Foundations
Stress-test the offer
Once you have designed the offer, stress-test it before you put it on the table.
The test is not “is this a good deal in the abstract?” Nobody signs an abstraction. The test is narrower, and harder.
Why would the other side say yes?
Why might they say no?
If they say yes, does the resulting deal still work for you?
Two of those questions are already partly answered before you get here. Promise asks what future state you are inviting the other side to value. Credibility asks why they should believe it will hold. Together they cover the reason to want the deal at all.
The six lenses below test the rest of the structure: what the exchange costs each side, what it risks, what it locks in, when everything happens — and what all of that does to your own economics.
Six design lenses
These are not six equal ingredients in an attractiveness score. There is no score. They are questions to run over a specific proposed offer — and most deals turn on one or two of them.
- What becomes better for the other side if they accept?
- What becomes better for you?
- Is the change important enough to motivate action, or merely nice to have?
Promise is the future state you propose. Value Creation examines the value that state, and the transaction around it, can actually produce.
- After price and every other transfer, what does each side actually retain?
- Are you giving away more than is needed to make the offer acceptable?
- Could a different structure preserve more for you without reducing what matters to them?
Discounts are the crudest form of value transfer. Most deals have cheaper currencies available.
- What must they do, change, coordinate, implement, learn, administer, or give up?
- What must you do?
- Is burden sitting with the party least able to bear it?
Look for work that is cheap for you and expensive or difficult for them. Moving it is often the highest-return change available.
- What can go wrong for them, and what can go wrong for you?
- Which specific downside is blocking acceptance?
- Can it be reduced, bounded, sequenced, evidenced, or allocated differently?
Credibility is whether they believe the promise holds. Risk is the uncertainty, the consequences, and who carries them if it does not.
- What future choices are they surrendering? What are you surrendering?
- Is the commitment you are asking for larger or earlier than the available information justifies?
- Could commitment follow proof instead of preceding it?
Commitment demanded ahead of evidence is one of the most common structural reasons an otherwise sound offer stalls.
- When do value, cash, effort, information, commitment, and risk each occur?
- Is the sequence itself creating the friction?
- Could reordering solve the problem without changing total economics?
Two offers with identical totals can be trivially acceptable or completely unacceptable depending on order.
Understand the other side before changing the offer
What the other side can accept is set by their situation, not by the merits of your proposal. Their alternatives, budget shape, approval rights, incentives, deadlines, politics, and implementation capacity determine which structures are even reachable. This is not neutral background research — it tells you what problem your offer has to solve.
- Their real alternatives, including doing nothing
- Budget shape: how much, in which year, from whose line
- Who decides, who approves, who can block
- Approval thresholds and procurement rules
- Individual incentives, not just organisational ones
- Deadlines, fiscal calendars, and external pressure
- Internal politics and prior history with this category
- Implementation capacity and competing priorities
“Do not change the variable named in the objection until you understand the variable causing the objection.”
“Your price is too high” can mean a first-year budget ceiling, uncertainty about adoption, a procurement threshold that triggers a longer approval, missing proof, or a genuinely weak perceived value. Each of those implies a different redesign, and only one of them is solved by a discount.
Their acceptance is a design constraint. So are your economics.
You are not trying to neutrally optimise two abstract parties. You have an objective: you want this transaction to happen on terms worth having. The other side matters because their agreement is a constraint on that objective — a hard one.
You do not need them to love every term. You need the offer to beat their relevant alternatives by enough to obtain agreement, while what remains is still worth doing for you. Those are two separate tests, and an offer must pass both.
Sometimes it cannot. Interests genuinely conflict, the other side's alternative is genuinely better, or the only acceptable structure destroys your economics. No deal is a legitimate and often correct outcome. This framework does not promise that every transaction can be made to work.
A strong offer gives the other side a sufficient reason to say yes while preserving enough value, control, and optionality for the transaction to remain worth doing for you.
Deal Geometry searches for structural improvements before assuming the remaining disagreement has to be closed with a concession.
Example — the budget-constrained software buyer
They ask for a discount. Diagnose before you move.
Suppose the diagnosis is a genuine first-year budget ceiling — the value is accepted, the total is affordable over three years, and the money simply is not in this year's line. The discount they asked for is not the only response, and it is the one that damages you most permanently. Candidate moves, and what each one costs:
Ramped or deferred payment
Solves a first-year cash or budget ceiling. Keeps total economics largely intact; costs you working capital and adds some collection risk.
Phased scope
Solves implementation capacity and approval size. Reduces near-term revenue; lowers their burden and their risk.
Paid pilot with defined criteria
Solves doubt about adoption. Delays full commitment; converts a belief problem into an evidence problem.
Longer term for better rate
Solves a unit-price objection using commitment as the currency. Increases their commitment burden — only viable if their confidence is already high.
Usage or milestone-linked pricing
Solves uncertainty about realised value. Shifts risk to you; requires measurement both sides trust.
None of these is universally right. Which one fits depends on which constraint is real — and if the diagnosis was wrong, every one of them fails for a reason you will learn from.
Example — licensing technology you do not own
They refuse your terms. Price is rarely the only variable.
You want a licence to a technology. The owner has declined your opening proposal. The reflex is to raise the number. The lenses ask what is actually blocking acceptance — and each block has structural answers that cost you far less than a higher price.
Fear of enabling a competitor
Field-of-use restriction; retained markets; carve-outs by territory or application.
Loss of future upside
Royalty participation, milestone payments, equity, or an earn-out on downstream revenue.
Uncertainty about what it is worth
Staged payments tied to validation, with a pre-agreed formula for later stages.
Need to retain control
Limited-term or limited-scope exclusivity, reversion on non-performance, approval rights.
Conflicts with existing partners
Narrow the field, add a cross-licence, or accept non-exclusivity with a diligence obligation.
Here you are the acquiring side, and the lenses work identically. Their commitment, their risk, their retained value, and the timing of their upside are the variables in play.
The stress test, in sequence
- 01State what you need from the transaction.
- 02State the promise you are making to the other side.
- 03Identify the beliefs required for them to credit it.
- 04Understand their decision context and their reference alternative.
- 05Run the six lenses and locate the actual mismatch.
- 06Identify which variables are genuinely movable.
- 07Generate candidate deal moves rather than default concessions.
- 08Trace second-order effects on both sides.
- 09Put the revised offer forward and learn from the response.
- 10Redesign, agree, or walk away.
A note on the architecture
The six lenses remain provisional. Restoring Promise and Credibility exposed that the earlier six-dimensional model mixed different kinds of concept: descriptions of a deal's structure alongside questions about belief and proposed outcome.
Rather than declare a new complete ontology, we are treating the six as stress-test lenses and letting use decide what survives. That is deliberate. There is no scoring here and no equation — the lenses are only worth what they surface on a real deal.
Deal Geometry Diagnostic
Run the stress test on your stalled and heavily negotiated deals.
The Deal Geometry Diagnostic reviews a sample of recent transactions and identifies the structural issues slowing your deals down.