| 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. |