Podcast · Finding Success Loyalistic · 2020-02-25 · 50:20 · In Finnish

How Million-Euro Deals Are Negotiated — Sami Miettinen on Finding Success

Published as “Kuinka miljoonakaupat neuvotellaan? Vieraana Sami Miettinen #Neuvottelija”

Hosted by: Antti Pietilä

▶ Watch on Finding Success

Sami Miettinen joined Antti Pietilä on Loyalistic’s Finding Success podcast for a full hour on how million-euro deals are actually negotiated. The conversation is structured around the four-part framework from Uusi neuvotteluvalta, the book Miettinen wrote with Juhana Torkki, which had recently reached number one in Finnish audiobook services before being displaced.

Power is situational, and people misread it. Miettinen’s example is recruitment: hiring a rank-and-file coder puts the employer in a strong position, but headhunting the best SaaS developer in the country inverts it entirely. A recruiter who still believes they are buying, when in fact they are selling the company to a top candidate, loses the hire — the marketing and sales worked, the negotiation failed. The same asymmetry runs through inbound and outbound: in outbound the seller usually wants it more and has invested more, in inbound the customer has, which is why an inbound process can be carried much further remotely.

Analysis is intelligence plus creativity, and in M&A it is service design. A company is almost never in sellable condition when a roughly six-month process begins. A good investment bank shapes the client into an analytical set of values, cash flows and growth that presses the buttons the most credible buyers are used to pressing. Miettinen’s example is Lyyti, a Turku-based B2B SaaS company for which the KPIs had to be built in the buyer’s own language — churn, cohorts, MRR growth, LTV. The counter-warning is don’t get caught in the middle: a project software house with a token product nobody believes in is worse off than one that is clearly what it is. You cannot put too much lipstick on that pig.

Sociability is the part Finns underinvest in. The skill of being physically present in a negotiation has eroded as interaction moved to WhatsApp, Slack and email — and the value is still created at the moment names go on paper. Handling your own emotions, reading the other side’s signals, and managing the arc from opening small talk to decisions under time pressure are all learnable, up to and including running an explicit small-talk script if that is what it takes.

Principle is a value with an algorithm attached. A stated value with no algorithm behind it is, in Miettinen’s phrase, bullshit. The payoff is compounding: a reputation for professional conduct makes the next negotiation cheaper, because nobody needs to run elaborate checks on you. The nuance is that not lying is a principle while deflecting a question designed to extract a damaging secret is a technique — and the two are compatible.

He offers a cake metaphor for the four: power is the cake slice and who holds the knife, analysis is growing the cake before dividing it, sociability is how you hand the slice over, and principle is what makes the same counterparty willing to bake with you again.

Deals are team sports on both sides. Not everyone who participates sits at the table. Escalation levels matter — Miettinen usually negotiates as an agent under a principal’s mandate, which is useful precisely because it gives the principal room to oppose him and reopen terms, where a principal at the table has to concede in real time. Inside the room he recommends a deliberate split: an active, creative negotiator who probes the space of possibilities, a quieter figure — often the principal — who makes the decisions and calls timeouts, and a scribe who records what was said and watches the other side’s reactions.

The other side’s other departments. In large sales deals, units with no part in the original process wake up once it looks likely to close, bringing compliance requirements, technical demands and political agendas — sometimes to attach their own wish list to a budget that is moving. Municipal and state projects are the starkest examples. Two defences: put the terms and conditions in the first offer as an annex rather than letting them surface at the end, and ask whether the risk-focused people have the wrong KPIs altogether.

The dialogue plan. Developed with Mika D. Rubanovitsch, this is the pre-table game: agree an agenda properly, then call the counterparty’s lead negotiator to calibrate it, revise, and resend — which strips out misunderstandings before anyone is in the room. Inside the negotiation, Miettinen argues against sequential bargaining item by item, which leaves you stuck on a single parameter such as price. Package offers — this price if this quality and this volume — keep several variables live, and nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.

The episode closes on content marketing as the seller’s long game. Miettinen’s book, his channel and appearances like this one make him better known to both sides of a table before the process begins, and a respected counterparty is given more slack. Translink Corporate Finance, where he is a partner, runs some 600 specialists worldwide under a Swiss holding company, and cross-border deals draw on the local partner who knows who is actually in the market — intelligence a LinkedIn search cannot supply. His most common correction to clients: the biggest competitor in Sweden is usually not the buyer. Buyers more often come from an adjacent field or from private equity, and a competitor may want the products and customers while emphatically not wanting a second sales organisation.

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