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3 Answers
None of them.
Tell a "no discount" vendor that you have a $10 million spend coming up, but you're going to need a discount, and watch the discount appear.
Vendors who claim "no discounts" have one of two things going for them:
1.) A well thought out plan where putting the product and service delivery in an inflexible pricing box works out great for small purchases that can be more time and effort than they're worth if you have to negotiate each one. For example, any order under $1000.
2.) A company that is generally doing well and growing, and is taking orders faster than they can realistically service them.
When the company inevitably falls on harder times, the "no discount" policy is one of the first to get thrown away. For example, call up HP today and say you'd like to buy $250,000 worth of servers, but will need a 40% discount. You would have been laughed at in 2005 - 2008, but today I suspect you'll get a call back very quickly given the mess that HP currently is.
What "no discount" really says is "your purchase amount is not materially relevant to us".
This is why partnering with a smaller supplier can pay good dividends for smaller companies -- you get more attention and have more leverage with the same dollar spend than you ever would spending those dollars with a large company.
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IBM had a "no discount" policy, during the 1980's. They gave discount in return for "commitment" , via their infamous VPA's the Volume Purchase Agreement, which committed their Customers to Spend an amount of money (or to take a volume of product at an agreed price) during a fixed time frame, the VPA carried "penalties" for non-compliance.
Competing in the "Plug Compatible peripheral" Market against IBM, our rule of thumb was they would hold the business if they were within 6% of our price, and we always won at 15% below their price. The art was negotiating a "Win Price" between 6% - 15% discount from IBM List price where we had a Margin of 80%! We took our Market share in the UK from 3% to more that 30% of addressed market in four years. THEN, they learned how to discount!
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