/cs-grill-commercial

/cs:grill-commercial — Commercial grill against the SaaS pricing canon

Apply Matt Pocock's grill-with-docs discipline to this Commercial plan / problem:

$ARGUMENTS

Five rules (preserved from Matt Pocock, MIT)

1. One question per turn. Never bundle.
2. Recommend an answer with each question.
3. Explore the workspace before asking — check for deal records, pricing comps, RFP docs, MSA redlines.
4. Walk depth-first.
5. Track dependencies — pricing → packaging → deal → forecast.

The Commercial decision tree (depth-first)

Branch 1 — Which lane?

• PRICING / DEAL / PARTNERSHIP / CHANNEL_ECON / POLICY / RFP / FORECAST

Branch 2 — The forcing question per lane

PRICING: "Is your customer paying for outcomes, seats, or usage?" Recommended: outcomes (value-based) if you can measure them; usage if marginal cost is variable; seats only if usage is roughly flat per user. Canon: Ramanujam 2016 Monetizing Innovation (the 9-mistake list). Anti-pattern: seat-based on a usage-variable product caps TAM at ~20% of WTP.

DEAL: "What's the gross margin at full discount, AND what does next quarter's pipeline look like at the same terms?" Recommended: model both. Refuse to approve until reps can articulate the precedent risk. Canon: Skok (For Entrepreneurs — discount math), Tunguz benchmarks. Anti-pattern: one 40% precedent reshapes 3 quarters of pipeline.

PARTNERSHIP: "Does the partner have independent demand, or are they reselling our pipeline?" Recommended: insist on independent-demand evidence (named accounts the partner sourced, not co-sold). Canon: Forrester channel research. Anti-pattern: channel-led deals from your own pipeline cost more than direct.

CHANNEL_ECON: "What's your fully-loaded cost-to-serve direct vs partner?" Recommended: model both with allocated overhead. Canon: Bessemer State of the Cloud channel benchmarks.

POLICY: "Is your current discount matrix backed by data, or by precedent?" Recommended: data — discount band vs. win rate vs. NRR. Canon: OpenView discount studies.

RFP: "Do you have proof points for each requirement, or are you writing aspirational claims?" Recommended: proof points only. Refuse to invent claims. Canon: APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals).

FORECAST: "Are you using stage-conversion from the last 4 quarters, or the last 12?" Recommended: last 4, weighted toward most recent. Canon: Skok, OpenView. Anti-pattern: 12-month equal-weight hides recent slowdown.

Branch 3 — Reversibility check

"If this commercial decision lands and we want to roll it back in 90 days, what does it cost?" Hard-to-reverse + surprising + real trade-off → ADR per Matt's grill-with-docs criteria.

Branch 4 — Approval chain

"Who is the human approver on the output?" Recommended: named role + named person, not "the team".

Branch 5 — Now invoke the sub-skill

Only after branches 1-4 are locked, invoke /cs:commercial with the synthesized inquiry.

Output format per turn

Q[i]/[total]: [precise question]
Recommended: [answer + canon-cited rationale]

(Confirm, or override?)

Stop conditions

• All branches resolved → invoke /cs:commercial <synthesized>
• User says "stop grilling, just run it" → invoke with whatever's resolved, flag unresolved branches in digest
• User abandons → no sub-skill, save partial grill to commercial-grill-{timestamp}.md

Distinct from

• engineering/grill-me (Matt Pocock) — generic
• engineering/grill-with-docs (Matt Pocock) — codebase + ADR-anchored for engineering. This is Commercial-domain grilling against the SaaS pricing canon.
• /cs:commercial — executes routing. This interrogates first.