I’m joined today by Jeanette Nyden. Jeanette is a well renowned contracts and negotiations specialist, who approaches her work with a focus on building win-win, sustainable, agreements. In fact, Jeanette was a co-author with Kate Vitasek and David Frydlinger of Getting to We: Negotiating Agreements for Highly Collaborative Relationships. Today’s podcast is the first of a two-part series that I am recording with Jeanette that will deep dive into negotiating balanced deals.
Jeanette has a fascinating background – including as a trial lawyer and professional mediator – that she applies to her work. Today, we focused on the role of procurement as the facilitator, and how Jeanette’s applies her learnings as a lawyer and mediator to pre-negotiation preparation and developing the persuasive arguments that are necessary to secure complex, yet balanced, deals.
This week, I am joined by negotiation ninja Mark Raffan. Mark leads a negotiations training business – both for buyers and sales professionals – and recently launched his own podcast – Negotiations Ninja – which I highly recommend that you check out.
We had a wide-ranging discussion on all things negotiation - from negotiation strategies and approaches, to the common pitfalls that negotiators face. What was particularly insightful was hearing how a salesperson is taught to negotiate so that we could spot those tactics, and understand when they are being used, as we sit on the opposite side of the table.
I had a blast talking to Mark, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!
My guest is Joseph Richardson. Joseph is the President and CEO of Professional Purchasing Partners which he founded in 2014, after a long spell as a practitioner. Joseph’s most recent buy-side roll was as a Head of Indirect Procurement in the Oil and Gas industry.
In our discussion, we touch on a wide range of topics, from the evolution of procurement to value beyond savings, and much more. One of the points that really resonated with me is when we talked about the notion of best-in-class procurement and benchmarking our organizations against others.
My guest on the Art of Procurement this week is my friend Johan-Peter, or JP, Teppala. JP is the CEO of the US operations of Sievo, a Finland-based procurement analytics company, encompassing spend analysis, spend forecasting, savings management and contract management.
The core of our conversation today focuses on how procurement can be the driver of what JP termed “radical transparency” through data.
We discuss three key themes:
In my mind, these are core building blocks for any catalytic procurement organization. It is hard to make a mark without good data.