Alex Adamo: Negotiating with Goliath – How Smaller Firms Should Negotiate with Bigger Players

Written By Alex Adamo, CEO of The Commercialiser

It’s a common scene. A fast-growing tech SME armed with innovation, lean talent, and a breakthrough product finally lands a seat at the table with a global tech giant. The excitement is real but so is the intimidation as you are suddenly playing in a different league, where power feels out of reach and the rules are rarely written in your favour.

Your job is to break the rules, forget where you come from, and turn the tables.

Size is not power. The advantage goes not to the bigger company, but to the party that best frames the value, controls the narrative, and controls pressures. That’s the mindset shift SMEs need if they’re going to survive, and thrive, in commercial collaborations with industry heavyweights.

Seek Validation From Your Family, Not Your Clients

One of the most damaging things an SME can do when entering talks with a much larger firm is to over-invest in rapport. It’s very natural to want to be liked and seen as credible, but chasing validation from a large company’s procurement team is a strategic misstep. They didn’t take the meeting to make friends. They took it because you’ve got something they might need: speed, innovation, access to niche markets, defensible IP, or the ability to solve a problem faster than their own teams can and add value to their critical business KPIs.

If you ask your AI for advice, you’ll hear things along the lines of “the more you tell them the conversation on their needs and the cost of inaction on their side, the more leverage you generate. Don’t simply tell them why you’re great, make an effort to show them how partnering with you protects their roadmap, accelerates time-to-market, or heads off a competitive threat. That’s what moves a deal forward.” This is as wrong as it gets.

Forget the conversation, focus on the negotiation. You don’t need to convince them they need you. If you are sitting across the table, they already know it. If the deal is relevant to them, they’ve done their research on you – they wouldn’t waste their time otherwise.

People who know their value do not spend time reasserting it to others.

Cheap Signalling Isn’t Just Their Game

Large firms often use delay as a tactic. You’ll see it in vague timelines, extended procurement processes, or endless rounds of “internal alignment”. These aren’t always genuine hurdles however, instead they are often pressure tools as the longer the process drags, the more likely a smaller firm is to drop their ask, cave on key terms, or burn out completely.

That’s the moment to shift gear.  SMEs must learn to signal strength. Set your deadlines in a way which is reasonably compatibly to theirs, but no subservient. If you feel they want to work with you, let them know you are offering them a better deal if the deal is closed within a certain reasonable timeline.

You have a business to run, and running your business cannot wait for 12 decisions makers to meet once a week for the next 3 months and then “hopefully make a decision”. They either jump aboard of your bullet train, or they miss it – and you’d better put your focus on opportunities that have real traction and don’t waste your time on hope. The grocery store won’t accept hope as payment, they need cash.

Guard The King, Unleash The Knight

One mistake smaller firms often make is exposing their founder or CEO too early in the negotiation. Get the CEO involved at the beginning when it comes to setting the tone and shaping the vision, then they should abandon the negotiation process and only intervene if absolutely necessary.

You’ll have otherwise a stakeholders matrix imbalance. Your CEO negotiation versus the junior buyer. It immediately signals subservience.

Get your team to do the back and forth while you orchestrate behind the scenes. Only expose yourself to the negotiation table if absolutely necessary and consider escalating and involving the counterparty’s more senior people if it unlocks more value and decision making power.

Give Them A Way To Say Yes

Big companies care deeply about optics. Deals must look good internally, pass procurement hurdles, and often land politically across departments. If you want to close with a tech giant, you have to build in what we call “golden bridges” – mechanisms that let them agree without feeling like they’ve conceded.

That might mean offering a limited exclusive, launching with a joint press release, staging a pilot as a first phase before full rollout or even capitulating on some terms that are less important to you but extremely valuable to them e.g. payment terms or other variables. These aren’t giveaways but rather tools to reduce perceived risk and increase internal buy-in.

Be Aware Of The Power Balance

There’s a fine line between being responsive and looking desperate. The larger player will likely try to impose artificial urgency like deadlines, internal budget windows or executive pressure. But here’s the question every SME must be prepared to answer before walking into the room: What happens to them if this deal doesn’t close? Rarely the tech giant will fail, but what about the stakeholders that are interested in working with you? You should be aware of business issues they will face without your company’s support.

Also, If your only path to success hinges on this one partnership, your BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) is weak, and so will your negotiation posture. However, if you have lined up other conversations, pilots, or even just market momentum, you can negotiate from a place of calm instead of neediness. As a CEO, you have a commercial duty to negotiate from a position of power or, at least, possibility to self-preserve. If you need them to survive, your negotiation options will be severely limited – but that doesn’t speak to the negotiator in you, it means you can’t run the business.

Another matter you should consider is, never give more than a certain % of revenue to one single client. If you become too dependent on a large customer, any policy changes or shifts in the market may destroy you. Set internal policies that do not allow clients to grow or increase prices after a certain threshold of total revenue that puts your business at risk.

If you are thinking “more volume, less price”. This is how they think at your local fish market – not how you run a sophisticated negotiation. Obviously there will be many market dynamics that will follow this standard trend, but you should at least know that you do not need to necessarily conform to market standard. Your job as a negotiator is to understand the rules and understand when it’s in your company’s interest to break them. Conformism by default means death by a thousand cuts.

You’re Not Making Them A Favour

This isn’t David vs Goliath, that narrative is just a distraction and on that sets your commercial frame from a point of complete weakness.

You are engaging in a mutual, respectful commercial exchange between two firms with different capabilities and constraints who might need each other to achieve better outcomes by working together. They are certainly not considering working with you to make you a favour.

Stay focused on the value that both parties will get, don’t let the big boardroom presentation get to your head or your underdog mindset ruin your chances, and do not accept a deal just because you need to close a deal. Protect your interests and make sure it’s a healthy deal for your business and your counterparty.