Gong Labs Labs analyzed more than 24 million sales calls and found that the average length of pricing conversations has increased 62 percent since 2020. Sellers are spending more time defending price, and responding to that pressure with discounts.
The reason most of those conversations go long is not that your price is wrong. It is that you accepted a frame you did not build. The buyer dropped a number. You treated it as real. From that moment, you were negotiating against a benchmark you could not verify, at a scope you never confirmed, under conditions you never examined.
This issue is about how that happens, why it works on most sellers, and the one move that stops it cold.
IS YOUR PORTCO STALLED?
Not plateaued. Not slow. Stalled. There is a difference, and if you are living it right now, you already know which one it is.
Most operators can identify the symptom. Revenue has stopped moving. Pipeline looks active but nothing is closing. The team is working but the number is not. What they cannot identify is the structural reason, and that is the conversation worth having.
If your portfolio company has stalled, I will tell you why in 30 minutes. No prep required on your end. I use a proprietary diagnostic framework built across 15+ scaling engagements to identify the growth ceiling fast.
What the Buyer Is Doing: Price Pressure Play #3 – The Benchmark Drop
The buyer introduces an external reference point early in the negotiation. “Industry standard for this type of engagement is around X.” Or: “We have seen similar organizations get this done for Y.” There is no source. There is no scope comparison. There is no verifiable context. There is only a number, stated with confidence.
This is not information. It is a positioning move.
The psychology is straightforward. An unverified number, delivered with authority, carries the weight of fact. The buyer’s claim implies that the market agrees on price, that your number is the anomaly, and that you owe them an explanation. Most sellers immediately start explaining. Once you explain, you have conceded the frame. You are now defending your price against a benchmark you cannot challenge, because you never required the buyer to prove it.
Gong data confirms what happens next. Late-stage deals where competitive benchmarks are cited without early challenge result in smaller deal sizes, with reps discounting to close rather than selling to value. The playbook names this precisely: sellers who accept unverified benchmarks as negotiating baselines discount an average of 11 percent of deal value defending a comparison that was never legitimate.
The tell is simple. The buyer cited a number. They did not name a source, define a scope, specify a timeline, or describe the contractual structure it was drawn from. That benchmark has not been substantiated. It does not yet exist as a legitimate negotiating reference.
Your Move: Margin Protection Move #3 — The Benchmark Challenge
Do not defend your price against an unverified number. Require the buyer to substantiate it first.
Step one. Ask for the specifics. “I want to make sure we are responding to an accurate comparison. Can you share the specifics on that benchmark: what was included in scope, at what scale, with what timeline, and under what contractual structure?” Then stop. Wait.
Most benchmarks do not survive this question. Buyers who invented or inflated a number will either deflect, go quiet, or suddenly become less specific than they were thirty seconds ago. That is your answer.
Step two. If the buyer provides detail, engage with the comparison directly. “Let us look at that side by side against what we have built for you. In my experience, when we break down the specifics, we are almost never looking at the same thing.” Walk them through the scope differential. Show where the comparison breaks down.
Step three. If they cannot substantiate it, close the loop calmly and without accusation. “Without a comparable scope, the benchmark does not apply here. Let me walk you through why the investment is structured as it is.” You are not challenging their honesty. You are requiring accuracy.
Social Proof (Reversed). The Cialdini principle at work here is Social Proof Reversed. The benchmark derives its power from the implication that the market agrees. By requiring substantiation, you dismantle that implied consensus. The buyer must now prove the comparison is real and equivalent rather than having you accept their assertion at face value. Most cannot.
The Win Condition
The win condition is binary. Either the benchmark survives scrutiny and you engage with a real comparison, or it does not, and you return to a value-based conversation with the frame intact.
FRACTIONAL CRO
83 percent of the VC, PE, and family office teams that reach out to me share the same situation: a portfolio company that has plateaued on revenue, lost pipeline velocity, or cannot convert at the rate the investment thesis required. The problem is almost always the same place. Sales and marketing are not operating as a system.
I serve as a Fractional CRO and Revenue Architect for growth-stage companies at inflection points. I have sat in a range of C-suite chairs across 15+ organizations, but the engagement that moves the needle fastest is always the one that starts with the revenue engine. If your portco has stalled, let us diagnose it.
Three signals from this week across Venture Capital, Private Equity, Family Offices, and Capital:
PE operational value creation is no longer optional. McKinsey’s Global Private Markets Report 2026 puts median buyout entry multiples at 11.8x EBITDA in 2025, a new record. With leverage contributing less to returns than at any point since 2010, revenue growth and margin expansion are now the primary drivers of PE fund performance. Operating groups at PE firms have more than doubled in size since 2021. The playbook has shifted from financial engineering to operational execution. Source: McKinsey
Exit pressure is building from the backlog. More than 16,000 PE-backed companies globally have been held for over four years, representing 52 percent of total buyout-backed inventory and the highest level on record. Average holding periods have reached 6.6 years. Bain’s 2026 PE Outlook notes that generating adequate returns on the 2021 and 2022 vintage cohorts requires high EBITDA growth under conditions that have been anything but cooperative. Portcos heading toward exit in the next 24 months need every margin lever engaged now. Source: Bain
Pricing discipline is a documented EBITDA lever, not a sales topic. McKinsey data shows that companies applying rigorous pricing techniques achieve 2 to 7 percent higher margins than peers. KPMG research puts the EBITDA margin improvement from pricing discipline and advanced tooling at 3 to 8 percent. At a platform company preparing for exit, that differential is a multiple-expansion event, not a rounding error. Pricing is not a negotiation tactic. It is a balance sheet decision. Source: Revenue Analytics
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.
Most pricing negotiations are lost before the seller realizes the frame has shifted. The buyer drops a number. The seller treats it as a data point. The conversation moves to justification. The seller spends the next twenty minutes defending a price against a benchmark that was never real.
This is not a close problem. It is a discipline problem.
The Benchmark Drop works because sellers believe they have to respond to every number the buyer puts on the table. They do not. They have to respond to substantiated numbers. An unverified benchmark is not a negotiating reference. It is a prompt to see if you will discount on demand.
Require the source. Require the scope. Require the context. Most benchmarks do not survive those three questions. The ones that do deserve a direct response. The ones that do not should be named for what they are: a negotiating tactic that you are not going to accept.
The win condition in this conversation is not a lower price. It is a return to value. 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.
