Issue #127

Asymmetry Is Money in Enterprise Deals

There is inherent imbalance in the value of deals for small companies selling to large enterprises. This can be a source of huge competitive advantage for you, or a danger to avoid.

Enterprise buyers rarely struggle to understand what you sell.

They nod and agree, they say it makes sense.

Then the deal drags, procurement turns up, and price becomes the only thing anyone wants to talk about.

hat is not confusion. It is a flack of nderstanding of enterprise sales best practice.
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Large organisations experience value unevenly. Pain is distributed across money, time, risk, reputation, and internal effort.

If you, as a seller, describe value as a list of features or even benefits, all that unevenness disappears. What remains is a price tag floating in mid-air.

You steam roller over all their wonderful complexity, reducing all the value drivers to one single number. That is easy pickings for procurement and the CFO.

That is why deals stall even when everyone agrees the solution is good.

Core insight

Enterprise value is asymmetric by default. A small change on your side can remove a large problem on theirs.

Exploiting this imbalance is the entire commercial game.

When that gap stays vague, buyers protect themselves by delaying, haggling or finding fault. When it is quantified, the deal starts to move.

Not because you pushed harder, but because the economics became visible. Clarity drives closing.

This is not clever selling. It is basic arithmetic applied to grown-up problems.

Speed

Start with speed, it is the easiest place to expose imbalance. Accelerating delivery usually costs the supplier a small, easily calculated amount.

A temporary reordering of priorities, an extra resource. A bit of short-term pain for the team.

On the buyer side, time can mean a very different thing. Earlier revenue recognition, avoided penalties, a programme that stops being a board-level embarrassment.

Ask this one blunt question, “If this landed four weeks earlier, what changes internally:

• Revenue,
• Cost,
• Customer retention,
• Regulatory exposure?”

Push until a number appears. Once it does, price stops being their centre of focus.

Capital

Next, consider capital. Enterprise organisations typically borrow cheaply. Earlier payment or committed funding is often trivial inside a corporate finance function.

For a supplier (you), it can unlock speed, senior attention, or delivery safeguards - stuff they want.

Treat payment terms as an economic lever, not a favour and certainly not as an assumption.

Earlier funding enables specific outcomes: faster mobilisation, parallel workstreams reduced delivery risk.

Walk through the trade in plain numbers. This is not an awkward conversation for big companies, it is the language they speak.

Risk

Then address risk. This is where enterprise buyers quietly bleed value. Missed deadlines attract scrutiny. Failed initiatives erode careers. Delays trigger internal politics that never appear in the RFP.

Your cost to reduce that exposure is often modest. All you need to put in place is:

• Clearer reporting,
• Phased rollout,
• A pilot before full commitment,
• Embedded support,
• Tighter service boundaries.

Ask which failure would cause the most internal trouble if it happened. That answer tells you exactly where the value sits.

Stability

Finally, contract stability. Additional volume or longer commitments rarely change supplier economics dramatically. In fact if a customer does affect your economics in a big way, you need to ask yourself if they are too big for you.

Losing a customer who represents a major share of your revenue can be devastating. You should be careful how you grow.

For buyers, stability simplifies planning, secures capacity, and reduces the constant churn of supplier review.

Frame longer terms around certainty of supply and access. They get:

• Guaranteed capacity,
• Priority support,
• Fewer internal escalations,
• An easier life.

Put numbers on what that stability removes from their workload.

A Simple Test

Before presenting a commercial proposal, write one sentence: “A small concession from us creates a large outcome for them because…”

If that sentence contains adjectives instead of numbers, you are not ready to price.

A Mistake To Avoid

Cutting price early destroys the very imbalance that should be working for you. Once price moves, every later value argument sounds like damage control.

Discounts belong at the end of a disciplined process, not at the start, before anybody has done the maths.

Next Step

Take one live enterprise deal and identify a single asymmetry around speed, capital, risk, or stability.

Quantify it properly, then rebuild the conversation around shared outcome instead of unit price. Invite your customer coach out for a coffee and run it past them.

House of Sales

I help people use what they’ve got and develop what they need to sell the way big customers buy.

Here's a free guide to creating even more value in accounts by getting your team to unleash their creativity. It's simple, you just use their focus in a structured way - so much more efficient and effective than brainstorming ideas.

​Account Planning with the Focus Matrix.pdf​

If you liked this then tell your friends and team mates, see you next week.

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