---
title: What financial services buyers need to know about B2B price negotiation
description: The vendor sitting across from you has a structured negotiation playbook drawn from FBI techniques. Most buyers in financial services do not know it exists. Having operated on both sides — 18 years as the institutional buyer at HSBC, then as the vendor at Backstop, ONYX, and in RegTech — this article explains what the vendor is doing and how to respond.
author: Declan Sheehy
datePublished: 2025-09-15
dateModified: 2026-04-28
url: https://www.oneblackwater.com/article-commercial-b2b-negotiation-sep-2025.html
sameAs:
  - https://www.linkedin.com/in/declan-sheehy/
keywords: B2B negotiation, price negotiation, vendor management, Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference, financial services procurement, Ackerman method, anchoring
schema:
  type: Article
  headline: What financial services buyers need to know about B2B price negotiation
  datePublished: 2025-09-15
  author: Declan Sheehy
  publisher: One Blackwater Consultancy Limited
  about: [B2B negotiation, vendor management, procurement, financial services]
---

# What financial services buyers need to know about B2B price negotiation

This article is written from a dual-side perspective. At HSBC Alternative Investments I spent 18 years as an institutional buyer building and enforcing vendor management frameworks. Then I crossed the table, operating as a vendor at Backstop Solutions, ONYX Capital Group, and in the RegTech sector. That experience reveals a clear asymmetry: the vendor has a structured, psychologically grounded negotiation methodology, and the buyer typically does not.

## The Voss Framework

The intellectual foundation most sophisticated B2B sales teams work from is Chris Voss's *Never Split the Difference* (Harper Business, 2016). Voss spent 24 years as an FBI hostage negotiator. His central argument is that negotiation is not a rational problem-solving exercise — it is an emotional one. The party that understands the other's fears, pain, and motivations consistently produces better outcomes.

## Key Vendor Tactics Buyers Should Recognise

**Extreme anchoring:** Vendors open 20 to 50 percent above their actual target. Whoever presents the first number sets the range within which the conversation moves. If you counter a £75,000 anchor to £60,000, you may have given the vendor exactly what they wanted while feeling you negotiated well.

**The Ackerman Method:** Concessions are made in decreasing increments, at increasing intervals, with odd numbers — always in exchange for something from the buyer. A vendor moving from £75,000 to £69,000 to £64,500 to £62,300 is executing a calibrated sequence, not running out of room.

**Black Swan hunting:** Throughout the process, trained vendors listen for information that changes the negotiation entirely — unspoken organisational pressures, career implications for the decision-maker, previous vendor failures that created urgency.

## How Buyers Should Respond

Know your market rate before any anchor is presented. Do not counter immediately — silence is information, not weakness. Ask for something in return for every concession you make. Control what urgency signals you share and when.