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It is enjoyable to negotiate with people who view "concession" in this sense. You can get them to agree to terms of greater business value in exchange for terms
by erdevs 10y ago
It is enjoyable to negotiate with people who view "concession" in this sense. You can get them to agree to terms of greater business value in exchange for terms of smaller business value, and they don't even think they "conceded" a thing!
It's a concession. Hootsuite didn't want to cover the credit card fees. But they ended up doing so. There wasn't even a proportional split (eg "let's each cover our portion of the credit card fees, according to our revenue share split") or a split of any kind. There was a separate concession by the vendor to cover steak dinners (of lesser value, and only a fixed cost) in exchange for Hootsuite's credit card fee concession... but that does not somehow make Hootsuite's concession a non-concession.
In any case, no point in debating terminology. Hootsuite gave up more value than they gained, but both parties got the deal done and are happy with it, so they made the right call in the end (conceding vs blowing the deal up). It's just not an amazing or widely applicable negotiation technique and, if anything, the vendor likely employed the better technique here.
- gregmac 10y agoMaybe in a couple months we'll see the reciprocal article: "How we saved thousands of dollars of credit card fees by paying for a couple steaks"
- bisby 10y agoIf credit card fees are $2,000 for every $100,000 of revenue (assuming 2% and all revenue through CCs), how is that different than 450$ for every $100,000 of revenue. This was not a 1 time dinner, it was "up to 0.45% of revenue will be spent on steak dinners" In the end it's still a concession, 0.45% is less than 2%, and a vendor might spend that much for schmoozing and maintaining business relationships anyway, but I would say its the same kind of cost as credit card fees.