Negotiating when you can't walk away

The situation

After eight years, this federation's sponsor was dissatisfied. The kind of dissatisfaction that builds slowly: agreements made long ago that have drifted since, visibility that became less automatic, and a sense that there was more in this than was coming out of it.

At the same time, leaving was never on the table. There is one position like this at this federation, and if the sponsor gives it up, the competitor is waiting. That makes for an uncomfortable negotiating position: you're unhappy, and the other side knows you're staying.

Situations like that usually end one of two ways. Either the sponsor swallows it and signs again for the same terms, carrying the dissatisfaction for another four years. Or the conversation turns hard, and you damage a relationship you're locked into yourself.

What we did

• We stayed in the background. The client held the conversations with the federation. We supplied the input, the analysis and the argument. That was deliberate: an adviser who shows up at the table changes the tone of a conversation between partners who have known each other for eight years.
• We turned dissatisfaction into specifics. "We're not getting enough out of it" isn't a negotiating point. "These rights aren't being delivered, these arrangements were never written down, and this is where the visibility leaks away" is. Only when a complaint becomes a list is there something to solve.
• We made the contract simpler, not thicker. The reflex in a difficult renewal is to write more down: extra clauses, extra guarantees, extra annexes. We did the opposite. Who delivers what, when, and how you can tell it happened — reduced to something both parties can read without legal help.
• We made visibility explicit rather than assumed. Official assets, communications and content are three different things with three different owners inside a federation. Naming them separately saves four years of misunderstandings.

What it delivered

The contract was renewed for a new Olympic cycle. The sponsor's visibility increased and improved across all three areas — official assets, the federation's communications, and its content. In that last category it tripled.

That figure shows where the problem had been. The sponsor had always been formally entitled to content; it simply didn't happen, because nothing specified what "content" meant or whose job it was to make it. Once it did, the volume tripled. Nothing extra was bought.

And the client is satisfied, which after eight years is the least automatic of the three. What didn't happen matters just as much: no conflict, no ultimatum, no relationship damaged. The federation kept a partner and the sponsor kept its position.

Bart's critical but constructive eye — a marketer working in sport every day — made the difference, both in what went into the contract and what that means in practice." Marketing Manager, sponsor

Why this works

After eight years the problem is rarely the fee. The problem is that nobody remembers precisely what was agreed and ambiguity always resolves in favour of the party doing the delivering. Not out of bad faith, but because a federation with limited capacity does what's written down in black and white, and leaves the rest.

A sponsor that can't walk away has no leverage. But leverage isn't the only route to a better deal. Clarity is another, and it costs the relationship nothing.

Communication, marketing and sponsorship are one discipline.