Entreprenurial Negotiating Tactics

It's mostly a great post, but the author's first suggestion -- never let the other side draft the contract -- is a good way to kill a big-company deal in its cradle. For reasons good and bad, big companies often insist on using their paper. If you force their contract negotiators to concede on that point, in their minds they already don't like you, and they may be less willing to concede substantive points that you want far more.

I used to be the general counsel for a medium-sized publicly-traded software vendor. Before I would even look at a customer's software license agreement form, I had the sales people arrange a five-minute phone call between me and the customer's contracting people. I was usually able to sell the other side on using our form (because our form was extremely customer-friendly). Even when we wound up using the customer's form, though, that first phone call helped establish a positive working relationship, which softened the blow when I sent the customer a redline of their form.

(Not to try to divert attention, but I did an http://www.drafterschoice.com/2008/11/how-to-kill-a-big-comp... of the above comments at http://www.drafterschoice.com/2008/11/how-to-kill-a-big-comp...)

These are more "contractual provisions", rather than negotiating tactics.

However, lots of good advice here, including some that involves little company / big company negotiating tactics.

Agreed - I wish I had read this a couple years ago...I am going to send this to my old boss!

Very nice post! This applies to real world startups too.

Nice post - lots of good suggestions here.