Contract Negotiation and Management
Negotiate Contracts That Favor Your Organization Over Providers With Telapprise
When you enlist the experts at Telapprise as your technology contract negotiators, we’re so committed to leveraging terms in your favor that we’ve actually negotiated ourselves out of deals that weren’t right for a client, no matter how much it may have benefited us.
When it comes to technology contract negotiations, you have to remember that service providers and vendors never lead with their best deal. They want to entice you into signing a contract that commits your organization to inflexible conditions and long contract durations that don’t necessarily benefit you. Meanwhile, you’re focused on implementing the technology, so your team often doesn’t have the time, resources, or knowledge to know when and how to push back against a particular contract.
When it comes to technology contract negotiations, you have to remember that service providers and vendors never lead with their best deal. They want to entice you into signing a contract that commits your organization to inflexible conditions and long contract durations that don’t necessarily benefit you. Meanwhile, you’re focused on implementing the technology, so your team often doesn’t have the time, resources, or knowledge to know when and how to push back against a particular contract.
When you’re at the contracting stage of a technology implementation project, you’re dealing with more overlapping teams than you encounter at any other stage of the Technology Lifecycle. While you may have settled on what technology you need, you still have to work with a sales team, a legal team, your IT team, a procurement team, and possibly even an implementation team. When you have this many team members involved in a project, miscommunication is one of the most common causes of delays.
Telapprise minimizes the risk of project miscommunication by becoming your broader project manager and keeping each of these teams in sync. Our capabilities don’t start and end with keeping teams on the same page when negotiating contracts. Instead, that’s merely one of the ways we mitigate pain points at each step of the Technology Lifecycle of Pain.
Along with keeping project teams working together instead of against each other, our experts also know when to push back against a vendor’s contract terms. Our battle scars—the lessons we’ve learned the hard way—are what protect you from making the mistakes. Since no two technology contracts are the same, we start by outlining all financial commitments and validating service delivery from day one.
Our approach guarantees that you aren’t oversold when a provider claims to offer something that isn’t stipulated in the contract. These verbal commitments are virtually impossible to enforce, and even when clients push back, most providers shrug their shoulders and move forward based on what’s in writing. Telapprise doesn’t let providers shrug their shoulders at a contract you signed when it doesn’t live up to your expectations because we never let you sign a contract that doesn’t favor you to begin with.
Our Baseline Assessments are designed to eliminate bloated contracts, achieve visibility across your broader technology platform, and deliver a guaranteed 2x ROI.
Why do so many companies go wrong during the contract negotiation stage of the Technology Lifecycle? It’s not so much any individual company’s fault as much as the market is set up to favor vendors and providers over their customers. It can be summed up with one simple question we frequently hear when we push back against a provider’s contract terms: Why don’t they just sign it? Sales teams and brokers are so used to clients blindly signing the contract without taking the time to understand its nuances that it’s become an industry norm. Telapprise is committed to changing that.
Think about it this way—when you’re ready to purchase a house or commercial property but have minimal real estate knowledge, who do you turn to? A real estate agent. How do you know you can trust them? Because they’ve gone through the requisite training and acquired the certifications and licenses to represent your best interests. As a buyer, that industry standard protects you from signing a contract or entering into a mortgage that favors the seller but exploits you because you don’t know any better.
See where this is going? There are no equivalent licensing or certification requirements in the telecom and technology space today. As a result, many businesses are pressured into signing technology contracts that clearly aren’t in their best interest, yet they have no way of knowing there’s a better way. At Telapprise, one of our priorities is turning the negotiating table, so things are the way they should be with contracts favoring customers over the providers.
The approach Telapprise takes to negotiating technology contracts is driven by one goal: leveraging the contract terms of an optimal technology solution to favor your business. If that sounds like something you’ve missed out on in the past, our experts are here to change that. Whether you’re just at the beginning stages of technology ideation or you’re already knee-deep in identifying contract negotiation strategies, Telapprise specializes in helping you negotiate or renegotiate technology contracts in your favor, so let’s get started.
If you never want to experience the ongoing frustrations of managing technology vendors again, schedule a Baseline Assessment today to take the first step.