Most companies I work with offer dozens or more types of services and/or multiple types of technologies, often performed or licensed starting weeks or months out and running over several years or longer. Often these services and technologies are scoped in tandem, whether at a customer's request / spec or the provider looking for proactive cross-selling opportunities.
In these environments you have to be able to creatively craft attractive commercial offers to incentivize prospects to award you business. To do so you have to know the profitability parameters of all aspects of the deal, where your bottom line lands, and where you can cushion certain parts of the deal to make other parts of the deal manageable.
If your shareholders, owners, etc. were a fly on the wall for those deal reviews, what would they think of the sophistication and accuracy of your profitability estimates?
