I Don’t Always Have to Win

I am a highly competitive person. Whether I am playing a tennis match against a friend or playing a board game with my family, I always want to win. This competitive drive often shows itself when I am negotiating to buy or sell a domain name. Like when I am playing boys against girls soccer with my family, sometimes it’s better to lose the competitive spirit for the betterment of all.

I regularly find myself in domain name negotiations where a gap exists between the price I’ve set and the “max” price a buyer has in mind. If the gulf is far too great, it’s easy to wish the prospect well and move on to other things. When the gap is more narrow, it sometimes comes down to who gives up first.

My competitive drive comes to the front of my mind, and I try as hard as I can to get the buyer to agree to my price. Sometimes the gap is thousand of dollars and sometimes it’s just a few hundred dollars. Both parties dig-in their heels, and oftentimes, the buyer goes away to find something else or simply decides he would rather not do a deal. Poof, the deal is gone.

For my, I need to get better at not always trying to win. I don’t need to squeeze every last penny from a buyer looking to acquire an inventory-quality domain name of mine. So what if I leave a few hundred dollars or more on the table when the profit margin is super high regardless of where we end up.

I have lost countless deals trying to squeeze more money from a prospective buyer who walks away. I have probably earned the same amount of money I lost holding to my asking price, too. However, many of those lost deals were for names I’d be happy to exit.

One thing I need to work on in 2023 is being a bit more collaborative with buyers rather than competitive to try and secure the best deal for me while risking a good deal for all. As things tighten up with the economic conditions, banking more deals will boost the bottom line.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

1 COMMENT

  1. “In order to gain something, you have to lose something… If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune.”

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Recent Posts

MAD Comment from NTIA About “Wholesalers”

2
Andrew Allemann wrote about the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) statement about the .com registry extension agreed upon with Verisign. As a...

Beware When Using AI for Domain Name Descriptions

6
Artificial Intelligence can be a time saver. For domain investors, it can make it easier and quicker to create marketing copy to help promote...

Atom.com Promoting Black Friday Sale

0
Atom.com is promoting a Black Friday sale with a prominent header banner on its home page. Atom CEO Darpan Munjal shared some insight and...

Fluid.io Becomes 2nd Largest Publicly Reported .IO Sale

5
This afternoon, Joshua Schoen reported the $199,995 sale of Fluid.io. The domain name was sold at his BIN price via Afternic, according to a...

Employer.com Acquired for ~$450,000 via Afternic

1
Late last night, Jesse Tinsley, Founder of Recruiter.com, announced a large domain name acquisition. His company purchased the Employer.com domain name for $450,000 USD....