swan-gtm Use when agent value must be proven to the people paying for it — before a renewal, at a QBR, or monthly as a standing receipt. Produces a value receipt: tasks completed, hours returned, cost avoided, ROI multiple.
Get the right kind of metrics
Three reporting categories exist; only one closes renewals:
- usage reporting — tasks run, tokens consumed. Engineering metrics.
- performance analytics — uptime, error rate, latency. Reliability metrics.
- ROI reporting — time saved, cost avoided, revenue generated. Commercial metrics.
Enterprise renewals depend on the third category alone. If the input data is usage-shaped, convert it before writing anything.
Establish the benchmark
The receipt is only credible if the "before" number came from the customer. Pull or ask for:
- what each task cost before automation (time per task, loaded hourly rate of whoever did it)
- which value units the customer already tracks and cares about — use theirs, never invent proxies
- the price paid for the agent over the period
If no benchmark was ever agreed, capture one now and flag it: value definition belongs before deployment, not after.
Compute the receipt
For the period (monthly is the right cadence — continuous proof beats a scramble at renewal):
- Tasks resolved — count of completed units, in the customer's language ("847 support tickets resolved")
- Hours returned — tasks × human-equivalent time, minus any human touch remaining ("average resolution 4 minutes; human equivalent 2.8 hours per ticket; 396 hours returned to your team")
- Cost avoided — hours returned × loaded rate, plus any hard costs displaced
- ROI multiple — value delivered ÷ price paid for the period
Show the arithmetic. A buyer who can re-derive the number will defend it internally; a black-box multiple gets discounted.
Deliver it
Write the receipt as one page the champion can forward: headline multiple, the three numbers above, a short trend line versus prior periods, and zero adjectives. If this account gets a receipt every month, the renewal stops being a defense — you stop defending your price and start reminding the customer what losing the product costs.
What good looks like
A great receipt uses benchmarks the customer stated, units they already track, and arithmetic they can check — and it existed before anyone asked. A mediocre one appears the week before renewal, built on vendor-estimated hours and activity counts. The traps: shipping usage metrics as if they were value, inventing human-equivalent times without customer sign-off, and averaging across accounts when margins and value vary enormously per account — always compute per customer.
MUST separate customer-agreed benchmarks from assumptions, and label any assumption. NEVER fabricate a benchmark or a rate. NEVER lead with tasks-completed alone — activity is not value.