This chapter was built in collaboration with the team at 30 Minutes to President's Club (30MPC). 30MPC is the top sales podcast and training company founded by Nick Cegelski and Armand Farrokh, who were both top enterprise sellers before they started the show. Together with their team, they have interviewed hundreds of the best reps in B2B sales.
In this section, we cover when to talk about price, how to build a proposal that a CFO will read, and how to handle the negotiation that follows.
How to win
The proposal is also where the deal leaves the seller's hands. The champion forwards it to the people who control the budget, and many of them have never met the seller. A CFO reads it cold, often in a few minutes, and decides whether the deal moves forward.
Three things make a strong pricing proposal:
There are no surprises. The buyer has known the price range since early in the deal, so the number in the proposal confirms what they already expect.
It is grounded in a problem the company has prioritized. The proposal ties the investment to a business problem that leadership has already decided to solve.
It can be read without the seller. It is short, clear, and visual enough that someone who was never on a call can understand it.
What the CFO is asking
A CFO who reads the proposal cold is looking for answers to four questions.
Does this solve a business problem we have prioritized? A proposal that reads like a nice-to-have goes straight off the CFO's desk. A proposal that solves a real problem the company has not prioritized goes off the desk too.
Does this vendor pass the sniff test? The CFO looks at whether the proposal is professional, whether the writing is clear, whether it is personalized to their company, and whether the visuals make clear who the vendor is and what they do.
Do I understand what I am reading? A proposal that needs the seller in the room to explain it will not get far.
How hard can we push on price? AI is now helping buyers answer this question.
The job of the seller
With that in mind, the seller has three responsibilities at this stage:
Take the surprise out of the price. Share a price range early enough that the buyer can qualify the deal long before the formal proposal arrives.
Make the proposal easy to read without the seller. Keep it short, clear, and visual so the CFO can understand it in a few minutes.
Keep the negotiation live. Move pricing conversations onto a call and ground them in the levers that move the price.
The most common pricing mistake happens long before the proposal. Sellers wait too long to talk about price, and the buyer sees the number for the first time after weeks of calls.
The better approach is to give a range very early and save the formal proposal for much later. If you are talking about a six-figure solution and your buyer is thinking about a five-figure solution, one of you is in the wrong room, and you both better figure that out as early as possible.
A simple talk track can sound like this:
"A solution like this typically costs between X and Y, depending on a few factors like the number of users and the products you choose. I wanted to share that range early so you have a sense of where you might land, and so it doesn't become a problem later."
The wording can change from deal to deal. What matters is that the buyer hears where they could land and which factors move the price. Sharing a range early qualifies the deal, and it shows the buyer that the seller is not hiding anything. When the formal proposal arrives, the number should confirm what the buyer already expects.
Protect your price from the start
Some sellers also tell the buyer early that they are not the cheapest option. It can sound like this:
"We're not the cheapest solution out there. If keeping costs as low as possible is your number one priority, there are definitely cheaper vendors. They don't do all of the same things we do, and they won't solve the same problems. If price is the most important factor, I'm happy to recommend a few other companies to talk to."
This sets expectations about price before the buyer starts comparing vendors, and it protects the price for the rest of the deal.
Keep it short, tight, and visual
Sellers often believe they lose deals because of starvation, which means they did not share enough information. Far more often, they lose deals because of indigestion. They share so much information that the buyer gets overloaded and pastes the whole document into ChatGPT.
A shorter, tighter, more visual proposal is easier for the CFO to read. It also gives the buyer less reason to hand it to AI to interpret.
A strong proposal puts the problem first, the solution next, and the number last. It usually has six sections:
Section
What it does
Problems we heard
It confirms that the seller understood the buyer's priorities.
Cost of inaction
It shows what the current situation costs the buyer.
Solution
It connects each part of the product to a problem the buyer named.
Plan and timeline
It shows how the buyer gets from signature to results.
Pricing
It explains how the price is structured and presents two or three options with a recommendation.
Commercial terms
It shows the final numbers, including any discount and the date it depends on.
To make each step concrete, we will follow one deal. Granit is an invented software company with 400 engineers, and Oborna is the AI coding tool proposing to them.
Start with the problems you heard
The beginning of the proposal is all about the buyer. A section titled something like "Problems we heard" works well, with the buyer's top three or four business priorities listed at two lines each. Each priority lands best when it is framed as something the buyer cannot do today that blocks a goal they care about.
Real quotes from the buyer's team make this section stronger. They prove that the seller listened, and they show the CFO exactly which of their colleagues the seller met with.
Granit's proposal opens with three challenges. Feature velocity per engineer has dropped 18% year over year. New engineers take six to eight weeks to reach production readiness, up from three. Across 400 engineers, that lost output adds up quickly.
Show the cost of inaction
The next step is to put a number on what the problems cost. Granit's proposal states that the company loses $4.4M in output every quarter at its current trajectory, and that 136 weeks of onboarding time this year equals 2.6 full-time engineers doing nothing but ramping. A number like this helps the CFO see that the problem is a priority. Jen Allen-Knuth's chapter on the account POV covers how to build this number with the buyer.
Connect the solution to each problem
The product works best when it appears after the problems are on the page. In a strong proposal, every part of the solution points back to something the buyer said. Granit's proposal sets three target outcomes, and each one answers a challenge from the first page. Faster pull request cycles address the drop in velocity. A three-week onboarding target addresses slow ramp time. Avoiding 15 to 20 new hires saves $4.2M and addresses the lost output.
From there, the proposal shows how the buyer gets from signature to results. Granit's proposal lays out four phases over twelve weeks: a 25-engineer pilot, an expansion to 150 engineers, a full rollout to all 400, and a 90-day impact review.
Explain the structure before you show the number
The pricing section works best when it opens with how the price is built. Most pricing comes down to four levers.
Volume is the number of products the buyer purchases.
Term is the length of the commitment.
Timing of cash is whether the buyer pays upfront or in quarterly or monthly installments.
Timing of the deal is how predictably the business comes in.
Explaining these levers first lets the buyer absorb the number on its own, and it gives both sides a shared basis for any negotiation that follows.
We recommend showing two or three pricing options. A single price forces a yes or no decision. Two or three options let the buyer choose which one fits them, and a recommendation tells them which one the seller would pick.
In the example, Granit sees two plans for 400 seats. The recommended Enterprise Pro plan costs $192,000 per year, and Enterprise Standard costs $134,400 per year. Directly below the pricing, a short section on the cost of doing nothing reminds the reader of the $4.4M per quarter Granit is already losing.
If the buyer later negotiates a discount, it helps for the revised proposal to show the original price, the discount, and the signing date the discount depends on. A visible discount tied to a date gives the buyer a reason to sign on time.
Present it live whenever you can
How the proposal reaches the buyer matters as much as what it says. A live conversation is always the best option, because the buyer can ask questions and the seller can answer them. A video recap is the next best option. It does not allow back and forth, but it carries far more than text. A proposal sent as text only is the weakest option.
Before a live call, it helps to decide the three things the buyer should feel when it ends. For Granit, the buyer should feel that Oborna understands their velocity problem better than any other vendor. They should feel confident that the rollout will not disrupt their engineering team. They should feel that $192,000 a year is a small number next to $4.4M in lost output each quarter.
A good way to open the call is by confirming the problems. It can sound like this:
"Before we get into the plan, I want to make sure we got this right. These are the three problems we heard from your team. Is anything missing, and is anything on this list less important than we think?"
If the buyer does not agree with the problems, the best move is to stop and fix that first. When the conversation reaches the price, the strongest sellers explain the structure, say the number, and stop talking so the buyer can respond first.
Each of these mistakes feels reasonable in the moment. They all make the price harder for the buyer to accept.
Waiting too long to share price. A buyer who sees the number for the first time in the formal proposal is likely to react with surprise. It also means the deal was never qualified on budget, so the seller may have spent months with a buyer who could never afford it.
Sharing too much information. A long proposal overloads the buyer. The CFO stops reading, and the buyer is more likely to paste the document into ChatGPT.
Getting the communication hierarchy wrong. Sellers often send a proposal by email when they could have presented it live. A live conversation is always better than a video, and a video is always better than text only.
Negotiating over email. A negotiation over email gives the buyer time to draft long counteroffers with AI. A live call lets the seller explain the levers and keep the conversation logical.
Leading with price. When the price appears before the problem, the buyer reacts to a large number before they have agreed that the problem is large.
AI has changed the proposal stage from the buyer's side. Buyers now run proposals through AI to summarize them, compare vendors, and prepare for the negotiation. Sellers should expect it and plan for it.
The first defense is the proposal itself. A short, visual proposal with clear, personalized writing gives the buyer less reason to hand it to AI. It also passes the CFO's sniff test, because it reads like it was written for their company.
The second defense is to get live when the negotiation starts. Sellers should expect long negotiation emails that were clearly written by ChatGPT. The best response is to move the conversation to a call and keep the negotiation off email.
On the call, the seller can explain the levers the pricing is based on and ask which ones the buyer can move. It can sound like this:
"Our pricing is based on four levers. The first is volume, meaning the number of products you buy. The second is term, and we value a longer commitment. The third is timing of cash, and we value payment upfront over quarterly or monthly payments. The fourth is timing of the deal, because we value being able to predict when your business will come in. Which of those feel most accessible to you?"
This gives the negotiation a logical basis, and it keeps the seller in control of how the conversation is framed.
