The Big Deal Is Not a Strategy

Most businesses have had one.

The monster opportunity.

It is much bigger than the normal deal size. Senior people know about it. It appears in every board pack. The CEO asks about it in corridors. Delivery has started quietly wondering how it would resource it.

And, before long, the entire year seems to depend on it.

That is when a big opportunity stops being exciting and starts becoming dangerous.

Big deals distort behaviour

When one deal can rescue the quarter, it gets attention.

Lots of attention.

Senior leaders join calls. Proposals get rewritten repeatedly. Commercial concessions appear. People stop questioning whether the customer is moving because everyone wants the answer to be yes.

Meanwhile, smaller opportunities receive less attention because they cannot change the headline number quickly enough.

The irony is that five ordinary deals may be far more valuable to the health of the business than one heroic win.

Concentration risk exists in pipeline too

Most boards understand customer concentration once revenue exists. If one customer represents 40% of turnover, everyone can see the risk.

I think the same discipline should apply to future revenue.

If one opportunity represents half the expected growth for the year, you have a concentration problem before you have even won it.

That does not mean walk away. It means stop pretending the rest of the pipeline does not matter.

Never build the plan around an exception

Large strategic deals should be upside to a strong commercial engine, not the thing keeping it alive.

The basic engine still needs to create opportunities, progress them, convert them and replace them.

If the underlying run-rate cannot support the plan without one unusually large deal, the growth model is fragile.

I have seen businesses convince themselves that the big deal was proof the strategy worked. Sometimes it was actually proof that one salesperson, one relationship or one unusual market event worked.

Those are very different things.

Give the big deal more scrutiny, not less

Because large deals matter so much, people can become reluctant to challenge them.

I prefer the opposite.

What is the customer's decision process? Who could stop it? Is funding genuinely committed? What political or organisational dependencies exist? What happens if timing moves by one quarter? How much margin are we giving away to protect the win? What is the operational cost of delivery?

If a deal is going to carry more weight in the plan, it should carry more evidence too.

Celebrate it when it lands

I love a big win. They can transform businesses, create confidence and open markets that smaller deals cannot.

But I never want a commercial team sitting around waiting for one.

A strong growth strategy should still make sense if the biggest opportunity disappears tomorrow.

If it does not, the issue is not the deal.

It is the strategy built around it.