Stine Mangor Tornmark

The most criticial elements are these: - know your organisation / business - understand how departments work, what they do and why they process the various data, - and build connections with people in your company. Stakeholder management is the key! Without these things, its difficult to have a good data privacy framework - that is embedded into the business & the processes - and that works.

if you want to be a good vendor contract negotiator you need a lot of different skills, including: - Stakeholder management skills, - A good legal understanding, - Good communication skills - and good at negotiating - and understanding what drives people.

You can start your career negotiating vendor contracts in different ways: If you have a legal background, the classic route will be to go inhouse and join the legal team. Alternatively you can also join a Procurement team. Some start in "Operations" Teams or "Office Management". Both these teams / departments handle a lot of vendors and thereby have a lot of vendor negotiations.

Vendor contract negotiations are often handled by the Legal team or if the organisation is really big; the Procurement team. My experience is from being part of a legal team - being the first legal hire in a Tech company - and having to negotiate contracts when the company wanted new tools, systems, SaaS suppliers etc. I started with negotiating vendor contracts like: - CRMs, HR systems, Marketing tools, Event / Conference suppliers, External Recruiters etc. So I wasn't viewing myself as a "vendor contract negotiator" - I was a part of the Legal Team and as part of my role I negotiated these contracts. And all these were Vendor Contracts. So maybe I was a Vendor Contract Negotiator.

As a good way of communicating with the vendor is to start with getting the vendor to explain: - Their average service levels the last year / month etc., and - If they have a website or similar where you can see their uptimes / availability This will make the conversation progress more smoothly and also enable you to better negotiate the SLA at a later stage.

As a first step, you need to do the following internally (when you have received the vendor’s SLA): 1. Find out how important the service / vendor is for your company, 2. Find out if it will have an impact on your company’s delivery to your customers 3. Understand the vendor’s service 4. Read the SLA in detail and get feedback from the buyer at your company.