A worked campaign example
Worked campaign angle: “Holding the line: a quarter-end pricing clinic.”
Format. A 60- to 90-minute workshop, or a 45-minute keynote followed by 30 minutes of moderated Q&A, for 20 to 40 people: enterprise account executives, value engineers, sales enablement leads and pricing or RevOps staff. Make it a half-day if the client wants the buyer-side exercise included. This follows the small senior-room format already in use, rather than a broadcast webinar.
Opening segment, 15 minutes. Retell the 2019 consultant story in the speaker’s own framing: the crisp shirt, the clicker, the 2x2 matrix for every human emotion, the 94-slide deck and discount governance framework left behind before anyone had to use them, and the line sellers remember: “discounting at quarter end trains your buyers to wait for quarter end.” The audience recognises the type immediately, making it an effective opening rather than a confession.
Second segment, 15 minutes. Flip the story. Thursday, the last week of the quarter, 4:52pm. The champion has gone quiet. Procurement asks about price flexibility. The draft reply offers 15% off in exchange for a video case study, then gets edited to 10% because 10% felt more principled—and never gets sent. On the call, the real ask turns out to be budget timing, not budget size: the start date moves, the first payment splits, the number holds, and the deal signs the following Tuesday. Draw out the dilemma: the seller has held the line, nothing is signed, and they cannot tell whether they have been disciplined or just stubborn.
Working exercise, 30 minutes, in pairs. Each pair takes a stalled deal from their own pipeline and writes two lists side by side: what the buyer has actually asked for, and what the seller has assumed the buyer wants. They then rewrite one planned concession as terms instead of price, using the levers in the story: start date, payment split, scope and term length. Each pair reports back in two minutes.
Closing segment, 15 minutes. Move from negotiation to what makes a case survive after the room empties. A business case built by someone who has never sat in a discovery call gives the champion nothing to defend when the vendor is absent. The version that travels has bottom-up assumptions and benchmarks the champion can understand and change, so that by the time it reaches a decision, it is the customer’s own value story rather than a vendor business case. Offer the timeline only if the client is interested: three paths for building this in-house, distinguished by who maintains it in year three—a prompt, an MCP configuration or owned software.
Follow-up artifact, delivered after the session. A one-page why-buy template built around the CRO’s one-line question: why this customer will buy. It draws on the 10-K, investor material, CRM threads and call recordings rather than memory. Give the client a completed version and a blank one so attendees can use it on the next deal without the speaker in the room.
Why this angle, rather than a general value-selling talk. It uses what MG Gurbaxani can say that most pricing speakers cannot: they taught the framework before having to live under it, with the discount governance slides, the quarter-end email and the four days of bad sleep that followed. It gives the sponsor a substantive session instead of a pitch slot, which matters because the existing rooms are explicitly closed to vendor pitching. It also turns the material into a working resource.
Before planning, confirm the speaking fee, availability, recording or repurposing permissions, whether the session would sit within MG Gurbaxani’s roadshow calendar or be a sponsor-hosted room, and who owns the resulting template. The posts do not include a recording of a talk, workshop or panel, so the format recommendations draw on the material’s structure and the stated shape of the roadshow, not an observed session.
