Deal context and discovery

The Deal Context panel is where structured discovery lives on the deal page. What you capture here changes two things at once: how the Deal Copilot coaches you, and the numbers in the customer model behind the business case.

Before you start. Open the deal from the Pipeline or from the left sidebar. Deal Context is the left panel of the deal workspace.

The subsections

Each subsection has an Edit pencil that opens a focused inline editor. Saving closes the editor and, for most fields, starts a recalculation.

Goals. Primary goal, secondary goal, timeline, and success metrics.
Pain Points. Primary, secondary, impact, and urgency.
Stakeholders. Champion, decision maker, influencers, and users.
Technical Context. What the customer runs today (the current solution field), their tech stack, integrations, and security requirements.
Value Story Readiness. Notes on how ready the deal is for a business case: what has been validated with the customer and what is still an assumption.
Notes. A free-text field in the deal header. It is inline-editable, and a new save replaces the existing notes rather than appending to them.

Deal Context also shows the product on the deal and any documents you have uploaded through the Deal Copilot.

Why it changes coaching

The Deal Copilot answers from the deal's context: the company, the value model, uploaded documents, the deal stage, and what you have written in these sections. A deal with a named champion, a stated primary pain, and a timeline gets coaching about that champion, that pain, and that timeline. A blank deal gets coaching that could apply to anyone.

The same context feeds the Coaching Memo on the right of the deal page. It assesses how ready the deal is and lists recommended next steps, including the discovery you have not done yet.

Why it changes the model

When you create a deal, valueIQ builds the customer model from public research and market defaults. Discovery is how those estimates become the customer's own figures. As you learn a number, edit it in the Customer Model panel and the value-driver breakdown recalculates. The business case gets sharper as the deal progresses, and every number in it traces back to something the customer told you or a cited market estimate.

Value stories render live against current deal data, so a business case you have already generated picks up the change as well.

Outcome-based deals

When the customer will judge the deal on an outcome rather than on a delivered capability, write the causal chain down: usage leads to a behaviour change, which leads to the outcome. Each link is a claim the economic buyer can test.

Capture the chain. Deal Context → Goals or Value Story Readiness → Causal chain field. Document each link explicitly.
Rate each link. In the same panel, add credibility and measurability notes per link: how confident you are the link holds, and whether the customer can measure it.
Bound the risk in the model. Customer Model → Drivers tab → driver card → Risk adjustments. For a driver whose causal link is weak, set a higher execution risk and a lower attribution share. Both sliders run from 0 to 1, and both pull that driver's expected value down.

Each driver's expected value is its base value multiplied by the attribution share and by one minus the execution risk. The deal's expected value is the sum across applicable drivers. Estimated value is the same sum before those adjustments, which is why expected value is the number to present.

Saves and recalculation

Most saves in Deal Context and the Customer Model trigger a model recalculation. Watch for "Recalculating…" with a spinner in the Deal Metrics bar. The Value Drivers panel dims while the recompute is pending and refreshes when it lands. You do not need to reload the page.

Tip. Fill in Stakeholders and Pain Points before your first Copilot session. Those two sections change the coaching more than any other.