Some time ago I was involved in founding a company and two VCs were working together to fund us. They'd come up with a term sheet and we needed to alter some of the parts of it.

So, we sat down with them and the CEO of our company laid things out by running through all the parts that everyone agreed on and framing the discussion as "and there are these two provisions that we don't, so we're really close".

The rest of the discussion was super-smooth because of the way it begun.