🛑 Stop Negotiating Your CPA Like Chris Voss

Let’s get one thing out of the way:

Most of what you’ve heard about negotiating CPA (cost per acquisition) in affiliate lending is noise.

Every new entrant wants to channel their inner Chris Voss—anchoring, countering, “tactical empathy.”

The reality: If you treat CPA like a chess match, you’re playing the wrong game.

It’s not about outwitting your partner. It’s about understanding the math (from the publisher’s perspective).

So, here’s a few things you need to know about CPA negotiations. Nine lessons from the field, not the classroom.

1. Negotiating CPA Is Overrated (For Most)

For most organizations, haggling over CPA is a gigantic waste of time.

You get what you pay for. Pay more, get more. Pay less, get less.

Why?

Because affiliates aren’t running on hope—they’re optimizing for revenue per impression (RPI), revenue per click (RPC), or some close cousin. Usually, there’s a relevance or conversion metric in the background, but it all boils down to one thing: how well your product monetizes as an affiliate partner, not your negotiation skills.

Your funnel—served ad impression to funded customer—is what drives their economics. CPA is just one input.

If your downstream funnel isn’t competitive, no amount of clever negotiation will save you.

Pro tip: Ask the publisher, “What’s a competitive RPI (or RPC or conversion funnel) on your platform in my product category?” They’ll usually tell you. If you hit or exceed it, you’ll see volume. If you don’t, you won’t. They have every incentive to be honest—if you deliver, it’s better for their customers and their bottom line.

2. New Entrants: You’ll Need to Pay Up

Coming into a marketplace as a new lender?

You are not on a level playing field with the incumbents.

They’ve tuned their funnels for years. Their ad position is better. Their conversion rates are better.

If you come in cheap, you’ll compound your disadvantage. The affiliate will rationally place you at or near the bottom of the list until the data convinces them otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent.

My advice: Come in slightly or materially above market. Buy your way into the conversation.

That higher CPA helps you make up for the deficiencies you’re likely to have—lower conversion, worse ad position, no track record.

You can always optimize down later—if your conversion funnel proves it deserves to be there.

3. It’s nice being at the top of the food chain

If you’re a top-three or top-five brand in your category, affiliates want you.

You’re table stakes for their marketplace.

That means you can flex—maybe even negotiate CPA down.

The quick pulse check: if your product is well-known, if customers expect to see it in the marketplace, if your absence would make the affiliate look incomplete—you have leverage.

But if you’re an unknown fintech? Forget it. You’ll pay at or above market. Unless you’re covering a segment nobody else serves, or you’re bringing a truly unique offer, it’s unlikely the revenue you generate for a publisher will be incremental (at least in the early years of your partnership).