The five objections that come up in every first call — price, accuracy, time to first signal, what the AI actually does, and who reads the deliverable — answered with the same evidence the diagnostic itself runs on.
Why $2K, not $10K?
The $2,000 14-Day Diagnostic is priced as a fixed-fee remediation engagement, not a retainer or a strategy seat. The comparable Ghost Deal Audit at $99 surfaces which deals in your pipeline are stalling; Pipeline Sentinel at $499/mo keeps monitoring the same pattern on a weekly basis. The $2K tier sits in the middle and is the only one that maps remediation — a sequenced 14-day plan tied to a flagged set of ghost deals — because the work to do that mapping is what actually costs money to deliver.
A typical $10K consultant engagement buys you 40–60 hours of senior time and a written report. The $2K Diagnostic delivers an identical shape of output (flagged deals, owner per stage-gate rule, exit criterion per owner), with the heuristic scoring already done before the engagement starts — which is what removes the 30-hour discovery tax a traditional consultant would bill.
The price is set because the Ghost Deal Index has already produced the underlying data: the 12-industry benchmarks, the ghost-rate distribution by deal size, and the stage-rotation patterns that drive a forecast miss. The $2K mostly covers the analyst + remediation mapping, not the discovery.
How we cut rep-confirmation bias
The Ghost Deal Index flags ghost deals against eight specific signals that are observable from the CRM itself: contract-execution before stage advance, last-meeting delta, buying-committee rotation, stage time vs. peer-deal median, MEDDIC field decay, source-of-truth staleness, multi-thread depth, and champion-attrition risk. None of those signals depend on a rep's narrative — they are observable on the deal record.
Across the 12 industries in the Ghost Deal Index, the per-industry ghost rate ranges from 22% (B2B SaaS Self-Serve) to 47% (B2B Staffing & Recruiting) — with a median of roughly 31%. That benchmark is what the diagnostic compares your pipeline against. Without a benchmark, you have no way to know whether your 38% ghost rate is normal or alarming; the benchmark is what makes a flagged ghost deal interpretable.
The bias check runs on a heuristic, not on a feeling. The shape of the heuristic is public on the site (see /ghost-deals), and the per-industry benchmarks are published there too. A rep's confirmation bias cannot survive a published benchmark that disagrees with their read.
When you see the first signal
The first signal is the flagged-deal set: by the end of week one (day 7) of the 14-Day Diagnostic you have a list of the deals in your pipeline that are showing ghost signals, ranked by ghost-rate risk and dollar exposure. That is the point at which the analyst sits down with the RevOps lead to walk through the flagged-deal set and the per-deal pattern that produced the flag.
By the end of week two (day 14), the remediation roadmap is delivered: a sequenced plan that ties each flagged deal to a stage-gate rule, an owner, and an exit criterion. That is when the diagnostic is complete. The total window between kickoff and the deliverable is 14 days, not 14 weeks.
For comparison: a $10K consulting engagement usually produces its first signal in week three or four, because the consultant has to spend the first three weeks on discovery and stakeholder interviews. The $2K Diagnostic's 14-day window is the entire reason the heuristic scoring runs before engagement, so the analyst starts where a traditional consultant would still be gathering data.
AI vs human analyst
The AI runs the heuristic scoring. It takes the CRM export, applies the eight ghost signals per deal, applies the per-industry median ghost-rate benchmark, and produces a flagged-deal set with a ghost-rate risk score and a per-deal reason (e.g. "stage time 2.3× peer-deal median, no contract executed, MEDDIC budget field null for 41 days"). That work is deterministic and reproducible.
The human analyst does the synthesis. The analyst reads the flagged-deal set against the team's stated pipeline narrative and produces the per-deal remediation step — what stage-gate rule the deal needs, which owner on the team owns the remediation, and what the exit criterion is for closing the work in 14 days. The synthesis work is the billable hour; the heuristic scoring is the platform, not the consultant.
There is no "AI vs human" trade-off hidden in this: the diagnostic's accuracy ceiling is set by the heuristic scoring and the benchmark, both of which are public. The human analyst's job is to turn a flagged-deal list into a sequenced plan the team can execute inside 14 days.
Who reads the deliverable
The final deliverable is written for the RevOps leader or the VP of Sales — the operator who owns the pipeline and can move stage-gate rules and CRM hygiene in the same week the diagnostic lands. The CRO is the secondary reader; the board is not the audience.
Each per-deal remediation step names a specific owner on the RevOps / Sales Ops team, a stage-gate rule the deal needs to clear, and a 14-day exit criterion. The format is designed so the operator can read the deliverable, walk it into the next weekly forecast meeting, and have the team start the work without a follow-up "now what?" call.
If the board needs a higher-level number, the diagnostic includes a one-page executive summary at the front: before / after ghost-rate, dollar exposure remediated, and a one-line statement of which stage-gate rule was added to the CRM. The board reads the executive summary; the operator reads the per-deal remediation. Both are present in the deliverable, in that order.
The $2K 14-Day Diagnostic ties every flagged ghost deal to a stage-gate rule and an owner. Pick the gate that fits your team.