Issue #67

The Alarming Mr Charming

This week's story is about having to use an extreme negotiation tactic or risk losing the deal, and my mind.

I was knee-deep in contract talks for a $10 million supply chain transformation project. This was a huge deal for both our companies.

With that kind of money on the line, you’d think we’d be working as partners, right? The stakes being too high for games. Everyone saw that.

Well, everyone except one guy—the new procurement director on their side. Let’s call him Mr. Charming.

Mr. Charming clearly had something to prove. He was all about finding problems, not solutions.

The contract terms? He picked them apart just to look important.

We were on a tight deadline because our investment fund for big projects was closing in two weeks. After that, nothing would get done until next year.

And their existing warehouse leases were ending soon. This was urgent for both of us, but Mr. Charming didn't care.

He wanted to drag it out, playing games to wear us down.

His demands were ridiculous, like wanting to pay in dollars when everyone in Europe uses euros.

Or insisting on 90 days credit when we’d already aligned payment terms with their business cycle to make things easier for them and us.

I’d been a procurement director myself, and I knew this guy was out of his depth. He was acting like a big shot but didn’t understand how things work at this level.

He just wanted to flex his authority, rejecting every suggestion we made without any reason.

It was clear: he had to go. I suggested to the customer that he was a disruptive actor, but they seemed quite happy for him to destroy the project.

I think they were afraid of his weird and frequent outbursts of temper.

Then came the breakthrough.

There was a clause in the contract about termination. It said either side could end the deal if the other failed to hold up their end, with 90 days notice.

But Mr. Charming wanted it reduced to 30 days. He thought it would give them more control, let them keep us on our toes.

What he didn’t realize was that it would take his company at least three months to find a new supplier, two months to refine and implement a new solution, and another month to sort out the transfer of goods and data.

He should’ve been asking to extend that period, not shorten it.

If the relationship ever did break down, it would be to our advantage to get them out of our facilities as quickly as possible, so we could get a new customer in.

This was my chance.

I agreed to the 30 day period, but only if they guaranteed they’d clear out of our facilities within that time. Then, I put a rough cost on the chaos they’d create trying to meet that deadline, twice our yearly invoice.

I circulated the impact assessment to the joint steering board and waited.

No fireworks. No objections. The clause was changed to say 120 days and I never heard from Mr. Charming again.

Months later, I saw he’d moved on to another job.

Lucky them.

The lesson? People like this have predictable patterns.

Mr. Charming always wanted to cut - cut costs, cut time, cut corners. All I did was let him trap himself with his own stubbornness.

Sometimes, the best move is to set the stage and let their own foolishness do the rest.

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You get just as many "players" in sales teams as you do in procurement departments, here is how to deal with them so they their constant BS doesn't wear you down:

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