posts By RED BEAR

In many procurement organizations, supplier negotiations still orbit around what suppliers say they want: price, terms, volume, and contractual protections. Teams respond to these wants because they’re visible, tangible, and easy to document.

Most sellers treat customer requests as fixed requirements. More units. Faster delivery. Lower price. A new term in the contract.

In every negotiation, power is present. But in most organizations, it's misunderstood, underestimated, or misused.

Procurement teams face an impossible brief: cut costs, lift quality, speed delivery, and preserve supplier partnerships. The instinct for many procurement organizations is to push harder for demand, exact specs, to threaten auctions, and insist on steep price cuts. The result is that procurement creates the wrong kind of transactional pressure that undervalues the supplier relationship and closes...

Negotiation tension is the constructive pressure that reveals hidden value between parties.

This post continues our exploration of the RED BEAR Negotiation Principles. These are the core ideas that help organizations build more profitable agreements through value, not price. In this installment, we focus on Principle 3: Managing Information Skillfully and the discipline that turns curiosity into control and conversations into outcomes.

Procurement sits at the crossroads of value creation. Across every supplier conversation, sourcing decision, and partnership, all value is negotiated… or not.

You invested in negotiation training. Your team showed up, got inspired, and left the workshop fired up. Fast forward three months, and you’re still seeing the same pricing concessions, weak margins, and lost opportunities. The problem isn’t your people. It’s the training model.

Preparation starts with insight, knowing supplier capabilities, market dynamics, and your true leverage before any conversation begins.