Habit is not a strategy: Inside the Beroe Negotiations Customer Masterclass with Intel

Mark Whelan has a system for Saturday night takeout. There are five people in his house, and five answers give you five options. So, he and his wife let the kids choose between two, both of which the parents are happy with. Nobody loses, and dinner gets ordered. 

It’s a small domestic trick, but it sums up most of what came up at our latest Beroe Customer Masterclass. A negotiation is usually won or lost long before anyone sits down with a supplier, in how the choice is framed, who is committed to what, and what “value” has been agreed to mean. 

Mark leads high-value, high-complexity commercial negotiations at Intel as Director, Contracts & Negotiations, Global Supply Chain Operations CoE. He was joined by Christian Paul, VP Negotiation & Agentic AI Products at Beroe. Subul Tanveer from Beroe’s Product Marketing team moderated, walking our speakers through the questions that attendees had submitted at registration. 

The conversation covered how to move from price to total value – including preparation, strategy, stakeholder commitment, and Total Value of Ownership (TVO), with three live polls along the way.

Sharpen the axe, then plan for the bad paths

Mark opens Intel’s internal negotiation training with a line attributed to Abraham Lincoln: given six hours to chop down a tree, spend the first four sharpening the axe – in other words: preparation. For him, good preparation comes down to three things. 

1. Align internally and write it down. Agree the objectives and “who can win what” before going to market. If you only figure that out near the end, it’s already too late. 

2. Challenge the assumptions. “We must stay with supplier A” is a starting position, not a fact. Testing it with the business is where your leverage begins. 

3. Know your leverage and your fallbacks. Understand your best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) before you need it. 

Christian warned that many teams prepare by playing the negotiation through in their heads along the happy path: we say this, they say that, we close. The best preparation plays out the other branches too, especially the ones where you don’t hold the better cards. That matters even more when there is only one supplier on the other side. 

He also pointed out that procurement always runs two negotiations, one internal with stakeholders and one external with the market. You won’t win every point internally. But the more aligned you are when that first negotiation ends, the more leverage you take into the second. Even in single-supplier deals, it pays to find out whether there is a point where you can walk away. “The best power in negotiation is the power to say no,” Christian said, and he sees a surprising number of single-supplier negotiations where that point isn’t recognized. 

The first poll of the session backed this up. Asked what most reduces negotiation success, 40% of attendees chose stakeholders limiting competition, ahead of time to prepare (33%), supply shortages (13%), and deal complexity (10%). 

On the data side, Christian’s observation was that most teams prepare category data and stop there. The missing half is supplier data: what situation the supplier is in, and what they want from this deal beyond a solid margin. That helps in a single-supplier negotiation, and it helps just as much when several suppliers are competing.

A lot of complexity is self-inflicted 

An attendee asked how to streamline complex negotiations. Mark answered with a story. A few years ago, he supported a deal where three or four suppliers were each delivering across three different scopes. The stakeholders’ reason was simple: they wanted a backup. The side effect was that nobody could compete properly for anything. 

The team proposed making each scope winnable on its own. A supplier could go from holding a small slice of three scopes to a large share of one, or even two whole scopes. The business still kept more than one supplier, the allocation got far simpler, and competition came back. It took plenty of back and forth, which is exactly why Mark wants the must-haves separated from the nice-to-haves early, documented, and built into the negotiation design. 

Christian came at complexity from the other side. Teams pulling RFx data out of fragmented, multi-ERP systems often cut the scope down hard just to make the event manageable. That’s understandable, since nobody can run an RFx with every possible option. But strip out questions such as “what would you offer for more volume, or a longer contract?” and you have quietly cut your own leverage. Learning what suppliers want three days before signing the contract is too late. The RFx is the place to learn it.

Habit is not a strategy

“Habit itself is not a strategy,” Christian said. He sees teams that run one auction format brilliantly and then run it everywhere, and teams that always negotiate by picking holes in the supplier’s cost base. Both work until suppliers notice. “If you always do the same thing, your suppliers will understand – and they will use it to their advantage.” 

His way of choosing splits on whether you have competition: 

• Competitive negotiations are about depth. The job is picking the right power tool, meaning the mechanism you put suppliers into. The market can lower cost, raise quality and, most usefully, reveal information, for example through a well-designed first round before the final negotiation. 

• Single-supplier negotiations are about breadth. Decide whether this is positional (a should-cost negotiation), collaborative (a gain share) or both, choose your levers, and build a game plan that covers every eventuality. 

Mark sees the same habit from a different angle. When one negotiation design works well, say a qualifying round followed by a reverse Dutch auction, word gets around and colleagues ask for “one of those” on their own bid. He compares it to asking for a hammer and a drill without knowing what the job is. The starting point is always the objective and your alternatives. The value, as he put it, is in the small tweaks that make each design fit its specific deal. 

The second poll asked who chooses the negotiation strategy. 59% said the category manager, 18% a specialist buyer or internal team, and 8% the stakeholders.

Commitment is your mandate to negotiate 

“Commitment in negotiation is fundamental to the ability to generate leverage,” Mark said, and the people he works with hear it every day. He asks stakeholders to walk him through exactly how they will decide, up front. If he knows that, he becomes a force multiplier for what they want. If a stakeholder changes their mind at the last minute, he will have built a negotiation that can’t deliver. 

He would much rather hear early on that only one of five suppliers really has a shot. The alternative is fake competition. Four suppliers waste their time, the negotiation team wastes its time, and the team loses credibility. Next time those suppliers are told they have a real chance of winning, they won’t believe it. 

Where there’s doubt, Mark’s team runs a “who can win what” exercise and gets it in writing. That’s often the moment hidden preferences come out: once people have to put their name to an allocation, someone admits they’re not keen on supplier B. With real commitment in place, the team can attach consequences, such as “only the top two bidders go through to round two”. Compare that with “give us your best bid and we’ll get back to you”, which costs the supplier nothing. 

Christian put a number on it. Even when the stakeholders are aligned, there’s a second layer of commitment in how you award the deal. Telling suppliers “if you win, you have the business” is worth 2–4% extra savings, all else equal, compared with “if you win, you’ll lead, and I’ll argue for you at the roundtable afterwards”. That’s 2–4% on top of the savings, not 2–4% in total. 

There’s a second benefit. Forcing the organization to commit brings stakeholders’ concerns into the open. Often there’s a cheaper fix than the one on the table: insuring against the feared outcome can cost far less than going with a supplier who is 20% more expensive.

When the incumbent knows they’re hard to replace 

Another attendee asked how to build leverage with an incumbent who knows they’re difficult to replace. These are some of the toughest negotiations, Mark said, and they start with honesty internally: if there’s no short-term alternative, admit it. Then map how much of the business is genuinely locked in, and for how long. Some scopes may be movable now. Others may need a runway of a couple of quarters or a couple of years, and that’s time to build credible alternatives. 

Next, put yourself in the supplier’s position. Their financials will tell you about cash flow, and the salesperson’s bonus and deadlines will tell you about timing. From there, decide on carrots and sticks. The carrots could take the shape of a longer agreement, a foothold in another part of the business, in exchange for better pricing, flexibility or capacity. The sticks are the alternatives you have. Should-cost modeling tells you how competitive the incumbent really is. 

The third poll asked how attendees persuade stakeholders to at least consider non-incumbents. 94% said they quantify the cost of staying with the incumbent. 11% ask nicely, and 5% admitted to plotting, scheming and escalating. Christian suspects the real-world share of that last group is higher. His argument for the numbers: if switching means five people spending two weeks briefing a new supplier, and the price gap on a $100 million deal is $20 million, the trade-off is not a hard one. 

Mark added that the framing matters. “How much money are you prepared to leave on the table?” draws a different reaction to “the cost of staying”. And escalation, done properly, is part of the plan. His teams negotiate with one voice: a single nominated spokesperson, no side negotiations, no renegotiating after the fact. They brief management two or three levels up that the supplier may escalate, and hand them the message to play back. That beats a senior VP getting a surprise phone call and asking what on earth is going on.

Put a dollar figure on value, not a score 

For Christian, TVO means taking every non-price difference between offers and expressing it in money, rather than leaving it in a scoring sheet. A shorter lead time, a higher service level, a supplier who embeds part of their team during transition: each gets a monetary value wherever possible. 

He showed what happens when it doesn’t. A team scores suppliers on 20 criteria, with 10 stakeholders rating each one, and weights price and quality 50/50. It sounds perfectly reasonable. But on a contract of roughly $10 million, that weighting quietly makes a 5-point quality gap worth about $500,000. If one supplier scores 84 and the other 89, that gap is within the margin of error, and it would be a big coincidence if it were really worth half a million. Weeks after signature, the CFO asks why the business paid $500,000 more for a supplier who scored 5 points higher somewhere in a spreadsheet. Nobody has a good answer. 

His fix starts on a sheet of paper with the stakeholders. Draw a line down the middle. List static factors suppliers can’t change, such as where their factory sits and the tariffs that come with it, on one side. On the other place the dynamic factors they can, such as lead time or service level. The static side is usually fuller, but the dynamic side is where the negotiation happens. In one recent client negotiation, the outcome was decided almost entirely by which supplier could commit to the best lead time, not by cost. 

Monetizing those factors works in two directions. Externally, suppliers can see what a faster lead time is worth to you, and build their own business case for delivering it. Internally, it turns a comfortable abstraction into a real question. “Price and quality, 50/50” gets nods. “Are we willing to pay $500,000 more for a supplier who scored 89 instead of 84?” always gets an answer, and in Christian’s experience the answer is usually that it’s far too much. 

Mark’s also offered an approach for keeping scorecards honest. Take two suppliers who both meet the requirement, one of which has every bell and whistle. If the stakeholder insists on the premium option, he asks: if the other supplier did it for free, would you take them? A yes means there is a price at which the extras stop being worth it, so now you can put a number on them. Sometimes that number is a judgment call. Sometimes it’s calculable, from transition costs, technology costs or a learning curve. Either way, he keeps the focus on the three or four things the business genuinely can’t live without. 

“I never think of negotiations in terms of price. I always think of it in terms of value,” Mark said.

Before your next negotiation 

To close, Subul asked both speakers what they would tell someone with an important negotiation next week. Mark gave three things, and Christian added two. 

1. Do your homework. Benchmarks, cost drivers, TVO, and above all your BATNA. 

2. Document the objectives. Write them down so there’s no ambiguity, and get stakeholders to put their names to them. Hold a dedicated commitment meeting if you need one. 

3. Have a plan. Don’t make it up as you go along. Know the timing, the tools and the sequence before you start. 

4. Check whether you can say no. Take five minutes to find out whether there is a point where you can genuinely walk away. 

5. Run a pre-mortem. Picture the outcome you most want to avoid, then work backward to make sure it doesn’t happen. 

Where the platform fits

Most of what Mark and Christian described is discipline rather than software: preparation, honest internal alignment, and the nerve to put a number on things. Beroe Negotiations powered by nnamu is built to make that discipline repeatable across more of your spend. It combines AI and game theory with more than €400 billion of codified negotiation data to recommend the right strategy for each event, across 11 negotiation formats, so the choice of mechanism starts from the deal rather than from habit. TVO-based evaluation turns non-price factors into money that suppliers can compete on, and a firm award commitment can be built into the event design. 

For a deeper look at building a TVO model, read The one-point win that cost 960,000 euros.

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