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GM to the Top 1% ☕
The whole industry is applauding the sixty second negotiation. Two days of back and forth, gone. A machine closes it before lunch. Everybody claps.
Here is the uncomfortable read. Speed is not neutral. A negotiation that collapses to sixty seconds only got faster because everything human got stripped out of it first.
And the things that got stripped out, the discovery, the trust, the judgment, were the only things standing between you and being interchangeable.
💡 SPEED IS A TELL. IT SAYS THE DEAL WAS ALREADY COMMODITIZED.
Think about what has to be true for a negotiation to take one minute. Every term is standardized. Every option is comparable. The only open question is price. That is not a fast deal. That is a commodity, and you happened to be one of the interchangeable inputs.
The deals that cannot close in a minute are the ones where you still matter. Where the outcome is uncertain and someone needs a partner they trust to navigate it. Where the risk is high enough that the cheapest bid is the scary bid. Where the buyer needs a human to say, I have seen this fail, here is how we make sure it does not. You cannot compress that into sixty seconds, and you should not want to.
So when a buyer wants to move at machine speed, hear the real message. They have decided you are a commodity, and speed is how commodities get bought. Your job is not to match the speed. Your job is to earn the pause. To be the vendor whose deal is worth slowing down for, because the outcome is worth getting right. The rep who races the machine to the bottom wins the race and loses the margin. Make yourself worth the extra day.
🔧 HOW TO EARN THE PAUSE
Slow is not the goal. Being worth slowing down for is.
1. Introduce a risk they had not priced: The fastest way to stop a rushed commodity buy is to surface the expensive thing nobody modeled. Now the deal deserves a second look.
2. Trade speed for a better term: If they want it fast, that urgency is worth something. Do not give the speed away for free. Exchange it for scope, term length, or a reference commitment.
3. Bring a decision the model cannot make: Judgment calls, edge cases, what happens when it breaks. Put a question on the table only a human can answer, and you are back in the deal.
4. Be the safe choice, loudly: When speed and price both favor the cheap option, certainty is your lever. Make the cost of being wrong the loudest number in the room.
🎯 THIS WEEK'S HOMEWORK
Look at your fastest-moving deal. Ask one honest question: is it moving fast because you are winning, or because the buyer has decided you are interchangeable? If it is the second one, find the one risk they have not priced and put it on the table before they sign.
❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY
Is your quickest deal this quarter a sign of momentum, or a sign you have been commoditized?
Reply with the deal that is moving faster than it should.
See you tomorrow.
Edward
Founder, Morning Sales
P.S. Being worth slowing down for takes homework, surfacing the risk the buyer never priced. The 500 prompts I sell are built to find it fast, the failure-mode questions, the cost-of-wrong math, the reference plays. 27 dollars, and it turns a race to the bottom back into a real deal: https://store.edwardgorbis.com