How a mid-sized business prepares for a purchasing negotiation

A gap that forms before the negotiation

The Einkaufsbarometer Mittelstand 2025 by BME and Onventis paints a picture that many mid-sized purchasing departments know from their own experience: 80.6 per cent of respondents see the greatest need for digitalisation in supplier management, of all areas, and 46.6 per cent consider their own systems inadequate for risk management.

In the first instance, these figures concern not the negotiation itself but what ought to be in place beforehand: a reliable overview of which suppliers a company actually works with, on what terms, and how dependent it is on them. Without that overview, every negotiation starts at a structural disadvantage – regardless of the negotiating skill of the people present.

What ‘prepared’ means in concrete terms

Before a purchasing negotiation, a mid-sized company needs to know not primarily about the supplier, but about itself. That includes:

• Its own dependency. What share of the total volume of the purchasing category concerned does this supplier account for, and how quickly – in all honesty – could a switch be made to a second supplier?
• Actual requirements. What quantity will realistically be needed over the next twelve months, as distinct from the quantity that has historically been ordered because it always has been?
• Its own contract history. Which terms actually apply today, and where do the prices most recently paid already deviate from those agreed? A company that cannot answer this question is negotiating from a starting point that it does not itself know.

It is precisely at these three points that the gap in supplier management described in the barometer comes into play: where systems are judged inadequate, what is often missing is not the data itself but a place where it comes together and can be retrieved ahead of a negotiation.

Who else belongs at the table

The finding that 81.5 per cent of respondents are relying on real-time communication and platform solutions to strengthen their own resilience draws attention to a second point: a purchasing negotiation is rarely a task for purchasing alone. Quality assurance knows which specification is a hard requirement and which would be negotiable. Production knows how critical a supply failure would actually be. And finance knows which payment terms are worth more to the company’s own liquidity than an extra discount. If a negotiation is prepared by purchasing alone, these perspectives are missing at the moment that matters – not because nobody has them, but because nobody asked for them.

Room for negotiation that goes beyond price

The barometer shows one further point: 88.9 per cent of respondents see the fast onboarding of new suppliers as a driver of growth. That changes what a negotiation should even be about. If speed and flexibility have a recognisable value for the company itself, that question belongs in the preparation: what is it worth if a supplier reliably accommodates changes in quantity at short notice, or if a second, already qualified supplier stands ready for the same item? A company that negotiates on unit price alone leaves this part of the possible outcome unused – not because it is not negotiable, but because no figure was put on it beforehand.

The first step, before a date has been set

Good preparation does not require you to introduce new purchasing software. It is enough if you build a single overview for your ten most important suppliers: current terms, actual requirements, degree of dependency, and the question of who, from which department, would still have something to contribute before the next negotiation. That overview costs you a manageable amount of effort – and it changes the starting point from which you go into every conversation that follows.

What matters here is less the form of the overview than its upkeep: a table that is built once and never updated again goes stale within a few months and ends up giving a false impression of certainty that no longer exists. If you decide who updates this overview after every supplier invoice and every contract change, you will, in doing so, already have closed part of the gap in supplier management described in the barometer – regardless of whether you end up using software for it or, for now, just a table.