All of these scary things you're talking about mean the same thing. "Give us a discount or we're not going to give you a purchase order".
From what I can tell from dealing with this problem (not nearly as directly as my business partners, but enough), there are basically just a few things you can productively do:
* Walk. A lot of times, the company will come back, and procurements is bluffing.
* Cave. You need the money enough to permanently sacrifice your rate at the client. You should really avoid doing this, because it is extraordinarily difficult to recover a concession on your rate.
* Convert to budget discussion. Try to get procurements to talk about a "number" they want to hit across the project (you can't do this with hourly billing HEY WAIT MAYBE THAT HOURLY BILLING STUFF ISN'T SUCH A GOOD IDEA AFTE--- anyways). Now take that number back to the real buyers and massage the scope of the project.
* Trade. Procurements wants a discount, you want a committed pipeline of work, a customer reference, or whatever. Again: if you're negotiating, make sure it's on the project rate, not the hourly.
You do not need a nontechnical cofounder to understand this stuff. You just need to know the role of procurements and you need to truly grok positioning.
Comments
All of these scary things you're talking about mean the same thing. "Give us a discount or we're not going to give you a purchase order".
From what I can tell from dealing with this problem (not nearly as directly as my business partners, but enough), there are basically just a few things you can productively do:
* Walk. A lot of times, the company will come back, and procurements is bluffing.
* Cave. You need the money enough to permanently sacrifice your rate at the client. You should really avoid doing this, because it is extraordinarily difficult to recover a concession on your rate.
* Convert to budget discussion. Try to get procurements to talk about a "number" they want to hit across the project (you can't do this with hourly billing HEY WAIT MAYBE THAT HOURLY BILLING STUFF ISN'T SUCH A GOOD IDEA AFTE--- anyways). Now take that number back to the real buyers and massage the scope of the project.
* Trade. Procurements wants a discount, you want a committed pipeline of work, a customer reference, or whatever. Again: if you're negotiating, make sure it's on the project rate, not the hourly.
You do not need a nontechnical cofounder to understand this stuff. You just need to know the role of procurements and you need to truly grok positioning.