Ambition Was Not the Problem. Control Was.
Most companies enter negotiations with a clear price target. But negotiations are not just about price — they are about shaping the total business plan across price, promotions, and growth investments simultaneously. The difference between a good outcome and a damaging one is often not the opening position. It is the ability to manage the full P&L impact of dozens of interdependent decisions, in real time, across a complex customer base.
For the Magnum team in France, this was precisely the challenge. Ambition was not in short supply. But the commercial environment was demanding: multiple moving variables across customers, the need for pricing consistency within France, and the added complexity of alignment across European buying alliances — where a decision made in one market can have unintended consequences in another.
Without a structured way to see the combined effect of each commercial lever, negotiations risk becoming reactive. Individual concessions seem manageable in isolation. The aggregate P&L impact is only visible too late.
"The challenge wasn't defining ambition — it was maintaining control over the full value equation while managing the complexity of a multi-customer, multi-market negotiation cycle."
From Reactive Discussions to Deliberate Trade-Offs
We worked alongside the Magnum France team throughout the negotiation process — not as an external adviser handing over a framework, but as an active part of the commercial engine.
The work centred on three interconnected dimensions:
01 — A Negotiation Tracker Built Around P&L Impact
At the core of the engagement was a negotiation tracker that translated every commercial decision into its full P&L consequence. Price moves, promotional investments, volume growth assumptions — instead of being managed as separate conversations, they were consolidated into a single view that made trade-offs explicit and comparable across customers.
This shifted the team's working mode. Rather than responding to retailer demands with isolated concessions, they could assess in real time whether additional investment was justified by incremental value — and where to push back, hold firm, or reallocate.
02 — Scenario Building and Offer Construction
Throughout the negotiation cycle, we supported the team on offer construction, scenario modelling and profit pool simulation. Each move was stress-tested against its full financial impact before it reached the table. This included actively engineering positive mix effects — ensuring that volume growth, where it was conceded, came from the right parts of the portfolio.
03 — Cross-Customer and Cross-Market Consistency
Individual customer negotiations do not happen in isolation. We consolidated views across accounts to give the team a total market perspective — identifying where decisions risked creating unintended price gaps within France, and where they needed to be calibrated against broader European buying alliance dynamics. Consistency at this level is rarely managed well under negotiation pressure. We built the structure to make it manageable.
A Negotiation Season Managed With Control — Not Luck
What changed was not just the outcome of a single negotiation season. It was the way the team approached the process. Negotiations shifted from isolated price discussions to a managed, real-time exercise in total value creation — with the structure, visibility and discipline to make that repeatable.