality/etc across the board by 5%, but as SI pointed out five years ago in it’s post on (Spend) Analytics vs. (Decision) Optimization, if your organization had a spend analysis product that allowed you to build a spend cube any time you wanted – on any data you wanted – on any dimensions you wanted – and then throw it away when you’re done then there would be nothing to stop you from building a cube on your RFP or Auction data, building cross tabs and tree maps, and then changing the cube to look at the data a different way. You’d find that you wouldn’t need optimization or a plethora of deterministic reports to find out who the lowest cost supplier was, who the highest quality supplier was, who the lowest cost supplier was relative to your quality metric, or any other query that can easily be answered by rank and cross-tab queries. And, as a result, you’d be able to solve many simple scenarios without optimization — and this is what this tool is attempting to do. Intesource realizes that many supply management organizations, especially in the mid-market, don’t have the advanced sourcing and modelling skills required to build complex optimization models and is endeavoring to build a tool appropriate to its user base. And while it’s not perfect, the reality is that, for an average (smaller) mid-size organization, continued development will allow Intesource to approach an 80% solution as many sourcing events and models of a (smaller) mid-size organization aren’t that complex and this type of solution will get such an organization much further than just e-Negotiation alone.  And on those 80% of events, the results will be near-optimal, if not optimal. 

Intesource has centralized all of its raw material and commodity price feeds into a market price centre that integrates the feeds with additional graphing and reporting functionality, monitoring and alerts, and statistical modelling capabilities. In the market price center, users can view historical trends and price fluctuations, focus in on any particular period of time, extend trend projections into the future, monitor prices, cash, and futures contract specifications, set watch lists to monitor key categories, set alerts to immediately inform the user if a price threshold is reached or a price fluctuation exceeds a certain threshold, and even pull up all of the information associated with the exchange(s) a commodity or raw material is associated with.

Finally, like a few other providers, it is tackling mobile, but it is doing it in a smart way. The reality is that, while you might want mobile access because it sounds really cool, in practice it’s typically not very cool because you can’t do really do anything useful on a 3″ to 4″ screen, and what you can do is limited on even a 9″ to 10″ screen. Realizing that all you can really do is retrieve critical pricing and status information, Intesource is building a customized read-only interface that will allow you to determine current event status, bid information, and whether or not there is anything you need to to do or respond to when on the go.  And it’s working with its customer base to develop an appropriate interface that they can use effectively. 

Other improvements since 2010 include an improved contract centre with more (user-defined) meta-data, search, and alert functionality; an improved vendor management (SIM) capability with embedded Q&A, enhanced search, attachment management, compliance, and watch-list capabilities; more milestone and scorecard management capabilities; an RFI question library with thousands of questions indexed by category, commodity, and other attributes (built on an analysis of 12 years worth of RFI data) to allow for quick definition of templates and RFIs; and a roles-based public event calendar. Intesource is constantly developing new modules, functions, and features with a roadmap largely driven by its user community as all requests are reviewed quarterly by an advisory committee and prioritized based upon overall demand and usefulness.

Intesource is a solid player in the eSourcing mid-market that should be included in the candidate pool by any company that does most of its business in North America.

The Price is the Price Only if You Pay the Price

Over at Next Level Purchasing, Charles recently published a good article on How Suppliers Defend Price In Negotiation. In summary, if the supplier thinks that you are not on your game, it will defend its price with a steaming pile of bull-crap.

Of the 7 examples that Charles gives for a common supplier response used when you attempt to start negotiations, my favourite has to be:

We are the only company that provides this product/service, so we don’t play pricing games – our price is our price.

First of all, unless you have it in your head that you have to have an iPad, there is no single source provider of any product or service. Pick a product. Any product. I guarantee there’s a dozen variations of it out there, somewhere. Maybe not all providers can meet your volume demands, and it’s probably the case that not all have the same quality level, but still, unless you’re insisting on a name-brand product, there are always multiple options.

Second, any supplier who wants to sell something bad enough will negotiate on price. Very few companies have the power to set a price in stone, and they are all selling branded products or services, like iPads, Wiis, or Playstations. Everything else is up for negotiation. And even if the price on the base product can’t move, maybe a value-added service can be thrown in at a deep discount.

The price is the price ONLY if you pay it. Given a choice between moving a line in the sand or being stuck with a mountain of inventory, which choice do you think a supplier is going to make?

Now, this isn’t to say that you should be requesting unreasonable price concessions, as everyone deserves a fair margin, but that you shouldn’t believe that the price is the price.

And if I was asked to choose a runner up, it would be:

“Is price the only criterion on which you are basing your decision?”

Of course not, but don’t let the supplier distract you. If you’ve done a proper cost model and determined that the supplier has built in a hefty margin of 20%, compared to the market average of 10%, unless you’re getting very valuable value-added services thrown in for free, you need to cut that margin in half to stay competitive.

The (Board) Gamer’s Guide to Supply Management Part II: The Settlers of Catan

I’m very excited to continue this brand new summer series that will help you whether you are just interested in finding out about this new and exciting career opportunity or ready to take your Supply Management career to the next level. Learning Supply Management doesn’t have to be as fun as watching paint dry — it can be much more fun! And when you can grasp some of the basic concepts playing a strategic board game with your friends, it’s a blast.

While Settlers of America Trails to Rails (also put out by Catan) might be a better choice to follow Ticket To Ride, that we introduced in last week’s post, The Settlers of Catan is also a great game to include in our series, and, more importantly, there is another great TableTop episode, again hosted by the one, and only, Wil Wheaton In Exile on Twitter. And since the best way to learn a new game is to see it in action until you are familiar with other board games in the same vein, we’re going to take advantage of the priceless gift that Mr. Wheaton has given us.

In TableTop Episode 2, Wil Wheaton uses Settlers of Catan, a modern day classic that has sold hundreds of millions of copies, to introduce us to the joys of trading wood for sheep. What could be better?

As with Ticket to Ride, the rules are fairly simple. As explained by Wil:

      We are settlers on the legendary island of Catan. The first person to reach 10 victory points wins the game. You get victory points by collecting and managing resources. You get resources when one of the settlements you have built is adjacent to a tile that has spawned a resource. We find out which tiles spawn resources every turn by rolling dice. No one will have enough resources on their own to build the roads, settlements, and cities they need to win the game. So we will all have to barter and trade with each other. Just like in real life, there are nasty surprises waiting for you. Whenever we roll a seven, the robber gets activated. He steals from you. We hate the robber. The robber is a dick. But if you get robbed, it’s not the end of the world. There are other ways to get victory points — having the longest road, having the largest army, or you can also trade in resources to buy [these] development cards (which may also give us victory points).

Sounds easy, right? So where is the difficulty? Some resources are more likely to be spawned than others, as each of the 18 non-desert hexes have different numbers associated with them from 2 to 12 (excluding 7), and, according to probability, hexes with sixes or eights are more likely to be rolled and spawn their resources. Plus, there are five different resource types (brick, wood, wheat, sheep, and stone), and each type of building requires multiple resource types. A road requires wood and brick; a settlement (worth one victory point) requires wood, brick, wheat, and sheep; and a city (which is built on top of a settlement and worth two victory points) requires two wheat and three stone. As such, you need to strategically position your settlements to maximize the chances of getting the resources you need, but you can’t place settlements just anywhere. They can only be at hex boundaries and there must be a road of length at least two between any pair of settlements on the board. Or, if you don’t have good placement opportunities for your settlements that would allow you to maximize your chance of getting resources (by placing the settlement on a corner between three hexes with decent roll probabilities), you can try to build on a port that gives you better than average trading opportunities. (In the game, you can always trade four resources of the same type for a resource of any other type with “the bank”*, but some ports reduce this to three for one, and some ports allow you to trade specific resources two for one. This is very useful near the end of the game when your opponents are unwilling to trade with you if they see you nearing victory.)

The only other relevant rules are that if you build the longest road (of length five or more), or amass the largest army (of three or more knights, which are mixed in with the development cards), you gain two victory points and if you are lucky enough to draw a monopoly card when you purchase a development card, you can play it down and every other player has to give you all cards of the resource type you name.** And if you roll the robber, everyone (including you) with 7 or more resource cards has to lose half, but you get to move the robber to any hex and steal a (random) resource from a player with a neighbouring settlement (or city).

So what are the parallels with Supply Management? In Supply Management:

      We are Supply Chain Professionals doing business in the global marketplace. The first of us to secure and deliver all of the products and services we need to meet all of the customer demands wins the game. We secure the products and services we need by managing suppliers and reserving limited production and distribution capacity. We find out which resources are limited by watching the market and taking note of tumultuous events. In today’s marketplace, no supplier will be able to meet all of our component or service needs on their own, so we will not only have to barter and trade with multiple suppliers, but also with our competitors and their suppliers in tight markets. And there will be nasty surprises waiting for us. A natural disaster may wipe out part of the raw material supply or Somali pirates may seize a precious shipment. We hate the pirates. They are dicks. But if our shipments get robbed, it’s not the end of the world. There are other ways to serve our customers. We can use the insurance money to buy from someone else, we can redesign our products to use alternate materials, or we can focus on a new or different substitute product or service to get us, and our customers, through the worst of times.

And just like in Catan, some resources will be more readily available than others. We will need different resources (from different suppliers) to assemble our complex product and service offerings, strategic reservation of production capacity and distribution capacity will give us a major competitive edge over our competition, and the more international trading capability we have at our disposal, the better trades we are going to be able to make (as some countries value wheat, lumber, or brick more than others, depending on whether they are short on building materials or food). The more trade lanes we have access to, the more markets the organization can serve; acquiring a monopoly on a certain product or service in a region, even for a limited time, gives us a significant edge in negotiations (as long as it’s not in violation of local laws), and keeping individual shipment value down can limit losses in the event of a robbery.

So what does The Settlers of Catan teach us?

  • if we are gamers new to the subject matter, it teaches us that successful Supply Management requires a lot of skill as we have to balance investments in (new) product development (settlements and cities) and logistics capacity (roads); we have to optimize local distribution (inner placement) hand-in-hand with global distribution (port placement); and we have to try and keep our competitors from locking up too much of available capacity in critical trade lanes (longest road) or production (largest army) and, most importantly, that we will have to do a lot of negotiating to succeed.
  • if we are new Supply Management professionals looking to improve our Supply Management game, it allows us to practice our negotiation skills and see how the negotiations change depending on the supply/demand imbalance for the raw materials and our relative strength in the marketplace (as your opponents will typically be very open to trading with you to mutual advantage if they are in the lead but very reserved if you are in the lead and the trade is perceived as advancing you [closer] to victory).
  • if we are seasoned Supply Management veterans, it helps us understand the strength and weaknesses of different Supply Management strategies. For example, if we focus on inland building to maximize the chances of resource spawning every turn, we are giving up any chance to guarantee low-cost trades later in the game (as we will not be building on ports). And if we focus on the ports, while we may be able to trade many resources cheap, we may never acquire enough resources to trade. If we focus on pure settlement and city building, an opponent may be able to sneak in and win the game with only two settlements (2 points) and one city (2 points) if they took a development strategy and secured the longest road (2 points), largest army (2 points), and two victory point development cards (2 points). It allows us to work on our strategic planning skills and notice that for every strength we achieve with a strategy, there is always a weakness that can be exploited by our competition with the right counter-strategy. And the better we understand the strengths and weaknesses of our strategies, the better we can adapt them and monitor them over time.

It’s a great game, and if you can’t wait to get started, I have great news if you own an iOS device. Catan for iOS is available in the App Store — although I must admit its a bit hard to play on the iPhone/iPod touch as you constantly have to zoom in and out. Now go forth and settle!


* which is a term you Monopoly (which we will not be including in this series) players are familiar with
** which has the opposite effect of the Mod card in Uno Mod for you Uno players

Procurement Game Plan: A Review Part II.3

Charles Dominick of Next Level Purchasing and Soheila R. Lunney of Lunney Advisory Group recently released The Procurement Game Plan: Winning Strategies and Techniques for Supply Management Professionals. In our first post, we set the stage with The Purchasing Professional’s 10 Commandments. In our second post, we covered the first four chapters of the book that discuss organizational role, supply management strategy, talent, and social responsibility — the stage that a modern supply management professional has to act upon. In our third post, we continued our detailed review with a discussion of the chapters on strategic sourcing and supplier qualification. Our last post began our discussion of the chapters on negotiations, and this post concludes our discussion on negotiations and Part II of our review.

The section on negotiation preparation was a good one. Quoting Benjamin Franklin is extremely relevant in this context. Where negotiations are concerned, By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail is a definite. Sales people spend every second of every minute of every hour of every day trying to figure out how to maximize the sale price, and thus their bonus cheque. You can bet they are preparing every free minute they have, and that they have been trained extensively on the art of the sale. As a result, you need to do as much preparation as you can on the art of the negotiation. So how does a skilled negotiator prepare?

  1. Try to find the win-win.
    If the only way for the buyer to get better terms is for the seller to sacrifice margin, it’s going to be a tough fight. But if the buyer can offer something to the seller that can look like a win in the rep’s pocket — such as more volume than expected, better production batch sizes, co-marketing — which may not cost the buyer much, the pie can be expanded and both sides can win. While the negotiation will still be tough, it is much easier to get a bigger slice of a bigger pie than to try and take the few scarps the sales person has left on margin.
  2. Know thy counterpart.
    You can bet that not only is a good sales person going to be researching everything he can about your organization if a big deal is on the table, but he’s going to be researching you too. Chances are, he’ll know your public Facebook and LinkedIn profile better than you!
  3. Know thy worst enemy.
    Your worst enemy is not your counterpart, but the assumptions you make. If you assume a supplier cannot go below a certain price because of your cost model, then you will never get below that price. But if the supplier has a better than average production process, maybe the supplier’s cost + 10% is lower than your modeled cost + 10% and a better price is obtainable. But if you don’t think to push for it, you’ll never get it.
  4. Use deep logic.
    Know all the potential responses to your arguments and have counter-responses prepared. Leave your supplier counterpart at a loss for words occasionally.
  5. Control the meeting.
    It’s your buy, and your agenda. Don’t let your counterpart make it your supplier’s agenda. That’s just bad news.
  6. Know what the supplier will ask, and have your responses ready.
    What really matters to the supplier rep? Deal size? Volume? Agreement date? Margin? Know this, as these will influence the initial set of questions, and have your answers ready. Plus, be prepared for the universal questions of budget, decision timeframe, and competition.

I also liked the sections on increasing your negotiation confidence, as you need confidence to control the meeting; and supplier’s psychological warfare, as we already know they do this (from our Review of Stephen Guth’s Contract Negotiation Handbook); body language, as this is often key to what some negotiations are thinking; and today tactics, as using all of your ammunition at once could leave you defenceless near the end of the negotiation. But the best section that you could easily miss is the section on tactics that can backfire. While you might think that crying-poor, saving-the-toughest-issue-for-last, and threatening to get-it-from-someone-else might give you some edge, it could result in the supplier just walking away at the worst possible time.

The second chapter on negotiations focussed on negotiating in specialized situations: adapting your game plan for different conditions as some specialized situations require specific negotiation approaches and tactics. Examples are policies, (proposed) price increases, cost breakdown requests, information exchange requests, and mutual cost reduction proposals. The text includes a discussion of each of these, but we’re going to skip through these, and the section on time-and-materials contracts, to negotiating force majeure clauses. In the case of a disaster that causes a significant disruption to your supplier, such a clause can make or break you. (Stephen Guth has discussed these clauses more than once on the Vendor Management Office blog, with one example being his post on The Get Out of Jail Free clause.) The short-list of what must be addressed should be in every Procurement Professionals’ master checklist:

  1. Will you get to waive exclusivity while your supplier cannot deliver?
    You need to meet your customers’ expectations one way or the other!
  2. Will you get most favoured customer treatment after a recovery?
    And will that be specified?
  3. Can your supplier provide you with a written contingency plan for each event the supplier wants to be defined as force majeure?
    If the supplier hasn’t thought this true, then maybe you need to think through whether they can serve you.

The sections on contract template was also good, but the next section of particular relevance was the section on negotiating with a supplier in another country. The 20 question checklist is a great starting point to discover much of what will be necessary for a successful international negotiation and relationship, and complements both SI’s series on Cultural Intelligence and Overcoming Cultural Differences in International Trade
as well as Next Level Purchasing’s course on the Basics of Smart International Procurement which were edited and co-created by Dick Locke.

Finally, don’t miss the section on why asking for suppliers’ advice isn’t as dumb as it sounds. Sometimes suppliers might have cost saving ideas they are happy to share in exchange for continued business. You’ll never know if you don’t ask.

This concludes Part II of our review of The Procurement Game Plan. In Part III, after a short break, we’ll discuss managing supplier relationships, measuring performance, and improving performance.