Sales

Sales' old reality is structural. The customer asks for a pull-in. Sales says yes — to preserve the relationship, to hit the quarter, to defend the account. The planning system schedules the order at standard COGS. Finance discovers three weeks later that the order cost more than it earned. The variance gets attributed to Operations. Sales gets praised for the booking and questioned about margin at the next QBR. Every part of that sequence is a symptom of margin-blind commit at decision time.

The new reality puts the math on Sales' screen at the moment of commit. The pegging cascade computes realized cost-to-serve in real time — the expedite, the changeover, the displaced higher-margin order, the SLA penalty risk. The recommended surcharge surfaces, dollarized against the specific cost drivers ($0.45 per unit, here's why). Sales sees the math before saying yes. The customer sees the math after Sales surfaces it. The conversation becomes a priced negotiation rather than a commitment-and-hope.

Customers initially resist the surcharge — "you used to just make this happen." Over a quarter, they recognize the transparency. The surcharge is consistent (same math every time, traceable to specific cost drivers), defensible (Sales can explain exactly where the $0.45 comes from), and negotiable (customer can request a partial pull-in at a different surcharge, or decline and accept the original date). The customer relationship gets healthier, not strained, because the negotiation is honest. Sales' tools change with the work: the commit panel with the pegging cascade visible, the customer-priority hierarchy in the Demand sub-policy that they help configure, the forward-demand collaboration channel (7.9) that gives them visibility into customer demand signals before the customer formally orders.