Negotiate the exit at signing

Signing day is the strongest you will ever be. The vendor has a quarter to close and a rival on the shortlist. Five years later you have fourteen million records inside their schema and no rival anywhere. Every clause you want then costs a multiple of what it costs today.

We learned the arithmetic on a CRM exit. The export API was rate-limited to ten thousand records a day. Fourteen million records. That is 1,400 days of polite extraction, or the vendor's own migration services quote, which was priced like they had done this math too. They had. Nobody on our side had read the export clause since 2019, because in 2019 there was no export clause.

So the standing rule: no signature until the exit is in the document. Five clauses, none exotic.

1. Export format, named. An open format with a documented schema, full fidelity: history, attachments, audit trails, metadata. "Industry standard export" is not a format; it is a shrug with a signature line.
2. Export SLA, numbered. Complete export delivered within thirty days of request, no per-record fees, no rate limit that turns thirty days into four years. Make the limit a number and divide your record count by it before you initial the page.
3. Egress, assigned. Whose network bill? For a warehouse of any size this is real money, and "not addressed" means "yours".
4. Decommission, dated. When you leave, the vendor deletes, and certifies deletion in writing within ninety days. Your compliance team will need that certificate exactly once, urgently.
5. Rehearsal rights. You may run a full export annually without triggering a renegotiation or a sales call. Then actually run it, the way you rehearse the runbook: the first export attempt should not be the one that matters.

Procurement will tell you these clauses slow the deal. They slow it by a week. The contract time bomb we defused last year had been ticking since a deal that closed three days early instead.

One more date for the wall: first export rehearsal within ninety days of go-live. If the rehearsal fails while the implementation team still exists, that is a support ticket. If it fails in year five, that is a program.