Encourage sales and BDR teams to disqualify leads and close-loss deals quickly. This 'fail fast' approach cleans the pipeline, focuses effort on viable opportunities, and provides a rapid, clear feedback loop to marketing on lead quality and campaign effectiveness.

Brad Jacobs advises against focusing on one acquisition at a time, which can lead to emotional attachment and overpayment. By maintaining a wide, active pipeline and moving multiple candidates through a funnel simultaneously, acquirers can remain disciplined on price and avoid the pressure of closing a specific deal.

If your sales efforts feel volatile or based on luck, it's likely because you aren't doing enough outreach. What seems like random success at low volume becomes a predictable process at high volume. A 1% cold call conversion rate isn't luck; it's a metric you can scale.

Even a top-tier sales professional has a career pitch win rate of just 50-60%. Success isn't about an unbeatable record, but a relentless focus on analyzing failures. Remembering and learning from every lost deal is more critical for long-term improvement than celebrating wins.

While a high close rate feels successful, it's a clear indicator that you are severely underpriced and leaving revenue on the table. The optimal pricing sweet spot that maximizes profit, not just the number of 'yeses', typically corresponds with a 30-40% close rate.

Salespeople often keep dead deals in their pipeline out of hope. To get realistic, ask a simple question for each opportunity: "If I had to bet my own money on this closing by year-end, would I?" If the answer is no, immediately remove it from the active pipeline and replace it.

Many M&A teams focus solely on closing the deal, a critical execution task. The best acquirers succeed by designing a parallel process where integration planning and value creation strategies are developed simultaneously with due diligence, ensuring post-close success.

Focusing on a single target is risky. If the deal fails after months of effort, you're back at square one. Maintaining parallel conversations with multiple potential partners ensures pipeline continuity and increases the probability of closing a deal.

When acquiring a business, don't rely on a single outcome like achieving a growth target. Instead, seek assets that offer multiple ways to win. Even if the primary goal is missed, the acquired data, technology, or talent could create significant value for other business units, providing built-in insurance for the deal.