Up-Front Contracts

1Session at a glance

2Open (0:00, 4 minutes)

• Write the five elements on the board now, as five blanks with only the headings: purpose, their agenda, our agenda, time, outcome. Leave them up all session. The Concept block fills them in.
• Ask for one show of hands on each of the three meetings in the open. Take two stories, no more, and stop there. This is the block where the stories are budgeted.
• Say what it buys on Monday, plainly: thirty seconds at the start of a meeting is the cheapest thing any of us can do to stop a meeting running long, stop being asked for work nobody agreed to, and stop leaving with two different ideas of what just happened.

3Concept (0:04, 22 minutes)

What it is, and the five elements (6 min)

• Define it before using it: an up-front contract is an agreement reached before a meeting about exactly what will happen in it, so that neither side leaves with a different idea of what took place. Nobody signs anything. It is spoken, or it is two sentences in an email.
• Answer the objection immediately, because somebody in the room is having it: contract sounds heavy for a thirty-minute call. The reason for the word is that both sides have to agree to it. An agenda is announced, a contract is agreed, and the difference is that you stop and ask.
• Walk the five elements from the board and for each one say what it prevents rather than what it is. Purpose prevents a meeting nobody can say the reason for. Their agenda prevents the question at the end you were not ready for. Our agenda prevents getting to the end and still not being able to act. Time prevents the thirty-minute session that eats ninety. Outcome prevents everyone leaving without a decision.
• Point out that the third element includes what we need from them, and that it is the one people leave out most often and the one that costs the most. Section 3 of the Learner Guide has the full set.
• State the rule at the end, after they have seen the five: both sides have to agree to what happens at the end of the meeting, not only to the fact that the meeting is happening.

Where they are used (4 min)

• Correct the obvious reading of the name first, because it is the misunderstanding that ruins this: up front does not mean before the first meeting. It means before every meeting and every contact, including the twelfth one with a client we have had for six years.
• Give the list in section 4 of the Learner Guide out loud: on the phone before a first meeting, before any meeting at all, at the start of each step of the system, at the end of a sale when the next conversation is about additional work or a referral, and at the end of every meeting to set up the next one.
• Spend most of this block on the last one, because it is the one the room will not do. If the next meeting is agreed in the room, with a purpose and a length and a decision attached, nobody has to chase anybody for a date afterwards.
• Make it concrete for the non-sales seats by naming four of their meetings: a business technology review, which is the recurring account meeting with a client, a scheduled remote session with a user, an onsite project visit, and a triage call booked from intake. Read the intake one from section 7 of the Learner Guide aloud and leave the other three for reading.

What goes wrong without one (4 min)

• Three failures, named in this order because they get progressively more expensive. Conflicting expectations: both sides came for a different meeting. A presentation nobody prepared: they expected something built, it was not built, and the meeting is now about that instead of about the work. Free consulting: they ask the questions they have been saving, get the answers, and nothing was agreed about what happens next.
• Do the free consulting one carefully, because the technical seats do it more than the sales seats do and they do it out of helpfulness. A user on a thirty-minute remote session raises three other things while you are connected. Each answer is worth having and none of them was agreed to. The fix is not to refuse. The fix is to have said at the start what the thirty minutes covers, so that adding to it is a decision instead of a drift.
• Connect it to the point from session 01: producing a proposal, an assessment or a presentation before you know what the problem costs the client, what they can invest and how the decision gets made means we are working while they are still deciding whether to have the conversation. The agreement that keeps you on the right side of that point is made before the meeting, not rescued during it.
• Close on the point: without this agreement, the meeting is run by whoever has the clearer idea of what it is for, and that is usually the other person.

The four-part opening (5 min)

• Read the worked script in section 6 of the Learner Guide out loud, the whole thing, at the speed you would actually say it. Do not summarize it first. The room hears it, then you name what it was.
• Then name the four parts, in order, and point at which sentence was which. Appreciate: thank them, confirm the date, the time, the length and the purpose. Naturally: the questions they will have for us. Obviously: the questions we will have for them. Typically: the two ways this can end. Sandler's shorthand for the four is ANOT, from the first letter of each word. Use the shorthand once and then use the four words.
• Make the room notice that the four parts are the five elements in a different order, with purpose and time folded into the first part. That is the point of the block: one method, with a form for saying it out loud.
• Spend a full minute on the fourth part, because it is the one that gets softened. Both endings have to be said: that it is a fit and we agree the next step, and that it is not a fit, said plainly, with the point that we would rather hear it in the meeting than be told it politely later. If only the good ending is offered, the client has no permission to give the other one, so they give a maybe instead.
• Note for the room: this is the version for a first meeting with a prospect and it is longer than what most seats need. Everyone else hears it once and then builds the thirty-second version in section 8 of the Learner Guide.

A decision at each meeting (3 min)

• State the rule: every intermediate meeting ends in a decision, and the decision is whether to go on or stop. Not whether to buy, unless this is the meeting where that gets decided.
• Say what a deferred decision actually leaves you with: a meeting that ends in "let me think about it and I will get back to you" has produced no information, no date and nothing anybody can act on, and what follows it is us chasing them. The agreement that prevents it is made at the start, by saying what the two endings are.
• Restate the four results from session 01 rather than pointing at them: a yes, a no, a referral, and a clear and well understood future in which both sides know exactly what happens next, who does it and by when. A maybe is not on that list.
• The same rule for the non-sales seats: a remote session ends with the issue fixed, or with a named cause and a time booked. It does not end with "I will keep looking at it".

4Show (0:26, 10 minutes)

1. Name the real meeting. Use one on the presenter's own calendar this week. Say who it is with and what kind of meeting it is before starting, so the room knows this is not a hypothetical.
2. Deliver it out loud to the volunteer. No notes, normal speed, thirty to forty-five seconds. Finish by asking whether that works or whether there is anything they want to add, then stop talking and wait. The waiting is part of the demonstration.
3. Let the volunteer push back once. Adjust out loud in front of the room, then restate the whole thing with the change in it. That restatement is what makes it an agreement rather than an announcement.
4. Have the room fill the five blanks on the board from what they just heard, one element at a time. Where the presenter missed one, let them say so and write it in.
5. Run it again with the outcome removed. Same meeting, same opening, but stop after our agenda and never say how the meeting ends. The volunteer responds the way a real client would, which is to say that sounds good. Then jump to the end of that imagined meeting and have them say "send me some options and I will take a look".
6. Write the two-sentence version live. Open the email window, type the written form of the same contract in front of them, and read it back: date, length and purpose in the first sentence, the two possible endings in the second.

5Do (0:36, 13 minutes)

1. Everyone names a real meeting on their calendar this week. Nobody sits this out and nobody invents one. A remote session, a triage call, a vendor call, a business technology review, a project visit, a first meeting with a prospect. If someone genuinely has none, they use the next ticket they will schedule time on.
2. Write the five elements for it in section 9 of the Learner Guide. Purpose, their agenda, our agenda including what we need from them, time, outcome. Full sentences, not headings.
3. Compress it to a thirty-second spoken version and write that out word for word, in the words it will actually be said in. Bullet points are hard to speak from once the call is live.
4. Pairs, both ways. Say it out loud. The partner plays the other side and pushes back on exactly one thing: the time, the agenda or the outcome. The one delivering it adjusts out loud, then restates the whole contract with the change in it. Swap and repeat.
5. Rewrite the line that did not survive, on paper.
6. Three people read theirs to the room. Presenter picks, and at least two of the three are non-sales seats. Everybody keeps the written version and uses it on that meeting this week.

6Check (0:49, 7 minutes)

1. A business technology review ends and the client says "send me some options and I will take a look". What was missing from the agreement at the start of that meeting, and what do you say before they leave the room?

   Answer

   The outcome. Without it the client proposes the ending, and the ending they propose puts the work on us and the decision nowhere. What to say before they leave is a contract for the next contact: what the options will cover, when they will have them, and a date and time already booked to get an answer either way, including a no.

2. Somebody says up-front contracts are a sales technique and have nothing to do with a scheduled thirty-minute remote session to fix a user's Outlook profile. Answer them by filling in all five elements for that session.

   Answer

   Purpose: fix the profile that keeps asking for a password. Their agenda: they will want to know why it happened and whether it will come back. Our agenda: we need them at the machine, unlocked, and about ten minutes where they cannot type. Time: two thirty, thirty minutes, so it ends at three. Outcome: either a working profile, or a named cause with a scheduled time for the fix. All five fit a session that has nothing to do with selling, because what they agree is what a meeting is going to be, and every seat here books meetings.

3. At the end of a first meeting a prospect says "this looks good, let me think it over and I will get back to you". Is that an acceptable outcome? Say what the obvious answer is and why it is wrong.

   Answer

   It is not. It produces no decision, no date and no reason, and what follows it is us chasing them.

   The obvious answer is that it is a good sign, because they did not say no and pressing now would spoil it. That is wrong twice over. The sentence is what a person says when nothing was agreed about how the meeting ends, so it is evidence of a missing contract rather than of interest. And treating it as positive is what turns one meeting into three months of follow-up that reaches the same answer later. The prevention is at the start of the meeting: say out loud that one of the two endings is them telling us it is not a fit, and that we would rather have that answer in the room.

4. A remote session booked for thirty minutes runs to ninety because the user raised three other problems while the technician was connected. Which element was missing, and which one would have stopped it first?

   Answer

   Time was named but the purpose was not bounded, so the session had no way to say what was in it and what was not. The element that would have stopped it first is purpose: saying at the start that this session covers the Outlook profile and nothing else makes the three extra problems a decision to make rather than a drift. Time then gives the second stop, at the twenty-minute mark, where the technician says what will not be finished and books the rest.

5. In the four-part opening, the second and third parts both list questions. Whose questions are which, and what happens if only one of the two is delivered?

   Answer

   Naturally is their questions, the ones they will have for us: who we are, how long we have done this, the kind of organizations we work with, what we actually do. Obviously is our questions, the ones we will have for them: how things are set up now, what is breaking, what it costs when it breaks, who else is involved. Deliver only the naturally part and the meeting becomes a presentation we give while they collect answers. Deliver only the obviously part and it becomes an interrogation before they have any reason to trust us with the answers.

6. Why does the contract have to be agreed rather than announced, and what do you do when the other side adds something you were not planning to cover?

   Answer

   Because an announcement produces silence, and silence is not agreement. The value of the whole thing is that neither side leaves with a different idea of what took place, and that only holds if the other side said yes to it out loud. When they add something, put it in and restate the whole contract with the addition in it, including what it does to the time. If it does not fit in the time, that is a decision to make at the start, which is the point: adding to the meeting is now a choice both people made rather than something that happened to the clock.

7Close (0:56, 4 minutes)

Work before the next session

• Use the contract written in section 9 of the Learner Guide on the real meeting it was written for, out loud, and write down in one line what the other person said back.
• Do it a second time on a different meeting, and write the two-sentence email version for a third.
• The five elements from memory, in order, and the four parts of the opening: appreciate, naturally, obviously, typically.
• Chapter 3 of the Sandler Foundations workbook, in the reference folder, for anyone who wants the source.

Next session

04 - Identifying Pain. How to find out what a problem is actually costing a client rather than what they say about it, why an opportunity where the client has no real problem does not close and the time spent on it is gone, and the questions that get from a stated complaint to the reason somebody would spend money.

Open items to settle

• Whether the scheduled-session note in Syncro should carry the agreed purpose, time and outcome, so the next technician can see what was agreed rather than reading the whole ticket.
• Whether the business technology review has a standing opening the whole team uses, and if so where it lives, since a process like that belongs in a Notion standard operating procedure rather than in one person's habits.
• Whether intake reads a contract on every booked triage call or only on ones over a certain length.

8Sources

• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations, chapter 3, Making Up-Front Contracts: chapter PDF.
• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations: full workbook PDF.

The term up-front contract, the five elements and the four-part opening of appreciate, naturally, obviously and typically are Sandler's. The worked scripts, the four Hermetic settings, and the thirty-second and two-sentence versions are ours.

9After the session