Consortia – the other side
Jason Busch over on SpendMatters was talking recently about consortiums. He was pretty positive about them – and praised their use as the “easiest way to save money while improving internal customer satisfaction inside a company”. I’m not as convinced. A few years ago, I was working for an organization that wanted to join a [...]
Timing is everything in your purchase
So it’s no secret than I’m an Apple fan… and they released the new iPhone 3G yesterday. On dozens of message boards across the world, people are actually complaining that they own a 2G iPhone (the original model) and that Apple won’t upgrade them to the 3G for free. WHAT?!? Do we expect this kind [...]
Do the Unthinkable
In the movie version of negotiation, Party A makes an offer, Party B makes a counter offer (rejecting the first offer). The first set of offers are the extremes, say for example, really low for Party A and really high for Party B. Then, through a series of back and forth discussions, each party slowly [...]
CIO Forum this week
This Tuesday through Friday, I’ll be onboard the Norwegian Dawn for the 2008 CIO Forum. I’m participating on a 2-person panel talking about strategies for receiving more value from your IT-related purchases. We’re going to cover the Five Fundamental Skills for Effective Negotiation and you’ll even get a free copy of the Software License Risk [...]
Incentives
I’ve written before about the use of Service Level Agreements and my general feeling is that if you have an agreement to perform, you perform per the terms of the agreement. In other words, if you buy an hour of my time, I give you an hour for my hourly fee. Within that hour, I [...]
Firesale
Today is April 1, the day after most corporations close their first quarter. So, I’m guessing that more than a few of you just finished a pretty strong push to get a few deals done by 5pm yesterday. Most folks call them firesales – the financial incentives made by vendors to close out their quarterly [...]
Price Control
Ever felt like you had no negotiation power when it comes to price? How would you like to have enough power to not only affect the price of A vendor, but ALL vendors? Well, there’s at least one buyer. Wal-Mart. Their purchasing power is the stuff legends are made of… and here they go again. [...]
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