How to Prep for a Winning Negotiation

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2012 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2012

The potential risk of supply chain disruption has never been greater. In fact, it’s become the new normal, say authors and educators Robert Trent and Greg Schlegel. The problem for many companies is that they are ill prepared to handle a disruption should one occur. This article argues for a new set of risk management techniques in a world where heightened supply chain risk has become a fact of business life.

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Although supply chain managers today have access to a wide range of e-sourcing and auction technology tools, they still use conventional negotiations as the way to establish or adjust the business relationships. Most senior procurement professionals would agree that this is the preferred way to handle alliances and strategic supplier relationships, which collectively account for a large proportion of supply chain spending.

In my many years of leading negotiations on behalf of Fortune 100 companies, and in training corporate and conference audiences on best practices in negotiations, I’ve become impressed with the levels of preparation of the typical supplier negotiating team compared to their procurement opponents. It’s apparent that those suppliers’ teams are making the time to cover every possibility they can think of. The team on the other side of the table? Not so much.

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