When to Stop Negotiating

A buyer has moved a supplier from an 8 percent price increase to 4.2 percent. There may still be another few tenths available. The supplier is visibly running out of room, the implementation team needs the agreement, and further pressure may require trading away something that matters more than the extra saving.

Most negotiation advice gives the buyer a clear instinct: keep going if more value can still be claimed. A new paper in Negotiation Journal asks whether that instinct is always rational. Peter Kesting, Remigiusz Smolinski and Rudolf Schüssler introduce what they call a sufficiency point. Negotiators already work with a reservation point, the boundary beyond which they should reject a deal, and an aspiration point, the ambitious result they would like to achieve. The sufficiency point answers a different question: at what point is the outcome genuinely enough?

The distinction sounds simple, but the authors are not proposing that negotiators lower their ambitions or stop preparing hard. Their argument is that maximizing one dimension of a deal can become irrational once the wider outcome is already sufficient and the marginal gain creates costs elsewhere.

For procurement, that is a useful challenge to one of the function's strongest habits.

Leaving value on the table is not automatically failure

Negotiation training often treats unclaimed value as evidence of poor execution. If the supplier would have moved another 0.4 percentage points and the buyer did not extract it, the buyer left money on the table. Sometimes that diagnosis is correct: a buyer who stops because the conversation becomes uncomfortable, accepts an unsupported claim or never tests the supplier's position has not discovered a sophisticated new stopping rule. They have simply stopped too early.

The sufficiency argument becomes interesting when the negotiator has done the opposite: prepared properly, tested the position, understood the available value and then decided that pursuing the remaining gain is no longer worth it.

The paper defines sufficiency as broader than a single number. The judgment can include economic outcomes, fairness, stakeholder effects, implementation risk, relationships, sustainability and other consequences that sit outside the narrow bargaining variable. That matters because procurement negotiations rarely end on price alone. A final 0.3 percent reduction may look attractive in the savings tracker but become poor economics if it is bought with reduced service, worse allocation priority, tighter payment terms, less engineering support or a supplier relationship that is now brittle enough to fail at the first operational problem.

The point is not that relationships should protect suppliers from commercial pressure. The point is that the unit of analysis should be the deal, not the last number moved.

The sufficiency point is different from your target

An aspiration point tells you what you would like to achieve. A reservation point tells you what you cannot accept. Neither tells you when further improvement stops being worth pursuing.

Imagine a renewal negotiation with three objectives. Procurement wants a price reduction, a two-year price-adjustment mechanism and guaranteed capacity during peak demand.

The buyer may have a strong aspiration on price and still reach a point where the package is already strategically good enough because the supplier has also accepted the adjustment mechanism and capacity commitment. Continuing to press price could force a trade against one of those protections.

The sufficiency point therefore cannot simply be another number between target and walk-away. It is a decision rule about the package, which makes it harder to use but also more realistic.

Procurement needs a safeguard against using "enough" as an excuse

There is an obvious danger in the concept. Weak negotiators can rationalize almost any early settlement by saying the deal was sufficient, turning a useful idea into a sophisticated label for concession.

A credible sufficiency point has to be prepared before the final pressure of the negotiation. It should be based on what the organisation actually needs, what risks matter, which objectives are already satisfied and what the marginal value of additional movement really is.

The buyer should still know the supplier's likely economics, alternatives, time pressure and leverage. They should still test claims. They should still make conditional trades rather than give unilateral concessions.

The same discipline matters when alternatives are weak. Our article on what to do when BATNA does not provide a real walk-away looks at that constraint from the other side: when leaving is not credible, the team needs to be even clearer about what further pressure is meant to achieve.

Sufficiency is only meaningful when the negotiator could plausibly continue but has a reason not to. That is a much higher standard than "this feels like a decent deal."

The marginal gain can be smaller than the marginal damage

Procurement teams are used to calculating the upside of another concession. They are less consistent about calculating the cost of obtaining it.

Some costs are visible: a supplier may demand volume, exclusivity, longer duration or faster payment in return. Others are harder to put into a spreadsheet. The negotiation can consume executive attention, delay implementation, reduce willingness to cooperate on engineering changes or encourage the supplier to recover margin elsewhere in the account.

None of those effects means the buyer should stop pushing as soon as resistance appears. Resistance is part of negotiation.

The useful question is what changes once the core objectives are already met. If the next increment of value requires disproportionate risk, time or countervalue, continuing is no longer automatically the more disciplined choice.

A stopping decision should be part of preparation

Many negotiation plans are detailed about how to start and vague about how to finish.

They define the opening position, the target, the walk-away point and the concession path. The implicit assumption is that the team will simply know when to close.

The sufficiency point suggests a better preparation question:

What would need to be true for us to say that this is enough, even if more might still be available?

For a procurement team, the answer might include a minimum commercial outcome, acceptable risk allocation, supply continuity, a workable implementation path and no concession that destroys more value than the next saving creates.

This does not need to become a bureaucratic scorecard. The value is in forcing the team to discuss the stopping logic before fatigue, ego or end-of-quarter pressure takes over.

It also creates a useful challenge for senior stakeholders. A procurement lead can explain why the team stopped not with "the supplier would not move" but with a clearer account of why the remaining movement was not worth what it would have cost.

The hardest part may be stopping after a successful negotiation

Negotiators are trained to notice premature closure. They are less often trained to notice unnecessary continuation, which creates a behavioural reason to think about the stopping rule in advance.

Once a buyer has created momentum and extracted movement, stopping can feel psychologically similar to giving something up. The next concession looks like proof that the previous one was not the limit. Success encourages another push.

That instinct is often useful. It is also how a good deal can become fragile.

The sufficiency point does not replace aspiration, leverage or disciplined value claiming. It adds a missing question to them.

A strong negotiator should know when a deal is unacceptable. They should know what an excellent result looks like. They should also know when the package already serves the organisation well enough that pursuing the last available gain would make the total outcome worse.

That final judgment cannot be delegated to a formula, but it can be prepared and practised.

For teams building negotiation capability, that means rehearsing not only how to open, challenge and trade, but also how to recognise a moment where continuing is no longer the strongest move.

Sources

• Kesting, P., Smolinski, R., & Schüssler, R. (2026). How Much is Enough? Sufficiency and the Limits of Maximization in Negotiation. Negotiation Journal. Advance online publication, 26 August 2026.
• Geneva Centre for Security Policy (14 September 2026). How Much is Enough? Sufficiency and the Limits of Maximization in Negotiation.