Nego Part I: Preparation Is Your Strongest Negotiation Tactic
- Pauwel Nuytemans
- 31 okt
- 6 minuten om te lezen
Your negotiation doesn’t start at the table. It starts months earlier, when you’re still shaping your internal plans. The better your plan, the stronger your hand when you sit down with your customer.
Yet most commercial teams still treat “negotiation prep” as a stand-alone step that kicks in right before sending the tariff letter. They focus on the price increase, not the plan behind it. The result? Reactive conversations, missed opportunities, and little real alignment.
Negotiation should go well beyond price. The goal is not just to get your increase accepted, but to land a total plan that creates value for both sides. The stronger your business plan, the easier it becomes to turn that value into mutual growth.
Start with your internal plan
In our first article “How to Unlock Value Early On,” we talked about the importance of a target framework: knowing the role each customer plays in reaching your overall business ambition. You can’t design a credible negotiation strategy if that role isn’t clear.
If a customer needs to deliver a profit reset, your plan should focus on pricing, mix, and promotion efficiency, not on listing another wave of SKUs. If another customer needs to drive volume growth, your mix of investments, promo depth, and activation will look entirely different.
That’s the first rule: create differentiated plans by customers to maximize total value.
Your first step is to capture every growth driver and risk in your business planning tool or P&L simulation (Exhibit 1). Too many companies only model the upside. Include the negatives too: category decline, delistings, cost increases, or retailer investment requests.
Most suppliers break the plan into familiar buckets:
Category: What trajectory is the category showing: growth or decline? Look at Long Term CAGR evolutions.
Customer: What’s their long-term trend?
Assortment: New launches, relaunches, range optimization.
Place: Distribution and shelving priorities.
Promotion: Frequency, depth, visibility, and execution.
Pricing/TTS: The impact of your planned list price increase or trade term changes.
Others: Anything else that drives growth, like retail media, online sales or brand activations.
Next, quantify each initiative’s financial impact on your top and bottom line, and its likelihood to land. Low-probability initiatives don’t belong in the base plan. Once mapped, simulate the resulting growth and margin to check alignment with your targets. The gaps that remain tell you where to adapt your strategy.
At this stage, you’ve got a clear internal business plan. The next challenge is turning it into a Joint Business Plan (JBP) that your customer can believe in.
Engage early
Strong negotiation prep means listening early. We advise suppliers to sit down with retailers during the summer months, well before commercial season starts.
Ask open questions:
How do they see category dynamics next year?
What are their priorities or pain points?
What does a “good partnership” look like to them?
It’s not a negotiation. It’s reconnaissance. These early talks are your best chance to understand the retailer’s view and to share first ideas about where collaboration could grow. You’ll often uncover signals of what’s feasible, what’s not, and what will require trade-offs later on.
From Business Plan to Joint Business Plan
When you draft your JBP, strip out anything purely internal: cost savings, factory efficiencies, tax effects and tailor what remains. The plan should speak the customer’s language.
If you’re launching a new brand platform, spell out what it means for them specifically:
Will they get early access or exclusivity?
How will it drive their category share?
How will it lift their basket size or store traffic?
That’s how you create “gives” and “takes.” A give might be a four-week prelaunch, or additional marketing support. A take could be extra shelf space or expanded assortment. Mapping these in advance helps you identify what can be traded later.
The most important step is translating everything into numbers that matter to them: consumer sales value and retailer margin (Exhibit 2). A great plan drives both your P&L and theirs. That’s what makes it credible.
How retailers assess you
Just as you evaluate your customers, retailers do the same for their suppliers. They compare, benchmark, and rank. Understanding how they view you is critical to understand your negotiation power later on.
Pricing & Margin
They’ll assess:
How big is your price increase? How does it compare to peers?
How has the retail margin evolved? How much inflation on supplier portfolio?
What’s your margin contribution to their overall P&L?
If the retailer’s margin is under pressure and you’re pushing another increase, expect friction. You’ll need data, not emotion, to defend your case. That’s why active retailer mix management starts after the last nego finished.
In our previous pricing newsletter, we explained how to use price index evolution, profit pool analysis, and retailer margin tracking to prepare those arguments. When you walk into the negotiation with those insights, you’re not just defending your prices, you’re showing how to make the partnership stronger.
Category Contribution
Retailers reward suppliers who drive category growth, not just brand growth. They’ll assess:
Have you contributed to category value, not just volume?
Are your plans distinctive and based on real insight?
Do you support their priorities, not just your own?
Innovation helps, but so does consistency. The strongest suppliers combine breakthrough launches with solid in-store fundamentals: promo effectiveness, visibility, distribution. Show you can do both.
Strategic Importance
They’ll assess:
Are you active in destination categories?
Is your brand equity strong enough to pull traffic?
Are you differentiated or easily replaceable?
Be honest about your positioning. Knowing where you stand versus competition helps you plan where to push and where to protect. Looking for answers to these questions will give you a foundation for your business review meeting.
Sell before you negotiate
Before negotiation season, you’ll usually host a Business Review meeting. It’s your chance to position yourself as next year’s winning supplier:
You’re a stronger, more reliable partner than competitors: how have you contributed to category and retailer growth? Think long term.
Your plan supports their business agenda: what do you have in the pipeline for next year? What’s in it for them? How does this link to their ambitions? Quantify! (Exhibit 3)
Their margin is one of your key priorities: despite pushing a price increase, you can still deliver margin for your customer. Start by identifying where the retailer makes money and where they don’t, then shape your plans around that. Focus on growing the segments that lift both your margin and theirs. Share your plans.
The more you score on these dimensions, the fewer battles you’ll face during the tariff discussion. Negotiations go smoother when both sides believe in the plan. But balance what you share: show ambition but keep a few cards for later.
Ideally, you’d align the business plan before talking numbers. But reality is different: retailers won’t commit to plans without knowing your price increase, and you won’t commit investments without volume clarity. It’s a dance. What matters is sequencing, reveal just enough to move the process forward.
What comes next
You’ve now convinced the retailer that you’re worth partnering with next year. The stage is set. But belief alone doesn’t close a deal.
In Part II of this series, we’ll move from selling to negotiating, translating ambition into action. We’ll dive into how to prepare your first negotiation meetings with precision:
Defining your negotiation variables and principles, so you know exactly where to give and where to hold.
Building a financial framework and trading model that keeps your targets intact while creating room for collaboration.
Negotiations should never be an improvisation. The groundwork you do now determines how strong you’ll stand when it matters most.
At Falcon Consulting, we help clients translate their Annual Business Plans into negotiation-ready strategies that align pricing, mix, and customer partnership.
If you want to strengthen your negotiation preparation, reach out:
Because great negotiations don’t start at the table, they start with a plan worth fighting for.
