Negotiation? What Negotiation?

One of our clients asked for a meeting the other day. They were interested in partnering with us on a recycling project and the campaign would last 6 months.

On the morning of this fairly important meeting I am so excited that I wore a suit, something I rarely do. Are you getting that this is an important meeting? The GM gets excited too. She decides this is just the type of meeting a GM should be involved in; she wore Crocs.

I get a little nervous. It’s never good when The GM gets involved in a negotiation. She has been known to give away our pot of money.

We walk into the meeting and I am in good spirits because I know we have the upper hand. The conversation begins with The City is pitching their idea. It is really good and we could get a great deal of exposure. And that’s when it happened. The GM said “What I am thinking is 50% off of all ads, with free color, in all of our papers, for as long as you want.” I am paraphrasing, but essentially that is exactly what she said.

Lets be clear. The City had not asked for a discount, they had asked for a partnership. Our name would be on everything they did related to this recycling campaign and all they asked us for was 25% of printing costs for the billboards (there were billboards!!!). Now here I give The City a ton of credit. They responded by attempting to give her a way out of the gaffe by saying, “What about the other promotional material around town?” To which The GM responded, “We are not interested.” My jaw bounced off of the conference room table 3 times before I could stop it!

Lets recap:
1) We are getting only 50% of the advertising revenue, when we could have gotten 100%. and
2) We will not be included in any of the massive publicity all over the city for the next 6 months.

Smooth… that was wickedly smooth.

If we had charged 100% for the ads, it would have more than paid for the billboards. As we walked out of the meeting The GM remarked on how wondefully the meeting had gone. I should really pay more attention to my boss and her mad negotiation skills.