You have made your decision and recommended it up the food chain, so now the fun part begins. Well, fun for some folks, anyway. For this post we’ll assume you have decided to move to a new platform. We understand some people decide not to move, but use the question of switching as a negotiating tactic. But it bears repeating that it is no bad thing to stay with your existing platform, so long as you have done the work to determine it can meet your requirements. We’re writing this paper for the people who keep telling us how unhappy they are, and how their evolving requirements have not been met. So after asking all the right questions, if the best answer is to stay put, that’s a less disruptive path anyway.
Replacement Tactics
For now, though, let’s just assume the current platform is not going to get there. Now the job is to get the best price for the new offering. Here are a few tips to leverage for the best deal:
- Time the buy: Yes, this is Negotiation 101. Wait until the end of the quarter and squeeze your sales rep for the best deal to get the PO in by the last day of the month. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s worth trying.
- Tell the incumbent they have lost the deal: The next step is to get the incumbent involved. Once you put in a call letting them know you are going in a different direction, they usually respond. Not always, but most times the incumbent will try to save the deal. And then you can go back to the challenger and tell them they need to do a little better, because you got this great offer from their entrenched competition. And just like when buying a car, to use this tactic you must be willing to walk away.
- Look at non-cash add-ons: Sometimes the challenger can’t discount any more. But you can ask for additional professional services, modules, boxes, whatever. Remember, the incremental cost of software is zero, zilch, nada – so vendors can often bundle in a little more to get the deal.
- Revisit service levels: Another non-cash sweetner could be an enhanced level of service. Maybe it’s a dedicated project manager to get your migration done. Maybe it’s the Platinum level of support, even if you pay for Bronze. Given the amount of care and feeding required to keep any security management platform tuned and optimized, having a deeper service relationship could come in handy.
- Dealing with your boss’s boss: One last thing – be prepared for your recommendation to be challenged, especially if the incumbent sells a lot of other gear to your company. The entire process we have laid out prepares you for that call, so just go through the logic of your decision once more, making clear that your recommendation is the best direction for the organization.
Tactics for the Status Quo
But it would be pretty naive to not be prepared in case the decision goes the other way – due to pricing, politics, or any other reason beyond your control. So it you have to make the status quo work and keep the incumbent, here are some ideas flor making lemonade from the proverbial lemon.
- Tell the incumbent they’re losing the deal: If the incumbent doesn’t already know they are at risk, it can’t hurt to tell them. Some vendors (especially the big ones) don’t care, which is probably why you were looking for something new anyway. But others will get the wake-up call and try to make you happy. That’s the time to revisit your platform evaluation and figure out what needs to be fixed.
- Get services: If your issue is not getting proper value from the system, push to have the incumbent provide some professional services to improve the implementation. Maybe send your folks to training. Have their team set up a new set of rules and do knowledge transfer. There are many options, but if you have to make do with what you have, at least force the vendor’s hand to make the systems work better.
- Scale up (at lower prices): If scalability is the issue, confront that directly with the incumbent and request additional hardware and/or licenses to address the issue. Of course, this may not be enough, but every little bit helps, and if moving to a new platform isn’t an option, at least you can ease the problem a bit. Especially when the incumbent knows you were looking at new gear because of a scaling problem.
- Add use cases: Another way to get additional value is to request additional modules be thrown into a renewal or expansion deal. Maybe add the identity module or look at configuration auditing. Or work with the team to add database and/or application monitoring. Again, the more you use the tool, the more value you’ll get, so figure out what the incumbent will do to make you happy.
Honestly, if you must stick with the existing system, you don’t have much flexibility. The incumbent doesn’t need to know that, though, so try to use the specter of migration as leverage. But at the end of the day, it is what it is. Throughout this process you have figured out what you need the tool to do, so now do your best to get there, within your constraints.
Once the deal is done, it’s time to move to the new platform. We will wrap this series by discussing migration and helping structure a plan to get onto the new kit. It will be hard – it always is – but you can leverage everything you learned through your first go-round with the incumbent, as well as this process, to build a very clear map of where you need to go and how to get there. Stay tuned for that.
Reader interactions
2 Replies to “Security Management 2.0: Negotiation”
Another good write up. Some times you would get all that is asked for without a major issue but in today’s economy that rarely happens. The 5 1st points will always assist.
Glenn
At a previous company, I would always warn my boss (The CIO) when these sorts of deals were on the table. We had an agreement, if the vendor insisted on talking to him, it was an inconvenience and he would ask for another few percentage points off on the deal. It was awesome. At one point, I’d asked for a 93% discount, the vendor escalated and then missed the call. We ended up with a 98% discount and that included hardware. It was a beautiful thing.