You are
the number.
Your job is to put a credible price on a thing that didn't exist this morning, and then defend it in front of a room. The pricing slide lives or dies in the defense, not in the slide. Your pre-flight is mostly about walking in with the right mental model — anchor to what gets replaced, never to what gets built.
Five items. Total time investment: under an hour.
- 01
Read the spec end to end
Once is enough. As you read, ask one question on every page: "what activity does this replace, and what does that activity currently cost?" That question is your pricing model in disguise.
- 02
Identify the cost-replaced anchor
The wrong way to price a productized consulting capability is to start from the cost to build. The right way is to start from the cost it replaces. If the buyer currently spends $X/month on consultant hours doing the thing this product automates, that's your anchor. Find that number for your team's spec before April 17.
- 03
Sketch the v0.1 business case
Three lines: (1) what does the buyer spend today, (2) what would they spend on this product, (3) what's the gap. The Narrator needs a number to point at by mid-morning on April 17 — your job is to have it ready by then. The deeper math comes later in the day.
- 04
Anticipate the four standard objections
"Why not just hire someone?" "Why not just use Jira / Excel / a free tool?" "What's the implementation cost?" "What happens after year one?" If you can answer all four in two sentences each, you'll defend the pricing slide in Q&A. If you can't, write the answers down before April 17.
- 05
Acknowledge recording consent
Every working session is recorded. Your business case work and Q&A defense get captured.
Pricing is advocacy, not a spreadsheet.
The slide is one slide. The defense is the rest. The Narrator delivers the number; you back them up in Q&A. If a judge pushes back on the price, you have 10 seconds to land a credible reason — not 10 minutes to walk through a model.
Anchor to value, never to build cost.
Build cost is irrelevant to the buyer. Value is the only number they care about. "This costs $X because we spent Y hours building it" is the wrong sentence. "This costs $X because it replaces Y hours of consultant time per month" is the right one.
The Client Advocate will pressure-test you in Build Sprint 1.
The CA's job is to ask buyer questions. Your number will be one of them. Welcome the pressure-testing — it's better to be wrong at 1:00 PM and right at 4:00 PM than the other way around.
Every working session is recorded. Your pricing model and Q&A defense get captured and become reference material the firm will reuse on future deals.