Keep your pricing guardrails
Pricing guardrails is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
Pricing guardrails is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
Guardrails matter more than limits: the rule that protects a deal is not the maximum discount but the requirement that no number, term or date is ever committed without a human.
| name | pricing-guardrails |
|---|---|
| description | Discount limits, terms we can and cannot offer, and when to escalate. Use when discussing price, drafting a quote or proposal, or responding to a discount request. |
| allowed-tools | none — this skill adds judgement, not reach |
| compatibility | Zealos, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and any client that reads SKILL.md |
| license | Free to use and edit |
--- name: pricing-guardrails description: Discount limits, terms we can and cannot offer, and when to escalate. Use when discussing price, drafting a quote or proposal, or responding to a discount request. --- # Pricing guardrails Configure the actual numbers in workspace settings. These are the rules for how to *behave* around price, which do not change with the numbers. ## Never do these without a human - Commit to a discount, in writing or verbally. - Agree to non-standard payment terms, a custom SLA, or an indemnity change. - Confirm a price for a configuration you have not seen quoted. - Promise a feature by a date. If asked for any of these, say it needs sign-off and give a time by which you will come back. Do not guess a number to keep momentum — an anchor you cannot honour costs more than a day's delay. ## Discount discipline - Never discount before understanding the objection. "Too expensive" is usually a value problem, and a discount confirms their doubt. - Every concession trades for something: term length, case study, timeline, payment up front, an introduction. - Discount the whole deal once, not in slices. Serial concessions teach the buyer to keep asking. ## Quoting State the price plainly and stop talking. No justification paragraph — it reads as an apology. If the price is right for the value, the value is what needs the words, and that belongs earlier in the conversation.
You have a written answer for the moment a buyer asks for twenty percent, instead of improvising one under time pressure.
Discount creep becomes visible as a pattern rather than as a series of individually defensible exceptions.
Non-standard terms stop appearing in signed contracts without anyone having approved them.
No. It can explain the pricing and say that a change needs sign-off. An anchor it cannot honour costs more than the delay of asking.
In workspace settings, not in the skill body. The skill encodes the behaviour, which does not change when the numbers do.
Term length, a public case study, payment up front, or an introduction to another team. A concession given for nothing teaches the buyer that the price was soft, and they will test it again at renewal.
Because the moment it matters is the moment judgement is worst — late in a quarter, on a call, with a number being asked for directly. The value of a guardrail is that it was written when nobody was under pressure.
Post-call automation turns a recorded conversation into the three things that outlive it: the commitments each side made, the fields that changed, and the follow-up that has to go out today.
/call-recap-formatA pre-call brief is worth writing only if it changes what you ask: who is in the room, what they are measured on, what happened last time, and the one question you cannot afford to leave without answering.
/discovery-questionsAI email triage is worth having only when it sorts by consequence rather than by recency: what blocks a deal, what someone is waiting on you for, and what can be read at the end of the week.
/email-rulesCRM data hygiene survives AI only if one rule is written down first: a field left blank is a known unknown, while a field filled in by inference is an unknown unknown that will be reported on as fact.
/crm-field-conventionsQualification is a claim about evidence, not a score: a deal is qualified when every criterion has a source you can quote, and unevidenced criteria are named rather than filled in optimistically.
/meddiccA writing-voice skill is the highest-leverage thing you can give an AI, because it changes every sentence the product produces and it needs no tools, no integrations and no data.
/our-writing-voice