Essential strategies for contract negotiations
Jinfo Blog

By Stephen Phillips

Abstract

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In September 2025, Jinfo hosted a "Contract negotiation role-play" Community session.

It featured Dan McGovern, former Global Head of Sales for a major vendor, who recently moved to the buy-side.

In the role play, Dan played a vendor representative, recreating two realistic negotiating scenarios, with client representatives being played by two Jinfo Subscription attendees.

The two scenarios reflected genuine negotiating challenges:

• a vendor that was taken over by private equity (PE) and demanding mandatory enterprise licensing
• a vendor seeking a 20% price increase for GenAI enhancements.

The role play demonstrated successful negotiation strategies that did not rely on adversarial tactics.

Instead, they emphasised the need for:

• comprehensive preparation
• strong relationship building
• strategic alignment

... to secure outcomes beneficial to both sides.

As one attendee reflected after the event:

"Thank you so much for the opportunity to join yesterday's Community session. I found it incredibly insightful and engaging.

The role-play, in particular, was excellent, and really highlighted how we are all grappling with similar challenges. Whether it's from the vendor side, where private equity owners are exerting pressure, or from the procurement side, where we are dealing with increasing cost pressures."

Our new report "Contract negotiation role play – analysis and practical strategies for your negotiations" provides a detailed analysis of the six main strategic levers that emerged during role play.

Here are two strategic takeaways from the report:

1. Understand vendor incentives and structure
   
   Clients should investigate and fully understand the vendor's internal structure and account prioritisation (e.g., whether the client is perceived as strategic or mid-market).
   
   Knowing the vendor's ownership, especially if they are private-equity (PE) backed, is critical. PE firms often impose aggressive growth targets. This objective directly informs the negotiation tone and timing imposed by the vendor representative.
   
   Knowing these internal pressures also allows you to strategically align with the vendor's senior management goals in order to secure better pricing, such as multi-year commitments, or non-financial value partnerships.
   
   
2. Qualify new technology investment
   
   When confronting a price increase driven by new features, such as AI, challenge the vendor by defining the enhancement as simply the vendor's "cost of doing business".
   
   Continuous product development and the integration of competitive features are necessary for a vendor to remain viable in the market. This competitive necessity should not be used to justify a significant cost uplift for you.
   
   Furthermore, when considering technology developments, managers must critically determine the complexity of deployment: for example will it require additional training, or will the product be accessed via a portal or require integration into your firewall?  Both of these examples would necessitate additional work for the client.
   
   These transformation costs are unlikely to be visible to the vendor, but can add a significant actual premium to the cost of the product.  Offsetting these incremental costs can be used as a lever to secure better pricing.

This is just a taste of the value taken from the session and published in our new report.

Read all six strategies, including leveraging internal approval thresholds and displacement opportunities, in our new comprehensive report:

• "Contract negotiation role play – analysis and practical strategies for your negotiations"

See also these other useful Jinfo Subscription reports:

• "Improve outcomes from your vendor negotiations"
• "The vendor negotiation checklist"

We truly welcome your feedback on these reports.

If your organisation doesn't yet have a Jinfo Subscription, explore its actionable strategies.

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