Talk it through with Vera before the call
A five minute rehearsal against a briefed analyst, out loud, before you dial. She has read the prep, knows your goal, and will argue the vendor side back at you.
You know the ten minutes before a vendor call. The prep is open in one tab, the last quote in another, and you are reading your own bullet points back to yourself because there is no one to say them to. You have a goal, three questions, and a stance you want to hold, but the first time you say any of it out loud is when the vendor is already on the line. That is a rough place to find out that your opening is soft, or that your answer to a discount refusal is a pause.
So we shipped a small thing that changes that moment. The meeting app now holds a private voice conversation with Vera about the meeting you are looking at. She is not in the call and the other side never hears her. She arrives briefed on your goal, your questions, the stance you want to hold, and the prep written for that vendor. You ask her what to open with, what to do when they refuse, or you tell her to argue their side back at you and see how it holds. This is the quiet cousin of the voice sparring room, aimed at the call in front of you rather than a full mock negotiation.
The named problem: the first rehearsal is the live call
Most buyers do not rehearse. Not because they think they are ready, but because rehearsing alone feels foolish and rehearsing with a colleague costs a meeting nobody has time to book. The result is that your negotiation muscle warms up during the negotiation. The vendor, who has run this call a hundred times this quarter, is already at temperature. That asymmetry is where discipline leaks out. You accept a framing you meant to resist, you forget the concession you were going to trade for, you let a refusal stand because you had no second move loaded.
The problem gets worse when the request arrived pre shaped. If the intake ticket already named the vendor instead of the need, you walk into the call carrying someone else's decision. You need to interrogate your own position before you defend it, and there has been no low cost way to do that out loud.
How it fits the workflow
This does not add a step. It fills the gap that was already there. You open the meeting to check your prep anyway, so the conversation lives exactly where your eyes already are. Vera reads the prep that was written for that vendor, the same package that feeds Vera when she comes on the call, so there is no re briefing and no copy paste. You are not explaining the deal to her. She already has it.
Three questions cover most of what buyers ask her before a call. What should I open with. What do I do when they refuse the discount. And, the useful one, argue their side back at me. That third one is the rehearsal that changes calls, because it forces you to answer the objection before the vendor raises it. When your counter to their refusal is muscle memory instead of improvisation, the call moves faster and you give away less.
Voice, or type, either way she answers out loud
Speak to her and she answers by voice. That is the point, because saying your position out loud is what tests it. But plenty of calls happen on a shared floor, in a client office, or on a laptop with no microphone, so you can type your question instead whenever you prefer. She answers out loud either way, which means you can rehearse silently on the input side and still hear the reasoning spoken back. If you would rather she lived where your conversation already is, she also runs in Slack and Teams, though the pre call rehearsal is built into the meeting itself.
You enable and tune all of this from the desktop app settings, including microphone permissions and whether voice is on by default for a given meeting type.
What changes for the buyer
The honest limits
This is a rehearsal tool, not an oracle. Vera argues the vendor side as well as the prep and the benchmarks allow, but she is modelling a reasonable rep, not the specific human you are about to face, who may have quirks, authority limits, or a bad quarter that no prep captured. Treat her vendor impression as a sparring partner, not a prediction.
She is only as sharp as the prep behind her. If the goal is vague or the vendor package is thin, the rehearsal will be too. The fix is upstream: a solid view of what is covered and what a good discount looks like makes the pre call conversation far more useful. Benchmark figures she cites are grounded, but a live rehearsal is not the moment to lean on a single number you have not verified in the underlying benchmark.
And she does not join the call. That is deliberate and it is the whole design. This feature makes you better before you dial. When you want an analyst present during the live conversation, with the memo written the moment you hang up, that is the call room, a different tool for a different minute. Use this one to walk in warm. Use that one to stay sharp while you are in the room.
Fredrik has spent more than twenty years in enterprise software, with time at Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce before moving to the buy side. He structured and priced the kind of large agreements most buyers only see once or twice in a career, which taught him where the leverage sits and how far a vendor will actually move. He started VendorBenchmark to hand that knowledge to every sourcing team.
