Since I published my last article, I’ve heard from many of you about the challenge around pricing based on outcomes, so I thought I’d dig into it a bit more. Being honest, I don’t have all the answers. What I’m hoping for is to spark a conversation, so we can learn from each other as we move increasingly into this new way of working.
Firstly, this is not hypothetical. McKinsey now earns about a quarter of its global fees from outcomes rather than hours, and the strategy work it was famous for is down to under a fifth of its business. EY is calling its version service-as-software. Bain and BCG are moving the same way. The firms that your customers often benchmark against have stopped defending the billable hour. We are not early. We are late.
And the pricing is not the hard part. We have spent 20 years selling effort rather than outcomes, and somewhere in the back of the mind sits a worry. If we measured what we actually deliver, the number might be smaller than the invoice amount! That is what stalls this conversation. Not arithmetic. Discomfort.
To charge for outcomes, you have to measure them in a way both sides trust. Here is what that takes.
This is the latest in a series of articles exploring the practical implications of Microsoft’s AI-First Partner Transformation Playbook for Dynamics 365 partners.
Decide how you will attribute the result before you start
Leave attribution to a conversation post go-live, and you have lost. Everyone has a reason to claim the win or dodge the blame, and the customer’s finance team will argue the improvement was theirs!
So, why not borrow the logic of a clinical trial? Dynamics 365 rollouts generally happen in phases. So, if region A goes live in the first quarter and region B in the third, the gap between them gives you your clearest view of the effect of the work. Agree on that comparison up front and write down what you and your customer expect would have happened without the project.
Be honest about the limit. This shows the project caused the change. It will not cleanly split the credit between your work, the customer’s effort, and the platform underneath. Which is exactly why the money is structured the way it is below.
Only price on metrics that pass three tests
Keep the metrics that survive these three questions:
- Is it controllable, meaning your solution moves it and not the market?
- Is it material, meaning the finance director already cares?
- Is it measurable from the system itself, not a survey?
Fail one and it is just a story, not a quantifiable basis for payment.
Even then, watch what happens next. The moment a metric becomes the thing you are paid on, it stops being a measure and becomes a target. For example, pay for every support ticket closed and suddenly tickets close fast, with quality falling off a cliff. I wonder why! So, never price on a single number. Fence it with guardrails that must hold, so the bonus can be justified and paid. Resolution time can improve, but only while satisfaction holds, escalations stay flat, and errors do not climb. Some guardrails are yours; some are the customer’s. That puts both names on the result.
The easiest outcome to measure is the wrong one
The simplest saving to put on a slide is headcount, so that is the one nervous partners reach for. Resist it. Cost taken out by cutting people is a one-off with no second act, and it poisons what you depend on most. Nobody adopts a system built to remove them, and dead adoption destroys the outcome you are paid for. Price on the harder things. Throughput, quality, error rates, revenue per head, retention. They compound and measuring them well is the capability that your competitors likely lack.
There is an upside to that. The old rule was to pick two of speed, quality and cost. Applied properly, AI is the first thing I have seen that moves two or three at once. That bundle is not a constraint; it is the offer.
Stop arguing about time and materials versus outcomes
It is a false choice. There is a ladder, not a switch. Fixed price near the bottom. Then milestone-based fees. Then a base fee with an outcome bonus. Then shared gain. At the top, a fee that tracks the value itself. You climb as far as your delivery maturity and your ability to measure will carry you, no further.
The uncomfortable part. Many partners arguing hardest to stay on the bottom rung belong two or three steps up and are avoiding the exposure. Others sprint to the top to appear modern and take on risks they cannot deliver on. Match the rung to what you can deliver on and prove.
Share the risk, but protect yourself first
Done naively, outcome pricing kills partners. Benefits can take 12 to 24 months to show, and no 40-person business can fund payroll on a promise to adopt. So, a base fee should cover your cost, and the bonus is upside on the movement you have proven. Carry all the risk for things only the customer controls, and you have written yourself an unfunded liability. Govern on shared insight, not one-sided oversight.
None of this is really about pricing. Outcome-based pricing is a mirror. It tells you, in a number, how much of what you charge for is value and how much is motion. That is why so many partners flinch from it.
AI is about to take the choice away. As agents absorb the billable hours, charging for effort stops working, and the only honest thing left to charge for is the result. The partners who can measure will set the terms. The rest will keep insisting measurement is impossible until a competitor proves otherwise.
If there’s one thing that I’m confident about, it’s where to start. Get the baseline right, captured cleanly before anyone is arguing about credit. That’s the part we built our GYDE365 Platform to handle.
So, here’s the question I’d put back to you. Not whether outcome pricing is coming, but whether you’d be comfortable measuring what you charge for today. What do you think your number would show?
This is the latest in a series of articles exploring the practical implications of Microsoft’s AI-First Partner Transformation Playbook for Dynamics 365 partners.
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Sources
McKinsey’s outcome-based fees, the shift in its work, and EY’s service-as-software model. Business Insider, November 2025. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-reshaping-mckinsey-makes-money-195132745.html
Bain and BCG AI revenue figures. TheStreet, May 2026.
https://www.thestreet.com/markets/ai-is-forcing-mckinsey-bcg-bain-to-rethink-consulting-fees