Treat procurement as a process, and not as a verdict on your value. Their job is terms, risk and paperwork. Keep working with your main contact, hold your fee where it is, and decide early whether the hours this process costs are worth the client at the end of them.
Keep selling to your contact and treat procurement as paperwork to be helped through.
Procurement evaluates terms and risk, so the value conversation belongs with the person who wants the work.
Ask your contact what their vendor process involves and what they need from you for it.
It's not because your main contact was being a jerk, it's because of the system and the infrastructure in the company.
Leah Neaderthal, Smart Gets Paid
Procurement wants terms, risk and comparability, which is a different set of questions from the ones your contact has been asking. Your contact wants the problem solved. Procurement wants to know the company is protected and the paperwork is right.
What they're usually working through:
Only the last of those touches your fee, and even there the question is usually "can we justify this" and rarely "can we get it cheaper." That's why the value case has to keep living with your contact, who is the person who can answer it internally.
Hold the fee and put your flexibility into terms, which is what procurement is set up to move anyway. A procurement team asked to find savings will take better payment terms as a win, and those cost you far less than a lower number.
In practice:
Step one is where consultants lose money. A procurement conversation feels like a fresh negotiation, and it usually is not: it's the administration of an agreement your contact already made.
Offer to do the work of getting yourself approved, and say so out loud early. Your contact is running this alongside fifteen other things, and the vendor process is rarely the most important item on their desk on any given day.
That does two things at once. It says you've been through this before and you're not fazed, and it takes a task off somebody's list rather than adding one. Your contact, who is the person inside the company who wants this to happen, now has a reason to keep moving it.
Sometimes, and it's a business decision rather than a rule. One of my clients spent about twenty-four hours inside a procurement process before she was paid a single dollar. That client turned out to be one of her best, stayed lovely to work with, and continued for the following year, and now that she's in their system she shouldn't have to do it again.
That last part is the whole calculation:
| Question | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Is this a client I want for years? | A one-time cost spread over a long relationship |
| Am I now in their system? | Future work skips most of this |
| Does the fee justify the hours? | Small engagement plus heavy process is a bad trade |
| Is the process the problem, or the people? | Slow is normal, disrespectful is a signal |
That last row is the one to watch. If the delay is multiple reviews and a legal team, nobody is being difficult and the company is being a company. If your contact is treating you as an order taker, ignoring boundaries and signaling scope creep before you've started, that's about the client and it's worth taking seriously.
When procurement enters, the feeling is that something has gone wrong. It's been three weeks, the emails have dried up, the person who was enthusiastic has gone quiet, and you start building a story where they've changed their mind about you.
I want to hand you the view from the other side of that desk. When I was in corporate, I had fifteen projects running. Getting a vendor approved was important and it was never the most important thing on any given day. If the approval needed a meeting that sat two weeks out, it went on the agenda for the meeting two weeks out. Nothing about that was a comment on the person waiting.
Once you can see it that way, the silence stops being frightening and turns into machinery. And machinery is something you can help with, which is the most useful thing about this whole situation: you get to be the person who makes it easier rather than the person waiting to hear.
The one thing I'd hold firm on is the number. Procurement's job includes finding savings, and yours includes running a business that works. Give them terms. Keep your fee.
I don't, and I discourage my clients from it. RFPs are built to compare providers on tactics, deliverables and price, they often turn on irrelevant criteria like years in business, and they block you from talking to the decision-maker about the real problem. If you must respond, try to get a discovery call with the person leading it, and pack the response with more value than the requirements ask for.
Read it, and treat it as a starting point rather than a fixed object. Payment terms, notice periods, intellectual property and liability caps are all commonly adjusted for consultants, and asking is normal. If a term would not work for your business, say which one and why, and offer the version you can sign.
References are reasonable and worth having ready. Past pricing is different: what you charged another client was set by that client's value and scope, and it tells this company very little. Explain that you price each engagement on the outcome, and offer to walk them through what drives the number for this one.
Longer than it feels like it should, and often several weeks to a few months in larger organizations. Ask your contact what the steps are and roughly how long each one takes, so you can plan around it. A known timeline turns an anxious wait into a date in your calendar, and it stops you following up too often.