e rewrote our entire price list this summer. Bases, add-ons, allowances, multipliers, the lot. Plenty of arguments, some of them good ones, and at the end of it a catalogue that we believed in.
None of which is evidence. Every number in it is a guess by people who had not yet watched a single stranger decide whether to pay it, and no further amount of arguing among ourselves was ever going to change that. The question “are these prices right” cannot be answered in a meeting.
A deal produces exactly one piece of evidence about pricing: the gap between what the catalogue said at that moment and what was actually agreed. That gap is a rep being talked down, which is the market disagreeing with a number in public, with a real decision behind it.
We were computing that number already. It was shown to the rep live, mid-call, written into a note, and then thrown away on the next page load. Only the settled figure survived. Now both are stored: what we agreed, and what the list said at the time.
Apanelthatdrawsconfidentaveragesoverthreedealsgetstrusted—andthenitistrustedonthedayitiswrong.
Under ten quotes it prints one sentence and no percentages at all. Not a greyed-out figure, not a provisional average with a caveat beside it. Nothing anybody could screenshot, quote in a meeting six months later, or repeat to a client. That refusal is more important than any number it eventually produces.
It does not recompute against today's catalogue. Comparing a stored total against current prices would measure catalogue drift rather than negotiation — a quote nobody discounted would sprout a discount the moment we changed a price. And nothing was backfilled: quotes from before the column existed have no honest baseline, so the panel counts them and says plainly that it cannot read them.
It also will not tell you which line item the client objected to. A discount comes off a whole quote and there is no honest way to attribute it to one row, so the per-item view says “where to look” rather than “what is wrong”, says so on screen, and refuses to name any line it has seen fewer than three times.
If nothing is ever discounted, that is not a sign the prices are correct. It is a sign they are too low — nobody is pushing back because nobody has to. The instinct is to read a clean sheet as validation, and it is the one conclusion this data most reliably contradicts.
Which is why the instructions for reading it are written at the top of the file that produces it, rather than left to whoever opens the page on a busy afternoon and sees a big encouraging number.