The deal closes. Someone drops it in Slack, the number goes on the board, sales moves to the next opportunity. Everyone treats it as a win: a single figure landed.
That figure is the smallest thing you just agreed to.
Five commercial commitments, one signature
A signed services deal locks five things at the same moment. Scope. Margin. Schedule. Resourcing. Revenue timing. The price is one output of the other four, and it is usually the only one anyone checks before the ink dries.
Each is a commercial commitment you now have to deliver against for months. Four of them were decided by whoever built the estimate, often without saying so out loud, and the first time most of the business sees them clearly is in delivery, when they have stopped being decisions and become facts.
The point of sale is the last moment you can still change any of them cheaply. So it is worth knowing what you are actually signing.
The scope boundary you will spend the project defending
The estimate drew a line around what is included. Everything on one side is priced. Everything on the other side is a change request you have not had yet.
If that boundary is vague, delivery inherits the argument. "Reporting" without a list of reports, "integration" without named systems, "training" without a headcount or a format. Each gap is a negotiation you deferred to a worse time, when the client already has the signed number in hand and you have already started spending against it. Draw the boundary while you can still price both sides of it.
The margin you promised finance
Every deal carries a margin the moment it is signed, whether or not anyone looked at it. Blended rate against blended cost, before a single hour is delivered. That is the best margin the deal will ever have. It only goes down from here, through scope creep, through the specialist you had to pull in at a higher cost, through the week of rework nobody scheduled.
Signing without a visible margin floor means finding out the real number after delivery, when it is a post-mortem instead of a decision. Set the floor per role and per deal, and treat a buyer-facing rate that drops below it as something that needs sign-off, not a quiet override. More on why that number moves in stop guessing margin at the point of sale.
The delivery window you now owe
A price implies a duration. Duration implies a start date and an end date, and the client heard both, even if the proposal only stated the fee.
Compress that window and costs climb in ways the estimate rarely captures: onboarding overlap, context switching, overtime, the change-order noise that a rushed team generates. The schedule you committed to is a commercial position, not a delivery detail. If it was set to match the price rather than the work, you signed up for the gap between them.
The resourcing draw on people you might not have
The estimate assumes people. Named roles, at an assumed seniority, available in the weeks the schedule needs them. Signing the deal commits that draw against a capacity pool that other signed deals are also drawing from.
Two deals that each looked fine alone can commit the same three senior engineers to the same fortnight. Nobody decided that. It fell out of two separate signatures that never looked at each other. This is the gap capacity-aware selling closes: knowing what you can staff before you promise it, not after. Sell capacity you have or capacity you have a real plan to hire. Selling capacity you are merely hoping for is a commitment with no one behind it.
The revenue curve the board is counting on
A signed deal is a promise about when money arrives, not just how much. Milestone-heavy at the back end reads very differently on a cash forecast than an even draw across the delivery window, even at the identical contract value.
That curve rolls up into the forecast the board is planning against: hiring, runway, the next quarter. A deal that slips its start, or bunches its revenue behind a late acceptance milestone, moves the number the business is steering by. The revenue shape is a commercial decision. It is worth making on purpose at the point of sale, not reading off the invoices later.
Every one of these is decided before you sign
None of these five is a delivery problem. They are commercial decisions that happen to surface in delivery, which is the most expensive place to discover them. The signed-to-started gap is where they usually show up: the deal is closed, the model that priced it is gone, and delivery is reverse-engineering what got promised.
The fix is to make all five legible at the point of sale, in one place, moving together. Change the scope and the margin, schedule, resourcing draw, and revenue timing should change with it, so you are looking at the whole commitment before you make it. In Estii, that is one model: descope an item on the scope page and effort, margin, schedule, and every breakdown recalculate together, so the five commitments stay in sync from the estimate through to handover.
A win worth the name is a deal you can price, staff, schedule, and deliver at the margin you promised. The board only shows you that one closed. Decide the other four before you sign, because after you sign, all five stop being yours to choose.
