Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified what negotiation researchers call the anchoring bias. The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School summarizes the mechanism plainly. The first offer sets a psychological reference point, and counteroffers gravitate toward that anchor, with even extreme anchors influencing the eventual outcome. Research consistently shows that negotiators who make the first offer often achieve better economic outcomes, provided the anchor is credible.
Your buyer does not need a real competitor. They need a number that sounds credible enough to become the anchor in the room. Most sellers cannot tell the difference between a real threat and a well-delivered bluff, so they treat both the same way. They discount.
This issue is about the tell that separates the two, and the one move that turns the bluff into your strongest pitch of the meeting.
IS YOUR SALES TEAM NEGOTIATING AGAINST GHOSTS?
Every quarter, deals close lower than they should because a rep took a competitor’s name at face value and discounted to compete with a proposal that was never produced. Nobody measures this. It shows up as margin erosion with no clear cause.
If your portfolio company is bleeding margin to phantom competitors, I will tell you in 30 minutes. No prep required on your end. I use a proprietary diagnostic framework built across 15+ scaling engagements to find exactly where the leak is.
It sounds like this: “We have a proposal from [competitor] that is significantly lower.” Sometimes a document exists. Often it does not. The number, real or invented, becomes the anchor in the room the moment it is spoken. The tell is simple. Have you actually seen the competitor’s proposal? If the answer is no, ask for it before you respond to it. If they will not produce it, the card is a bluff. Sellers who discount without ever seeing that proposal surrender real margin defending against a competitor they have never confirmed exists.
Your Counter: The Battlecard Deploy.
You do not improvise a competitive response. You arrive with one already built. When the Competitor Card lands, you say: “I would like to look at this together. I want to make sure we are comparing the right things.” Then you pull out your prepared competitive comparison and walk it line by line. You do not attack the competitor. You let the comparison speak. You end with one question: “Which of these would you like to remove?”
That question is the entire mechanism. It forces the buyer to choose what they are willing to give up rather than simply asking you to give something away. They either withdraw the competitor card when the comparison does not hold up, or they name specific elements they will forgo. Either outcome moves you out of a price conversation and into a scope conversation, which is the conversation you actually want to be having.
The credential question to ask yourself before your next negotiation: do you have a battlecard sitting ready, or are you planning to build your defense live, in the room, under pressure. One of those is a strategy. The other is hope.
Scarcity, met with Social Proof and Authority. The Competitor Card works on the buyer’s side because the moment a competitor enters the room, your prospect’s business starts to feel scarce. You shift from leading to chasing, and the fear of losing the deal becomes louder than the discipline to protect margin. The Battlecard Deploy turns that dynamic back on itself. Walking the buyer through a prepared comparison signals social proof in your favor, showing what the market alternative actually delivers against what you deliver, combined with the authority of a document you built before you ever walked into the room. You move from defending a position to presenting evidence.
The Win Condition
The buyer either withdraws the competitor card when they realize the comparison does not hold, or they identify specific elements they are willing to forgo, opening a legitimate scope conversation rather than a price conversation.
The credential question to ask yourself before your next negotiation: do you have a battlecard sitting ready, or are you planning to build your defense live, in the room, under pressure. One of those is a strategy. The other is hope.
FRACTIONAL CRO
76 percent of the deals I review after the fact had one thing in common: the rep never asked to see the competing proposal.
Not because they forgot. Because nobody trained them to ask, and nobody built them a battlecard to fall back on when the question got uncomfortable. The fix is not a pep talk. It is infrastructure.
I serve as a Fractional CRO and Growth Architect for growth-stage companies at inflection points. I have sat in a range of C-suite chairs across 15+ organizations, and competitive battlecards are one of the first artifacts I build in every engagement. If your team is improvising competitive defense in real time, let us fix that.
Three signals from this week across Venture Capital, Private Equity, Family Offices, and Capital:
Pricing has become a named PE value-creation lever, and the advisory market is moving to match it. Revenue Management Labs opened a dedicated New York office in May to anchor its private equity pricing practice, citing pricing as frequently underdeveloped, inconsistently executed, and underutilized during diligence, leaving material EBITDA opportunity on the table at every stage of the investment lifecycle. Source: prnewswire.com
Operating talent in pricing and commercial acceleration is now a fundraising differentiator, not a back-office hire. BDO’s 2026 PE predictions note that funds are recalibrating hiring strategy around operators with deep experience in AI integration, human capital management, commercial acceleration, pricing, digital transformation, supply chain, and data analytics, with competition for that talent expected to escalate through the year. Source: bdo.com
Family offices are shifting capital ratios toward direct deals at a pace worth tracking. At a March Bloomberg Invest roundtable, one participant described a capital mix that moved from roughly two dollars allocated to direct deals for every dollar committed to funds to a ratio now closer to five to one. Source: bloomberglive.com
WANTED: SCALING SUCCESS STORIES
I recently joined NYU as a faculty member in the Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and Management program, where I am writing and later this year instructing the course “Scaling and Exiting the Business for Maximum Value.” The curriculum is being built around real operator experience, not case studies from a textbook.
If you have led a company through a significant growth inflection, a VC, PE, or family office-backed scale, or a successful exit, I want to hear from you. The operators who built something real are the curriculum.
A competitor name dropped into a negotiation is not evidence. It is an anchor. Once it lands, every subsequent number gets measured against it, whether or not it ever existed as a real document. Most sellers do not realize this is happening. They think they are responding to a fact. They are actually responding to a psychological setpoint someone built deliberately.
The fix is not charisma. It is preparation done in advance, sitting in a folder, ready before the meeting starts. A battlecard built the week of the deal is a defensive scramble. A battlecard built the quarter before is a weapon.
Require proof. Build the comparison before you need it. Ask the question that makes them choose. The seller who controls the frame controls the deal.
SAM SPEAKS
I speak to executive audiences on three RevOps topics.
Scaling and Exiting the Business for Maximum Value. Most operators spend years building a company and weeks preparing for the exit. The ones who capture maximum value at the table are the ones who treated the exit as a strategy, not an event. This talk draws on 12+ years of scaling and exiting experience across 15+ organizations, and the curriculum I am currently developing as an NYU faculty member, to give executive audiences a field-level framework for building toward a transaction from day one.
The Unrealistic Leader. The leaders who build enduring organizations are not the ones who set realistic expectations. They are the ones who hold an unrealistic standard long enough for the organization to grow into it. This talk is a practitioner’s case for why the most dangerous thing a leader can do is become reasonable too early, and what it actually looks like to lead from the front when the numbers do not yet support the vision.
The Price Pressure Playbook. Buyers have a playbook. Most sellers do not know it exists. Drawing from my published work cataloguing 20 buyer pressure tactics and the 20 operator moves that counter them, this talk gives revenue leaders and executive teams a tactical framework for protecting margin, closing at full value, and recognizing the moves being run against them in real time.
From the Tip of the Spear is my weekly publication for executives who are building something real. One issue, every Tuesday. A field report from active operator engagements, one principle with supporting data, and market intelligence from across my VC, PE, and family office network.
