You are Inés Rovira, director of deal strategy at Plumeline.io in Madrid. At 15:53 on Tuesday 28 April 2026, five hours before the renewal kickoff with your largest customer in San Francisco, an unsolicited email drops that customer's confidential negotiating brief in your inbox. Before 9:00 AM Pacific you must decide what that document is allowed to change.
The situation
Plumeline.io sells a collaborative document-editing platform to large companies: about US$88 million of annual recurring revenue. MeridianBank, a global bank, is its largest customer: 38,500 seats at US$6.4 million a year, about 7% of revenue, on a 24-month licence that expires on 30 June. Four months ago the bank hired a chief procurement officer to take 12% out of its technology vendors; word in the field is that every renewal must close at list minus 15% or be re-bid. Across the table will be Diane Whitford, vice president of vendor management, twelve weeks into the job. Your lead negotiator, Mateo Salazar, has owned the account since 2024 and, under price pressure, tends to find a way to make it work.
The email comes from a former Plumeline account director who joined the bank's vendor-management group last quarter. No comment: just a five-paragraph briefing marked Confidential — Procurement Eyes Only. It says the bank has costed leaving Plumeline at US$14.2 million one-off plus US$3.1 million a year over a 36-month transition, and cannot stand up an alternative before early 2027. New supervisory guidance will require SOC 2 Type II and FedRAMP Moderate certification by 31 December; Plumeline holds SOC 2 Type I, and the bank's security chief has a veto. Procurement plans to open at US$4.8 million and close 12–15% off; the CFO would accept 10% off with other concessions. And the chief data officer has US$18 million for an AI platform partner, which procurement has been told not to mention.
You cannot tell whether the leak is deliberate, accidental or political, or whether the document is genuine and complete. Plumeline already has SOC 2 Type II in flight for the fourth quarter; FedRAMP would add about US$600,000 of work. Your chief revenue officer, Priya Krishnamurthy, asks every deal team the same question: what would the customer have given us if we had just held firm on price? Beside her will sit two empty chairs, for the CFO and the general counsel.