/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)
- One question per turn. Never bundle.
- Recommend an answer with each question.
- Explore the workspace before asking — check for deal records, pricing comps, RFP docs, MSA redlines.
- Walk depth-first.
- 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) — genericengineering/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.