Key points
- And the stakes are not hours: on a typical $2.4M a year EA, landing the renewal just 5% under the opening ask is $120,000 a year, and the waterfall exists to show you which levers get you there.
- The Copilot Studio scene does the credit arithmetic in the open: pay as you go at one cent per credit against $200 packs of 25,000, with consumption ramping around six percent a month, so you can see exactly when a commitment starts paying and when it starts owning you.
The waterfall: six drivers, five levers, one line you set
The centerpiece is a waterfall of your worst case: six drivers that push the renewal up, from list increases and additions Microsoft expects to the padding that arrives uninvited, stacked against five levers you control. You drag one line across it, the outcome you would accept, and run scenario A against scenario B to see which levers carry the number under it. The waterfall is not a chart of what happened; it is a rehearsal of what you will let happen.
Behind it sits the price Time Machine: curated Microsoft price lists and events from 2012 to July 2026, indexed by budget area, so when the account team calls this year's increase normal you can put fourteen years of what normal actually looked like on the screen behind them.
app.isvcosell.com/tooling/spend-theatre
The waterfall scene: six worst case drivers against five levers, with your acceptable outcome as a line you drag.
THE SAME JOB, TWICE
TODAY, BY HAND
You reconstruct the EA position in Excel: the reseller quote, last cycle's order forms, price list PDFs.
You model the uplift by hand and guess at what Microsoft will add for Copilot.
The E5 question, what is actually used, needs a report from IT that takes a week to arrive.
The CFO slide gets built the night before the meeting.
A full week of analyst time per cycle
WITH ISVCOSELL
Open the Spend Theatre. It seeds from your Microsoft 365 optimizer data and stages ten scenes on arrival.
Drag the acceptable outcome line across the waterfall; run scenario A against B.
The E5 heatmap already shows adoption by component, with the unused half wired to a lever.
The asks sheet and the exec slide are the last two scenes. They are already built.
About an hour, most of it thinking
What changes: a week of spreadsheet reconstruction becomes an hour on stage. And the stakes are not hours: on a typical $2.4M a year EA, landing the renewal just 5% under the opening ask is $120,000 a year, and the waterfall exists to show you which levers get you there.
ACT TWO
E5 by component, and the Copilot credit math nobody shows you
The E5 heatmap breaks the suite into six components and maps adoption bands across them, because E5 is not one product, it is a bundle you justify component by component. Where adoption is thin, the heatmap sends the unused half straight to the lever it funds: that is the difference between knowing you underuse E5 and negotiating with it.
The Copilot Studio scene does the credit arithmetic in the open: pay as you go at one cent per credit against $200 packs of 25,000, with consumption ramping around six percent a month, so you can see exactly when a commitment starts paying and when it starts owning you. An Azure scene prices the roughly eight percent benefit of shifting eligible spend, and the estate levers scene collects the rest of the yield.
"The waterfall is not a chart of what happened. It is a rehearsal of what you will let happen, with the levers on stage next to the drivers."
ACT THREE
Corridor, asks, and the workroom after the show
The closing act is the negotiation itself. The corridor scene tracks offer rounds against your target and shows how much of the gap each round closed, the asks sheet states every request with the evidence scene it came from, and the exec slide compresses the whole show into the one image your CFO will actually forward.
Then the theatre hands you a workroom. Outreach cards open pre drafted emails, and a deterministic project plan lays four phases and fifteen tasks against your real runway, compressed to fit however many weeks you actually have. The show persists its state locally, so the plan you half finished is the plan you resume.
THE TEN SCENES
What the three acts cover
1 Position and waterfall: where the spend stands, six worst case drivers, five levers, the draggable acceptable outcome line, scenario A/B.
2 Evidence: the price Time Machine back to 2012, the six component E5 heatmap, and the estate levers scene.
3 AI money: Copilot Studio credits, pay as you go against packs with a monthly ramp, and the Azure shift benefit.
4 The close: the offer corridor, the asks sheet with evidence links, the exec slide, and the workroom with emails and a phased plan.
THE HONEST LIMIT
It optimizes Microsoft, not your whole estate
This theatre is deliberately Microsoft only. The vendor wide picture, every publisher combined, lives in the IT spend optimizer, which is a different tool answering a different question. Bring the Microsoft show to the Microsoft meeting and the portfolio view to the budget meeting, not the reverse.
The price history is curated, not scraped: it covers the major list events and price moves that matter to an EA position, and the credit ramp is a model you should sanity check against your own Copilot telemetry once you have it. The theatre gives you the argument; your usage data keeps it honest.
About the author
Fredrik Filipsson, Cofounder, ISVCOSELL
Fredrik has spent more than twenty years in enterprise software, with time at Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce before moving to the buy side. He structured and priced the kind of large agreements most buyers only see once or twice in a career, which taught him where the leverage sits and how far a vendor will actually move. He started ISVCOSELL to hand that knowledge to every sourcing team.
More posts by Fredrik Connect on LinkedIn →
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