Don’t Buy a Deal
Why Buying the Deal Will Break Your Business (And What to Do Instead)
In many companies I’ve worked with, I’ve heard a familiar phrase echo from the sales floor: "Just get the W."
Land the deal. Lock in the logo. Hit the quarter.
Sometimes that strategy is valid, especially when entering a new market or territory. You might need to buy your first customer by offering a lower price, flexible terms, or tighter delivery. But what happens when "just get the W" becomes your default negotiation posture?
What happens when the way you win deals... makes it impossible to deliver them?
I’ve seen it kill business or bring them close to bankruptcy if not addressed.
Buying sales is a band-aid for a broken foundation.
What Does ‘Buying the Deal’ Really Mean in Negotiation?
"Buying the deal" is a profound strategic misstep where you compromise your long-term value and operational integrity for a short-term sale. It's a failure of negotiation, because it shifts the focus to closing at any cost rather than on building a sustainable agreement leading to true win-win.
This pattern of self-sabotage manifests in several ways:
Aggressive discounting to beat a competitor's price, often leading to a "race to the bottom".
Underbidding on projects below cost just to win the job.
Over-promising on delivery, features, or timelines that are unscalable and impossible to deliver profitably.
Overspending on customer acquisition (CAC) in a way that is unsustainable.
Signing bad-fit clients who do not align with your ideal customer profile, simply to boost short-term metrics.
Accepting vague "maybe" deals instead of insisting on a clear blueprint of expectations. The goal isn't a rigid, inflexible contract or agreement, but one that provides enough clarity on how to execute the agreements and prevent integrity issues later on. A "yes" without a clear blueprint and defined actions is meaningless, as it only creates the illusion of alignment.
At its core, buying the deal is a failure of negotiation, not just a bad sales call. Instead of understanding the real interests of both sides and building a sustainable agreement, the focus shifts to closing at any cost. Often on bargaining points like price, scope, or time. But the cost of "Buying" a deal always comes back down the road.
The difference between Bargaining, Bartering and Negotiations.
The Dangers of Underdelivering and the Compounding Damage
When you "win" a deal you weren’t ready to service profitably, you set off a series of consequences that are costly to both your business and your team. What feels like a win in the moment often becomes a liability with a time delay.
1. You Underdeliver and Erase Trust.
The client bought into the promise, but you don't have the budget, resources, or margin to fulfill it. This leads to missed milestones, reactive communication, and customer resentment. The client feels they can't rely on your commitments, and once trust is cracked, it rarely comes back clean. A single dissatisfied client can damage your reputation faster than a hundred good ones can rebuild it.
2. Your Margins Disappear.
Aggressive discounting to win a deal systematically destroys profit margins. For instance, a seemingly small 5% discount can lead to a disproportionate 12.5% reduction in gross profit per sale. To make up for this, you’d need a 14% increase in sales volume just to maintain the same total profit. This trains customers to expect lower prices, systematically eroding your future pricing power and trapping you in a cycle of low profitability.
3. Your Team Burns Out.
That pressure doesn't just hit the bottom line, it hits your people first landing squarely on your team, who are forced to work with under-resourced projects and unrealistic deadlines. This leads to unsustainable workloads, high turnover rates, and decreased productivity. They are the ones left to manage the emotional fallout of a deal signed under pressure instead of principle.
4. You Block Better Opportunities.
Every unit of time, effort, and capital spent on an unprofitable or bad-fit client is a unit not spent on a strategic initiative, a more profitable client, or product innovation. This creates a significant "opportunity cost", draining morale and preventing you from capitalizing on genuinely lucrative opportunities.
A few years ago, I worked with a company delivering a major infrastructure solution to a national transportation customer. The deal was large, multi-year, multi-million dollar. But it was underbid by at least $1–2 million compared to the next closest proposal. The first year went fine. The second year started showing cracks. By the time I arrived in year three, it was chaos.
Corners were being cut.
Work was delayed.
Resources were reallocated.
Legal threats began surfacing.
External relationships and internal team morale were at a low.
Why? Because the only way they felt they could secure the deal was to buy it, promising what couldn’t be delivered profitably, hoping to make it work later. They didn’t negotiate, they bargained, and the price wasn’t just financial. It was morale, reputation, opportunity cost, and the list goes on.
Why Companies Keep Buying Deals, and the Root Cause
Buying deals often signals deeper, systemic problems within a business. The pursuit of "growth at all costs" and the influence of cognitive biases can blind founders and sales teams to the true long-term costs of their actions.
This behavior can mirror a bad addiction. The pressure from a previous bad deal—a "shot" of short-term revenue—can increase the chance of buying a deal again just to stay afloat. It's a vicious cycle that prioritizes immediate metrics over the long-term health of the business.
These aren't always rational decisions. They are often fueled by psychological traps like:
Sunk Cost Fallacy: The human tendency to continue a failing course of action because of the time and money you've already invested.
Scarcity Mindset: The belief that opportunities are limited, leading to a desperate fear of missing out on any deal, even unprofitable ones.
Misaligned Incentives: When internal systems reward top-line revenue at the expense of delivery risk and long-term profitability.
Pressure culture: Sales quotas > long-term thinking.
Misaligned metrics: Celebrating vanity metrics while ignoring real business outcomes.
Low Negotiation Skills: Your teams are not trained to build real agreements that improve outcomes for both parties.
You might still win a few deals this way, but you'll be paying compound interest on that mistake in the form of diminished trust, shrinking margins, and a compromised reputation.
The Antidote: How to Use Value-Based Negotiation Instead
Real negotiation is the antidote to buying deals. It is a principled approach focused on building agreements you can stand behind without flinching. This is how to move from a place of desperation to a position of strength:
1. Dig for Interests, Not Positions.
Bargaining focuses on positions, and short-term extractive wins. Negotiation focuses on interests, the "why" behind what you want. Ask questions like: "What pressure are you under?" or "What is the real problem we're trying to solve?" This is the dignity-first approach, where you seek to understand before being understood.
Case Study:
Years ago, one of our clients, a law enforcement agency, refused to pay for a service contract they had already agreed to. On paper, it was a breach of contract. Everyone wanted to escalate. But many wanted to just cut them a deal so we could at least capture some revenue. The pressure was to get some cash in the door.
Instead, I spent months talking to the right people and learning the real story behind their action. It turned out, it wasn’t about price. They had been burned by a competitor of ours with a similar style contract and it was about a feeling of fairness. They wanted a pricing model and contract that was more transparent so they knew they were paying for what they got and nothing more. We designed a new pricing model, gave them transparency, and earned their trust back. And the final number? Almost identical to the original. But this time, it was a negotiation, not a battle.
2. Set Realistic Expectations and Boundaries.
Don’t promise what your team can’t deliver with confidence and consistency. Every time you oversell just to win the deal, you trade short-term revenue for long-term trust, and trust, once cracked, rarely comes back clean. Sustainable negotiation isn’t about pleasing everyone, it’s about building agreements you can stand behind without flinching.
3. Build Value, Not Just Discounts.
If you’re hesitating to charge full price, don’t just tweak the pitch, dig into the discomfort. Is the offer truly delivering the value it claims? Are you clearly communicating that value in the negotiation itself? Or have you trained buyers to expect discounts, not because they asked, but because you never learned how to defend the deal with conviction? Discounting out of doubt doesn’t build trust. It signals uncertainty. The stronger move is to build enough value that you can stand by your number, calmly, confidently, and without apology.
4. Learn to Walk Away.
If a deal requires you to overpromise or underprice, it’s not a win. It’s a liability with a time delay. You might secure the signature today, but you’ve introduced friction into every future conversation. Delivery falters. Margins shrink. Trust begins to slip the moment performance can’t meet expectation. The cost isn’t just financial. Your team pays for it too. They’re the ones left scrambling to stretch capacity, cut corners, or hold the emotional fallout when a deal was signed under pressure instead of principle.
What looks like short-term success often becomes long-term erosion. And once your reputation is compromised, you’re no longer negotiating from strength.
Final Takeaway: Why Real Negotiation Builds Sustainable Business
Overpromising in negotiation doesn’t close the gap; it widens it. This is why integrity is not just about values. It's about engineering agreements you can actually fulfill. When your word holds up under pressure, you don’t just win the deal — you build the kind of reputation people come back for.
Buying deals is a shortcut. Negotiation is a skill. One wins the quarter. The other builds a company.
If you're seeing signs of erosion in your client relationships, sales margins, or team morale—ask yourself:
Where have we bought deals instead of negotiating for the right ones?
Ready to Train Your Negotiation Muscle?
Most leaders wing it in the moments that matter most and walk away with doubt, regret, or missed outcomes. The Cyr Method's free Negations Skill assessment asks 16 simple questions to help you get clarity. You’ll get a tailored report with quick wins to improve how you negotiate and a deeper understanding of your mindset, emotional grounding, and conversation control.
See how you stack up. Find out what might be holding you back.
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