from 18,000 dollars for the session and the analysis One remote room, same protocol and same analysis, is 9,500 dollars. Within 90 days of a CHI wave it is 15,000 dollars, because the instrument already did the discovery. Recruiting and incentives are quoted separately, travel at cost, and the 90 day close-the-loop session is 4,500 dollars.
What you get. A same-day capture of the route map and the ranked breaks in the room's own words, then a written analysis inside 10 business days: themes, the splits between roles, cleared verbatims, and the protect, fix, and stop-funding list with owners and 90 day tests.
Most advisory events are built to avoid this. A customer council, a distributor advisory board, a user group. Dinner, a golf outing, some branded gear, a slide deck about the roadmap, and a summary nobody reads because nothing in it was ever going to be uncomfortable.
This is the opposite exercise. The day is designed to break your route to market on purpose, in a room where the people who actually move the product can say where it fails, so that what gets rebuilt afterward holds under load. Nothing gets stronger until somebody finds where it gives.
What gets broken
The route, step by step: specification, quote, branch, truck, install, callback. It goes up on the wall live and every break in the chain gets marked as the room finds it.
Then the 5 dimensions, the same 5 the Channel Health Index scores: ease of doing business, pricing, support, quality, and internal promotion. Examples, not adjectives.
Then the conflict pass, where contradictions get read back and either resolved or recorded as a split. Splits are data. Two roles describing the same process differently is usually the most valuable thing in the transcript.
Prepared, not improvised
Every participant receives the material in advance and writes 3 route problems before sitting down. The questions are set before the day and they are few, because a focus group that chases 15 questions produces 15 shallow answers. No networking breakfast.
Your leadership is in the room and can take part. Earlier versions of this day asked hosts to sit silent, and that was the wrong instinct. What matters is that the facilitator holds the clock, the questions, and the authority to end a thread, so the room is not steered toward the answer somebody hoped for.
Three rooms, never mixed
| Room | Who is in it | What comes out |
|---|---|---|
| Customer | Engineers, maintenance, and procurement from accounts that buy | Specification, reorder, failure, and brand-switch triggers |
| Channel | Distributor principals, outside sales, and inside sales | The 5 dimensions, internal promotion above all |
| Expert | Independent reps, integrators, contractors, retired specifiers | Route truth your own people will not say to you |
Run on separate days or separate halves with different badges. Put all 3 groups in one room and they perform for each other, and a distributor principal will not describe your pricing honestly in front of a customer who buys at that price.
Eight to 12 people who still touch orders, 16 at the outside, past which it is a conference.
The part that is not obvious
The day is not the product. The analysis is.
The room is recorded on redundant equipment, video plus an independent audio recorder, because a single device failure costs the entire engagement and a junior engineer with a notepad was never a recording method. Nobody is reconstructing the day from memory on the flight home.
What follows is a reflexive thematic analysis of the transcript, the same method used in the peer-reviewed work behind this practice. Codes, themes, and the disagreements between roles, built from what people actually said rather than from what the person who booked the day was hoping to hear. Marketing summaries pull the 6 quotes that support the campaign. This does the opposite: the quote that contradicts the campaign is the one that gets a page.
You receive the room’s own words the same day, and the analysis inside 10 business days.
Run under research conditions
The event is handled close to how a study is handled, because that is what makes the transcript usable.
Participants are told in writing, before they agree to come, what is recorded, who sees it, and how it will be used. Recordings and transcripts stay with this practice. Your sales organization never receives the raw material. Verbatims are cleared individually before they are attributed to anything, and anyone can decline attribution without leaving the room.
Those rules are not decoration. A participant who thinks the tape is going to their account manager gives you the version they have already given their account manager.
Recruiting, and who invites
Recruiting the room is most of the work and all of the risk, which is why it is quoted separately rather than folded into the day rate.
An invitation from you gets attendance and costs candor. An invitation from us gets candor and struggles for attendance. The split is designed per engagement, in the open, before anybody is contacted.
One voice on the roster is chosen because it disagrees with you, and that is disclosed in advance so nobody is ambushed by it.
What it costs
| On site, the full day, the session and the analysis | from 18,000 dollars |
| One room, remote, same protocol and same analysis | 9,500 dollars |
| Run within 90 days of a CHI wave | 15,000 dollars |
| The 90 day close-the-loop session | 4,500 dollars |
Recruiting and incentives are quoted separately once the roster is designed, and they are a real number rather than a rounding error. Industrial participants expect 200 to 500 dollars for 90 minutes of their time, a channel room costs more to recruit than a customer room, and who owns the invitation changes both the cost and the candor. Travel is at cost.
The reason a CHI wave lowers the price is not a discount. Prep is most of what you are paying for on the front end, and when the scored cards already exist the session opens on a distribution rather than on discovery.
Two comparisons are worth holding beside those numbers. A single focus group, recruited and moderated by a research agency, commonly runs 7,000 to 20,000 dollars, and what comes back is a topline deck rather than a coded analysis. An advisory council meeting of 12 to 18 people over 2 days, with the venue, the travel, the dinners, and the gear, costs a multiple of any figure on this page, and what comes back is minutes.
The 90 day rule
A 90 day follow-up, a call or a 2 hour session rather than another event, at 4,500 dollars. If the top 2 breaks did not move, year 2 does not get run as theater.
For marketing firms
Sold to the end client. Agencies refer rather than white-label the day, because the consent, the recordings, and the analysis are held by the person who ran the room. See For marketing firms.