I was watching the recent discussion and failed negotiations between Zelenskyy, Trump and JD Vance at the White House. It went badly. For everybody. And I think that the set up could only have gone badly. It also reminded me of a few excellent relationships I’ve had with customers and/or suppliers which have been spoiled by changes of leadership, so I thought it worth a bit of discussion here. I’ve also had relationships sail along happily, or even improve, with leadership changes. So a change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are definitely some traps and characters to watch out for.
This is especially true if you sell a complex service, like branding, business consultancy, software design, development and similar.
Misunderstanding your service is the biggest issue
The person who hired you, who did all the research, and looked into everything has now gone. Their knowledge has left the institution they worked for, and if the replacement doesn’t have this knowledge or reasonable past experience for this, then you have a potential problem. They may have a very different set of expectations for a given expenditure than their predecessor.
This isn’t a big problem if they’re aware of these limitations and are willing to listen and understand. If they can be walked through what you’ve done, and why certain trade offs happened then there’s scope for understanding.
But if they are coming from a position of thinking they already know everything about your service, then you could really face some trouble. How do you teach the unteachable? You can’t. It’s as easy as trying to explain to an Everton fan that Liverpool is a better team. Or vice versa.
But if they don’t understand your service properly, you’re going to run into the following characters:
The ‘negotiator’
This is a person brought in by management as a negotiator. They’ve sold them some great stories about all the deals they’ve closed, the great prices they’ve achieved, and how brilliant they are in business to business negotiations. However, if they have a knowledge gap, they cannot negotiate effectively. So they come in with various strategies to try to save money, because that’s all they can really offer to the boss. Not getting more for their money, or a better future service. Savings. It’s always just about savings.
What they’ll do is to try to find every possible weak point in the service or system you provide. A laundry list of deficiencies. One example we had, they were comparing our custom built software with Microsoft’s Excel. Although our software had led to some huge efficiency savings in their organisation, they were frustrated that it didn’t have, for example, an undo feature if somebody accidentally ran a bulk delete. Of course, we’d thought of that, with soft deletes and could restore most mistakes quite easily, but it was more of a process than CTRL+Z (CMD+Z for Mac preferrers) because you know, you have to be careful with business critical data – and this was very much a business critical system.
But it didn’t matter. I could explain every benefit, every strength, and what it came down to is that they wanted to spend less, but we couldn’t go below a threshold and make any profit whilst maintaining and hosting the system to our standards. The negotiations got rather stuck, and instead of continuing with a sensible retainer everything end up having to be charged and costed individually – and once you get to that stage everything ends up costing more because you have to clear the cost and risk of pricing. I don’t personally think it’s a good format for a working relationship, because every time I spend two hours pricing up a job, writing a quote, and dealing with comms, often for something worth less than a grand, and then get ghosted by the client, I just find myself losing the will to work with them when there are better customers to deal with.
The ‘sneak’
These are an interesting type. They often do everything to sneak past official channels, often directly contacting team members rather than using support, in order to try and sneak little bits of work through without paying for them. This can work in the very short term, as a lot of people are natural pleasers and they think that keeping the customer happy is the most important thing possible.
The worst, however, is the one who tries to directly hire your team members to work for them. This is a breach of contract, so we always terminate a customer who tries this on. It’s a simple red line and a breach of trust.
The ‘bully’ with a sidekick
These are the worst, and the closest to what I saw going on in the White House. In essence, you have a new leader (not necessarily the top boss, just of the project on the client side) who thinks a bit like the negotiator archetype that belittling everything you do is the way to get the most out of you.
One of the key problems here is that they all think everyone is the same – because they will seek the largest margin possible, that’s what you are also trying to do. So they always think that you have something to give. Something they can negotiate. For example, you may work on a gross margin of 30%, necessary in a complex service business as a bare minimum because of training and downtime costs. But they believe you’re working on a 100% margin because that’s what they always try and do. So they’ll be trying to shave your margin down as much as possible even though there’s nothing for you to shave without putting your business at risk.
Meanwhile, they often won’t give you the security of a solid, long term contract.
In meeting trying to work out a contract, they will stomp around, bang the table, expect you to be grateful for the money they’ve spent with you in the past, and generally act like entitled children. They will always argue if something is deemed out of contract, and at each point they’ll find a way to try to make you feel smaller and less important.
And then you have their sidekick. Like JD Vance, they’re suck ups who will throw in weird bombs to throw you off your stride just as you think you’re formulating a response that doesn’t cause more trouble.
In my experience, if you have something that other people could do, it’s better to walk away from this kind of relationship. If, however, you have something unique… just charge like a wounded rhino. Make them pay. Because they’re actually the ones in a weak poisition.
However, like Zelenskyy, you’re likely wanting their money, which they have, in return for your creativity – which they don’t have. When work is tight, walking away is a privilege that not all of us have.
So how to cope?
Become super transactional. If it’s not in the contract, you don’t do it. If their bills are overdue, you use the contract term that allows you to not provide a service that month (you do have that, right?), and that’s your primary strength – the contract and your backbone. Ultimately, you have something they want. They’re bullying you because they think you’re struggling for options. The truth is that you almost certainly could find another customer – and you must be looking for those too.
Being like Zelenskyy, and stating that things could go badly if they don’t consider your relationship more carefully won’t work, sadly. These are not listening people. They’re transactional, and that’s how you must be in return. Either that or just don’t work with them.
Your strategy
Care. Care about the customer. Care about the new leader you’re dealing with. But not thaaaaat much, to use a phrase by master US negotiatior Herb Cohen. You always have to know your boundaries, what the cut off points are, and stick to them. Bullies even appreciate the certainty. They know what they’re dealing with then. And you can be quite open about it.
Zelenskyy actually did that brilliantly in his negotiation with the US government team. He cares passionately about his country. He cares to give a good deal to the US. But it absolutely had to come with security guarantees that would give protection to his country from Russia. That was his line. Everything else in the televised address was just theatre and posturing. It was there to make Trump and JD Vance look better, in their loss of the deal. And that was it.
So what Zelenskyy now has is a strengthened relationship with the rest of Europe, which seems to be founded on mutual respect. And Europe has decided that it’s time to be a little less dependent on the USA. This is likely good for Europe, and bad for the USA – because in the past, the USA has done very well out of running what I consider to be lots of state sized protection rackets. It’s used it as a way of project hard military power around the world, and using it. Countries don’t really have allies – they have interests. The USA needs certain things to be kept at bay, to get some resources at bargain prices, and to keep its currency strong so it can buy foreign goods at what are, effectively, bargain prices.
A bit about the best relationships
The best relationships are the ones that acknowledge each other’s dependency on one another. That you, the creative supplier are not delivering a commoditised good such as a washing machine or pencils, and a client adds and gains value from your work. Between you, you increase the value of the world in a way that neither could do on your own. By working together, you maximise value to a mutual benefit.
The two parties should also both know what the other side is doing, why, and what the short and long term benefits are. This way they lift each other up!
That’s partnership. And these are my favourite relationships. They’re less stressful, we deliver our best work, and everyone tends to be happy.
