Ralph de Groot

Head of Marketing & Founder Procurement Tactics

Team members of Procurement Tactics have been responsible for all three important steps in any negotiation process:

1. Preparation
2. Strategy: actionable procurement strategies
3. Negotiation:  how to implement your strategy

Procurement & Sourcing Negotiating experience

As Procurement Managers,  team members of Procurement Tactics have been responsible for:

• Negotiations with 500+ suppliers regarding purchase prices, promotions, commercial-, legal-, financial and logistical conditions.
• Annual contract negotiations: Negotiations with €200 Mio + deals with suppliers like Unilever, Heinz, Pepsico
• Creating long term strategy: conducting yearly annual procurement Plan
• Negotiation experience with over 200+ account managers and commercial & sales directors
• Negotiated with people from over 30+ countries & cultures around the world
• Created over 300+ negotiation plans: being a sparring partner for procurement managers in their process of creating negotiation plans
• Implementation of long term Procurement & Sourcing strategy: conducting & implementing an annual procurement Plan for over 8 years
• Preparation & implementation of many e-auctions with €1 mio + savings
• Contract & Supplier management:  check if agreements are being complied with and deal with possible bottlenecks

Preparation & Strategy experience

As Procurement Analysts & Strategic Procurement Managers, team members of Procurement Tactics have been responsible for:

• Overall conduction of Procurement & Sourcing strategy for global retailer Ahold Delhaize, including the implementation of a program with strategic pillars as innovation (e.g. new procurement tactics)
• Responsible for implementation of many synergy procurement saving programs.
• Process: implementation of the way of working for a team of 50+ Procurement Managers
• Preparing negotiations with (A-brand) suppliers in order to achieve the best results
• Creating tooling & templates: conducting and standardization of insights

Our belief

At Procurement Tactics, we believe that better deal results are driven by three very important variables: empathic negotiation design, negotiation preparation, and negotiation tactics. In our Certificate Program, we will teach you how to understand them and how to use them to your advantage yourself! Here, we will explain our model.

Too many negotiators start their negotiations about what is important to them. We believe that a 100% clear understanding of the negotiation opponent via Empathic negotiation design is the key to any successful negotiation result. Whether you’re experienced or new to the field of negotiations, you will need to understand the other party to achieve better results. The better you are in preparing a detailed understanding of your negotiation counterpart, the better your negotiated results will be.  Empathic negotiation design requires that you are able to listen in order to fully understand the other party’s point of view: make it your business to learn all that you can about the other party! Understanding what your negotiation counterparts’ values and whatnot are, what drives them, what they need to achieve, and what their interests, hobbies, and core values are, will make you a better negotiator and will drive your results.

While Negotiation Preparation is the second driver of success in any negotiation, too often individuals or organizations rush into negotiations without proper planning, Taking a ‘prepared’ seat at the negotiation table gives power, confidence, and creative solution thinking. Before any negotiation, make sure to understand your position, but also the position of your negotiation counterpart. The more rigorous you are in preparing a detailed, specific understanding of your negotiation counterpart and their perspective, the better your negotiated results will be. Sure, preparing for a negotiation is clear to anyone. But what if we tell you that we developed templates by which negotiators can prepare for deals faster and easier than ever before?  After you have completed our Certificate Program, you will know all the ins and outs of proper preparation to improve your results.

Negotiation tactics are the third very important variable to master to achieve great deal results. Your ultimate deal will be determined by how skilled you are as a negotiator. The more skilled you are, the more the other party will be drawn to settle close to your ideal outcome and closer to their limit. Your selection of negotiation tactics should depend on your personality and the results of your earlier research on the tactics that will probably be used by your negotiating counterpart. Most used tactics are difficult to identify, very subtle, and used for multiple purposes.  Getting to recognize the most popular tactics will help you to negotiate way more efficiently! It’s important to know how and when to use particular tactics to get more of what you want from the negotiation.

An example of the founder of Procurement Tactics: 

“In my time as a Procurement Manager, I had to deal with 1500 different products delivered by 70 suppliers every year. Suppliers were traditionally better equipped;  most account managers that I had been dealing with, only had to focus on one customer and thus the negotiator: me. This led to what I call, the knowledge gap. They had way more time to prepare for negotiations. Most of them kept detailed notes on my likes and dislikes, interests,

family details, and so on. In general, they were in a better position to choose the most appropriate tactic to approach me in the upcoming negotiation. My advantage, on the other hand, was the fact that I was negotiating all day & year: that experience leveraged the knowledge gap mostly: I practiced a full year with changing styles & using tactics. This helped me to have one important skill in any negotiation: I was not predictable.”

Do you also want to learn to apply effective tactics yourself and become unpredictable? There are a large number of tactics that you can use in negotiations! In our Certificate Program, we will teach you which tactics to use, when to use them, and in what way you should use them!