Jeremy Segal, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS)

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In competitive M&A, the highest LOI price rarely wins the best deal. Growth equity firms bid high, use diligence to drive the price down, and retrade at the finish line. Sellers know the playbook. Jeremy Segal argues that precision at the LOI stage is a stronger differentiator than price, and that precision starts with knowing exactly which cost lines you can move before the LOI is signed, not after.

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Jeremy has run M&A at Progress for six years. In that time, the company went from under $400 million to nearly $1 billion in revenue. The deals behind that run weren't won on price. They were won because Progress had a cost-optimization model built on infrastructure it already owned and a commitment to maintain the LOI number even under competitive pressure.

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The harder lessons are just as instructive. A seller who restricts team access during the announce-to-close window. A bootstrapped founder who was never fully bought in. A workforce that expected an IPO and got an acquisition. Jeremy covers each one, and what he built or changed in response.

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What You'll Learn

• Building  a pre-LOI synergy model based on what you can actually execute
• How to use existing infrastructure to outbid PE on price
• Escalating diligence friction before it kills a deal
• Why a no-retrade commitment builds trust with sellers
• Structuring retention pools when a target's IPO falls through
• What target profile actually fits a disciplined buyer
• Why private valuations haven't caught up to public markets

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If you're building pre-LOI deal models and want a framework for translating assumptions into an operational plan you can execute, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has Buyer-Led M&A™ frameworks to help you close the gap between what you modeled and what you deliver.