Have you ever used a major incident as a bargaining chip to secure better deals from your vendors? How do you leverage a negative situation to negotiate more favorable terms?
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Worldwide Strategy & Portfolio, Cross Industry (Supply Chain, ESG, Engineering, Customer Experience, Intelligence Automation, ERP) in Manufacturing13 days ago
Yes! Anytime you're looking at contract language, the relationship is already at a point where there is contention or conflict. If you're looking at disaster recovery, understanding what you can hold them accountable to is 100% a bargaining tool for moving forward. It's quite common, especially with professional services, but also for vendors at that level. Hopefully, it never gets there, but I would definitely use it as a bargaining tool. Additionally, leverage it with your next contract to ensure they have the pieces in place that you didn't get from your former vendor. This applies not only to the current vendor but also to the incumbent.Vice President - Enterprise Platforms & Cybersecurity in Energy and Utilities13 days ago
Absolutely! When the CrowdStrike issue was happening, we were in negotiations on their next-gen SIM, and I was actively texting my sales rep. The price went down. Another dollar, the price went down again. I absolutely used it to my advantage. I explain to the vendor, “If I'm willing to commit to you, I need to explain to my leadership why I'm sticking with you. You need to come to the table and pony up a little bit to pay your pittance.”Director of IT13 days ago
We usually have a punitive clause baked in to our contract agreements, and so there's that. If it's a vendor to whom we otherwise see good value and the incident is regarded as rare, we would either demand the root cause addressed either through the vendor's internal support or if resolving the incident required more resources to execute the contract, we could use that so that we could get the additional resourcing at the old cost.