4 Negotiation Mistakes We See Again and Again in UK Procurement

Ask most procurement professionals if they’re good at negotiating, and they’ll say yes. Ask them to talk you through their last three negotiations in detail, and the story usually gets more complicated. Negotiation is one of those skills everyone assumes they’ve got a handle on, right up until a deal goes sideways and they’re left wondering exactly where it went wrong.

With UK procurement teams under real pressure this year — food and commodity costs still working through the effects of the worst harvest in decades, and wider economic uncertainty pushing organisations to lean harder on their supply chains for value — the gap between an average negotiator and a well-trained one is showing up on the bottom line more than ever. The CIPS Global State of Procurement & Supply 2026 report found that over half of procurement teams are planning to invest in staff training in the next 12 months, with skills gaps flagged as a genuine and urgent concern, and negotiation is consistently one of the skills named.

So we asked our own tutors — who between them have run negotiation training for procurement teams across every sector from manufacturing to the public sector — what they see going wrong most often. Here are the four patterns that come up time and again, backed by some of the best-known research and case studies in the field.

1. Walking in Without a Walk-Away Point

The single most common mistake isn’t a tactic used badly — it’s the absence of a plan before the conversation even starts. Delegates regularly tell us they went into a negotiation with a rough idea of what they wanted, but no clear sense of what they’d accept as a minimum, or what they’d do if the deal fell through entirely.

This isn’t just a training-room observation. It’s the founding idea behind modern negotiation theory. Harvard Business School Professor Michael Wheeler puts it simply:

“Sometimes you may have very good options. Other times, your alternatives may not be very attractive. Whatever the case, pick what you’ll do if there’s no deal.”

— Michael Wheeler, Harvard Business School, Negotiation Mastery

Without a defined walk-away point — what negotiation researchers call your BATNA, or Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement — it’s almost impossible to know whether an offer on the table is actually good, or just better than nothing. Negotiators without one tend to either concede too easily under pressure, or hold out for terms they can’t actually justify, and neither serves them well. The fix starts before you ever sit down at the table: define your objectives, your walk-away point, and your best alternative if no agreement is reached. It’s the foundation everything else in a negotiation is built on, and it’s exactly where our course starts — with negotiation fundamentals and understanding your own negotiating style, before a single tactic gets discussed.

2. Misreading Who Actually Holds the Power

It’s easy to assume that the bigger organisation, or the one writing the cheque, automatically holds the leverage. In practice, that’s often wrong — and getting it wrong is expensive. We regularly hear from delegates who pushed hard on price with a supplier, only to discover afterwards that the supplier was effectively the only viable option in the market for that particular product or service. Negotiating as if you hold more power than you actually do can damage a relationship you depend on, sometimes permanently — a supplier who feels strong-armed unnecessarily has little incentive to go out of their way for you later, on delivery timelines, quality issues, or flexibility when you need it most.

Power in negotiation isn’t one thing — psychologists French and Raven identified five distinct forms of it back in the 1950s, from formal authority to expertise to the simple ability to reward or withhold, and CIPS still teaches the framework today because it holds up. Getting a proper read on where power actually sits, rather than assuming it, is often the difference between a good negotiation and an expensive one. CIPS’s own archive of member case studies includes FCIPS-qualified negotiator Fiona Revell, who talked a single-source supplier down from a proposed 99% price increase to just 22% — a result that came from understanding leverage properly, not from bluster. That’s the discipline we build on our course: properly assessing power and leverage on both sides before you negotiate, not during, because market alternatives, switching costs and timing pressure all change how a conversation should be approached.

3. Giving Concessions Away Without Getting Anything Back

Under pressure — whether that’s a tight deadline, an impatient stakeholder, or simply wanting the conversation to be over — it’s tempting to make a concession just to move things along. We see this constantly: a discount offered, a term relaxed, a deadline extended, all without asking for anything in return. Every concession given away for free teaches the other side that your position is soft, and invites them to keep pushing. It also means negotiating capital gets spent on nothing — the same concession, traded for something of value in return, would have cost no more but gained something real.

Jonathan O’Brien, whose book Negotiation for Procurement and Supply Chain Professionals has become something of a standard text in the field, built an entire methodology — Red Sheet® — around the discipline of concession strategy, precisely because so many otherwise capable negotiators give value away without realising it. The rule his approach comes back to again and again is simple: concede less, trade more. “We could look at that, if…” is a genuinely useful habit to build, and it’s core to what we teach on managing tactics, counter-tactics and concessions — because that single shift, from giving to trading, is one of the fastest ways to change a negotiator’s outcomes.

4. Treating the Signature as the Finish Line

The negotiation doesn’t end when the contract is signed, but a lot of procurement teams behave as though it does. Renewal terms, review points and exit clauses often get the least attention of anything in a deal, precisely because they only matter later — and “later” has a habit of arriving at an inconvenient time, when a relationship has changed and nobody remembers agreeing to something vague. Ambiguous terms around renewal, review or exit are where relationships that go well quietly stay fine, and relationships that go badly turn expensive fast; sorting out what should have been agreed at the table, after the relationship has already soured, is one of the most common and avoidable sources of contract disputes.

It’s telling that O’Brien’s negotiation methodology dedicates an entire chapter to post-negotiation activity — not as an administrative afterthought, but as a core part of the discipline. CIPS’s own negotiation guidance makes the same point: agreements should always be thoroughly documented, precisely to avoid the confusion and disputes that surface once a relationship is under strain. The fix is to build review points, renewal terms and exit conditions into the negotiation itself, rather than treating them as loose ends once the “real” commercial terms are settled. Post-negotiation review and relationship management is the fourth pillar of our course for exactly this reason — a good negotiator thinks about the whole lifecycle of the deal, not just the moment it’s signed.

Why This Still Comes Down to Being Human

It’s a good moment to raise this, given CIPS’s own “Great Conversation” initiative has just introduced an AI avatar to help gather views on the future of the profession. Reaction has been mixed. Some see it as a smart way to widen participation; others have questioned whether talking to an AI avatar can really substitute for a genuine conversation between people. We don’t think that debate is unique to CIPS’s project — it’s a live question across procurement as AI tools spread into more of the day-to-day work.

Negotiation is one of the clearest places where the answer still leans firmly towards people. AI can help you prepare: modelling scenarios, summarising a counterparty’s public position, flagging market data you might have missed. What it can’t do is sit across the table, read the shift in someone’s tone when a number lands badly, or decide in the moment whether to push further or hold back. Every mistake covered above — no walk-away point, misjudged power, concessions given away, terms left vague — is a failure of human judgement under pressure, not a data problem. No tool fixes that. Only practice does.

Build These Habits Properly

None of these four mistakes are complicated to fix once you know to look for them — but they’re genuinely hard to unlearn on your own, mid-negotiation, under pressure. That’s what our half-day Negotiation short course is built for: planning and objectives, power and leverage, tactics and concessions, and relationship management, worked through with real scenarios rather than theory, delivered by MCIPS-qualified experts, and capped at 15 delegates so it stays properly interactive.

Full course details, dates and booking: Click Here

Bring It In-House

Got a team who’d all benefit from sharper negotiation skills? We run private, tailored sessions for groups of five or more, online or at your premises. Get a team quote or call us directly.

Call us on 01254 945 902 or drop us a line at enquiries@cipsbusinesstraining.co.uk.

Sources

Michael Wheeler, Harvard Business School, ‘What is BATNA?’, HBS Online. French, J. & Raven, B., ‘The Bases of Social Power’ (1959), as referenced in CIPS’s Commercial Negotiation qualification (L4M5). CIPS Knowledge & Insight, negotiation case study archive, featuring Fiona Revell FCIPS. Jonathan O’Brien, Negotiation for Procurement and Supply Chain Professionals (Kogan Page). CIPS Intelligence Hub, Negotiation Strategy guidance.