Sales as Shared Prosperity: Reducing Dissatisfaction in Every Deal

Most sales training frames the job as “doing a deal.” The salesperson’s job is to close. The customer’s job is to negotiate. And somewhere in between, a contract is signed.

But here’s the problem: a deal isn’t always a win. Too many deals leave one side dissatisfied — sometimes both.

I’ve carried one principle throughout my career: every business decision should reduce dissatisfaction. If a sale creates dissatisfaction — for the buyer or the seller — then it isn’t really a good sale at all.

Over the past 25 years, this philosophy has helped me deliver more than $2 billion in sales. I’ve never given a discount. I’ve had customers choose to pay above list price. And I’ve walked away from deals that would have hurt my reputation. The result? Happy customers, long-term partnerships, and products I could stand behind.

Why Discounts Aren’t Value

On the surface, discounts look like wins. Buyers pay less, sellers close faster. But dig deeper and dissatisfaction grows:

Margins shrink — sellers start cutting corners to protect profitability.
Quality erodes — buyers receive less than expected, trust declines.
Relationships sour — the deal begins with suspicion, not confidence.

Research confirms this.

McKinsey found that a 1 % improvement in pricing can lift profits by 8–12 %, while a 1 % discount disproportionately erodes margins.
Harvard Business Review calls discounting “teaching customers to devalue your product.”

True value isn’t in shaving percentages off the price. It’s in ensuring both sides walk away confident the exchange was fair, sustainable, and worth continuing.

The Virgin Lesson: Open-Book Pricing

One of my favorite customers was Virgin. They always insisted on open-book pricing — seeing our costs, our margins, everything. At first, that felt intimidating, but then came the surprise.

They often told us: “You’re not charging enough.”

Their reasoning was simple: if we didn’t make enough profit, we couldn’t staff projects properly — and if we couldn’t staff properly, they wouldn’t get the outcomes they needed.

Virgin understood something many forget: a sale must sustain both sides. This aligns with Peter Drucker’s insight that “the purpose of business is to create a customer” — not a one-off deal, but a lasting relationship. A struggling supplier cannot deliver excellence; a thriving one can.

The Whiteboard Mindset

I encourage sales teams to ditch the slide decks and use a whiteboard instead. Three things happen when you do this:

Credibility – you must own your knowledge, not hide behind slides. Anyone can read PowerPoint; real experts can explain it live.
Participation – buyers become active contributors, sketching and questioning, not passive listeners.
Momentum – the buyer feels the project has already begun.

Edward Tufte famously argued that PowerPoint flattens nuance. Corporate Visions research shows that interactive, visual selling improves retention and engagement. Whiteboarding turns sales into collaboration — aligning expectations early and reducing dissatisfaction before a contract is signed.

Saying No Is Part of Selling

I’ve turned down many deals — not because I didn’t want the revenue, but because they would have harmed my product’s reputation. The look on some clients’ faces has been priceless when they heard: “you are not the kind of client we need.”

Too often, teams chase every logo. “We need this customer,” they say. But do you?

Sometimes the customer isn’t the right fit — they won’t engage, won’t use the product properly, or won’t value the outcome. Selling to them only increases dissatisfaction.

Fred Reichheld, creator of the Net Promoter Score, showed that wrong-fit customers hurt profitability and reputation. Jim Collins put it simply in Good to Great: get the right people on the bus — the same principle applies to customers.

We don’t need every customer.
We need the right customers — the ones who value the journey, engage with the process, and genuinely need the product to reach their goals.

And What About the Salesperson?

Salespeople themselves are often pressured to close deals quickly, even when doing so erodes value for everyone.

In my teams, I structured incentives across revenue, margin, and customer satisfaction — with accelerators for strategic goals and clawbacks for unhappy customers. The result? No unhappy customers and salespeople proud of the deals they made.