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GM to the Top 1% ☕
I had a seven figure deal that would not move. Good champion, real budget, clear pain. And it sat for two months while I kept sending the same proposal, priced by the seat, and kept getting the same soft maybe.
The proposal had a line near the top. Number of licenses, times the per user price. I had built a thousand of those. It was how I forecasted, how I defended the deal to my own finance team, how I knew what I was carrying.
I was protecting the wrong thing.
💡 THE SEAT WAS PROTECTING ME, NOT THE DEAL
I finally got honest on a Tuesday. I opened the order form and deleted the license line. The whole thing. Then I made myself rewrite the first page around one number, the outcome the buyer's VP actually got measured on, which was cycle time on a process that was bleeding them roughly two million a year.
The next call was different in the first ninety seconds. The champion stopped asking about per user cost and started telling me how the two million broke down, which teams owned it, and why last year's fix failed. The second I stopped selling seats, they stopped negotiating price and started confessing the size of the problem.
That is the part nobody tells you. Seat pricing feels safe because it is legible to your finance team. But it caps the conversation at the size of a license. Outcome pricing feels exposed, because now you have to actually understand their business. And that exposure is the whole unlock. You cannot price an outcome you do not understand, so pricing it forces you to earn the context that wins the deal.
The number that moved was not the discount. It was the size of the problem they finally admitted was real, because I finally asked a question that was worth answering.
🔧 HOW TO REPRICE A STUCK DEAL AROUND THE OUTCOME
I have now done this on purpose many times. The sequence is the same.
1. Delete the seat line, literally: Open the doc and remove the license math from the top. You cannot lead with the outcome while the meter is the first thing they read.
2. Find the number their boss asks about: Not your metric. The one your champion gets a calendar invite about when it goes the wrong way.
3. Size the problem before you price the fix: Get them to say the cost of the status quo out loud. The deal is never bigger than the problem they will admit to.
4. Make the license the mechanism, not the message: The seats still exist on the paperwork. They are just no longer the pitch. The pitch is the result.
🎯 THIS WEEK'S HOMEWORK
Pick one stalled deal. Rewrite the first line of your proposal so it names the buyer's outcome and its dollar cost, with no seat math above it. Then ask your champion one question, what does this problem cost you if nothing changes. Let the silence do the work.
❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY
What is the one line on your proposal that is protecting you instead of moving the deal?
Reply with the deal where the seat math is doing your thinking for you.
See you tomorrow.
Edward
Founder, Morning Sales
P.S. The hardest part of repricing a deal around an outcome is the account work underneath it, understanding their business well enough to name the number. I packaged the 500 prompts I use for exactly that, the deep research, the value hypothesis builders, the questions that get a champion to size their own problem. It is 27 dollars: https://store.edwardgorbis.com