Sales.

The framework

1. 01

   The units the buyer already keeps.

   Day 45 settles what you're compared against and Day 46 settles that you price the outcome rather than your effort. This is where the outcome's numbers come from. Every business already counts something — machine hours, missed delivery windows, days of stock, hours per claim — and a unit they already track has a rate attached to it and somebody whose job is to defend it. Ask two things in discovery: what do you measure this by, and what does one of those cost you. Write both answers down word for word; teach them a new metric first and you've added an argument you didn't need.

2. 02

   Take it in half-built, with your name on the assumptions.

   Earlier in this elective the job was getting the buyer to put a number on the problem out loud. This is the move after that, and it runs the other way. Build the equation at your desk, then take it in unfinished, with every assumption you made written on the page and labelled as yours. Ask their operations person to replace your inputs with figures from their own system. They will — correcting a stranger's arithmetic about your own plant is nearly irresistible, and the labels make plain which cells are still guesses. What you leave with isn't a better estimate. It's an equation whose inputs carry their fingerprints.

3. 03

   The number will come out smaller. Take it.

   Their data almost always cuts your figure: the downtime you assumed was eleven hours a month turns out to be six, the scrap rate is already better than the industry benchmark you borrowed. The instinct is to argue the difference back, and it's the wrong instinct. A smaller figure drawn from their system travels into their business case unaltered, while a larger one drawn from you gets a haircut from whoever reviews it, and takes a piece of your credibility with it. Accept the correction visibly. You're trading the size of the claim for the one property that matters, which is that it holds when somebody checks it.

4. 04

   What happened after the last one delivered?

   The move Anderson, Kumar and Narus press hardest in Value Merchants is the one almost nobody makes: go back after delivery and measure what actually changed, in the same units you argued in. Most sellers never do, because the answer isn't in their control and the meeting could go badly. But an equation with a real result written underneath it stops being your projection and becomes somebody else's experience, which is the only version a sceptical buyer reads as evidence rather than marketing. Two documented outcomes will outperform any case study your marketing team can write, and they cost you a diary entry.