Insights to the often missed opportunity to win with renewals, including a 5-Point technical checklist for better understanding your renewals.

How to achieve results in strategic sourcing projects by buildind the stool of success. John, a friend and strategic sourcing colleague, was struggling with how to finish vendor negotiation with a positive outcome. He was struggling to guide the business stakeholder…

A recent Bitdefender article said one in ten firms will lose $10MM from cyberattack and, as a result, greater investment in cybersecurity is being made by companies. That’s great! BUT cybersecurity firms, by the nature of the service they provide, may represent a greater security risk than ‘normal’ vendors. Here’s a story to illustrate what I mean.

A recent CPO article by Mark Lotti quipped, "…a vendor's cyber risk becomes the client's cyber risk".  The sheer number of breaches and data loss make this statement ring true, now more than ever.  The question is, how do you manage your vendors’ risks to keep your data secure?

The fast-technological evolution means that nearly every aspect of your business is experiencing change in some way, and vendor management is no different. When it comes to procurement and vendor management in the digital age, look out—and be ready—for these emerging technologies and trends.

A look inside the four results (not titled ‘best price’) you want in negotiating every deal you ever do.  

Adversarial or collaborative? Here’s a story about a recent negotiation where the vendor representative took a very adversarial approach. Let’s see how it worked out for them…

Adversarial or collaborative? Here’s a story about a recent negotiation where the vendor representative took a very adversarial approach. Let’s see how it worked out for them…

This is the third and final blog in our POWW series where we discuss the WW for Win-Win.

Welcome to the Seprio Blog, a place where you will (hopefully) find pearls useful in protecting your business priorities, where we tell stories and talk about best practices in vendor management, negotiating, and contracting better. Today’s post focuses on the O in POWW: Objectivity.

Welcome to the Seprio Blog, a place where you will (hopefully) find pearls useful in protecting your business priorities, where we tell stories and talk about best practices in vendor management, negotiating, and contracting better. I’m your host and Seprio Master Certified Negotiator, Patrick Bohnenkamp. Today’s post is the first in a three-part series on the tenets of best practice negotiating.

Plus a 3-Part Data Protection Negotiation Strategy

5 Practical Tips For Protecting Your Business Priorities With The Right Agreement

Let’s get right to it: price is not pricing when it comes to many technology contracts. Pricing is the basis for determining the price you pay. Simple, not easy. After you and your team get past the “warmth” of the proposal evaluation, the contract comes. That’s often when things get considerably colder. Here are 3 tips for revealing the real price in complex technology contracts.

It’s no secret the hot spot for savings within healthcare organizations has become their extensive purchased services and outsourcing agreements.  While the supply savings rock has already been turned over and squeezed for every dollar, many untapped savings are lying within an organization’s purchased services contracts.  However, the biggest challenge in finding savings in purchased services is discovered as soon as the analysis begins, “…how do I even know if this is a good deal?”

Year after year Seprio meets with current and prospective customers to talk about their organization’s savings goals.  Each customer is unique in many ways, however everyone’s initiatives have the same unit of measure, dollars.  .

Answer the questions and keep track of your score to see how you stack up.

Achieving contractual success in a volatile marketplace like healthcare requires the vision to continually shape and guide the negotiation process.  In lock step, one needs to be able to foster and keep a positive vendor / customer relationship, but still drive the desired outcomes. This needs to be done despite the obstacles that are in your way (high switching costs / restrictive contracts) and the obstacles that are placed in your way (vendor imposed conditions) after your goals and objectives are defined.

To meet an annual goal is the daily grind, but what about sustained multi-year cost savings? Producing savings in the operational expenditures is an important first step, however what about setting up your organization’s contracts and pricing for success from the beginning?

It’s difficult to say how many times we’ve been asked this question, more than 100 probably even more than 1,000.  Back in the “old Microsoft days…” the licensing schemes were so complex that it was literally necessary to map a 6 year strategy in order to completely optimize a licensing program.  This isn’t the case anymore, nor is it with the other large box software/services companies either.  While it seems very trite, the devil really is in the details.  Too often organizations see these spends happening so frequently that they never take the time to get their arms around it as a collective organization.