Sample frameDay 169·Negotiation · Close

Morning. Signing is the easy half. The people who have to deliver what you promised weren't in the room when you promised it.

Negotiation.

Signed Is Not Done

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The question

Name the last agreement you signed that under-delivered — scope grew, a service level nobody could meet got promised, an integration took three times as long — and then say who from the delivering side was in the room when those terms were agreed, because deal teams promise what delivery teams have to survive, and that bill gets paid every month of the contract by people who never saw the negotiation.

The idea

Danny Ertel worked with Roger Fisher at the Harvard Negotiation Project, co-writing the workbook to Getting to Yes, before co-founding Vantage Partners, a firm that advises companies on the agreements they sign by the hundred. In Harvard Business Review in November 2004 he published 'Getting Past Yes: Negotiating as if Implementation Mattered', and its argument is one dealmakers resist, because their incentives are built the other way. Organisations reward the close. The bonus, the announcement and the handshake all attach to signature, so negotiators optimise for terms extracted rather than value realised, then hand the contract to a delivery team that was never in the room and never agreed to anything in it. Ertel's remedy is to negotiate the deal you can actually run: bring the people who will run it into the process, and settle in advance how both sides will handle the surprises every long agreement produces. A concession the other side can't meet isn't a win.

The framework

01
Ask who has to live with this, then put them in the room.
Before the next session, write the names of the people who'll actually deliver what you're about to promise: the engineer, the account manager, the operations lead, the person who answers the phone in month four. Then invite at least one of them, even for an hour, even as an observer. The gap between what gets promised and what gets delivered rarely opens out of malice. It opens because nobody in the room had ever tried to do the thing being agreed to. An hour of their time before signature costs less than a quarter of their apologies afterwards.
02
The terms you extracted are the wrong scoreboard.
A concession the other side can't meet is a dispute with a signature on it, and you'll pay for it across the term in escalations, goodwill and renewal risk. Ertel's distinction is between the dealmaker who measures success at the close and the implementer who measures it at the end of the contract. Run that test on your last big win: which of the terms you were proudest of has since been waived, reinterpreted or simply ignored? Each of those was the price of getting the meeting finished.
03
Negotiate the handover as an item on the list.
Put transition on the agenda alongside price and settle it with the same specificity. Who introduces whom, in which week. What each side must have ready before day one. Which three numbers both organisations will watch, defined identically, reported by a named person on a named date. Sign the commercial terms and the operating terms together, because the second document is the one your teams will live inside. Left to be sorted out later, it gets sorted out by whoever is least busy, and they weren't in the negotiation either.
04
The surprises you can't yet name still need a route.
Every agreement longer than a quarter produces something nobody forecast: a volume that doesn't arrive, a dependency that fails, a rule that changes. The deals that survive are the ones carrying a route agreed in advance for raising a problem without either side reaching for the contract. Name the counterpart at each level, the window in which a surprise must be raised, and the date at which both sides may reprice without anybody losing face. Write it into the terms while you still like each other.

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