What it costs, and what it has to produce.

How a programme budget works

A Demand Programme has two parts, and we keep them apart on every invoice.

1. The orchestration fee. Ours. It pays for planning, buying-question research, review, measurement and management. It is fixed and agreed in advance, and it does not grow when more of the budget is spent.
2. The execution allowance. Yours, held for the work itself: writing, product and specification data, page builds, quote-flow changes, technical fixes and specialists. It is spent only on items you have approved. Whatever is not spent is credited, returned or rolled forward, under the terms written into the mandate.

The point of the split is incentives. If our income rose with spend, we would have a reason to exhaust your budget. With a fixed fee, the only way we keep an engagement is by producing enquiries your team wants.

What moves the number

1. Scope of demand. How many buyer journeys, product families and territories are in the mandate.
2. The work the journey needs. Some gaps are a few pages and a quote form. Others need product data verified line by line, or a specialist who understands the equipment.
3. What your team can implement. If your developers or agency ship changes, the allowance goes further. If we implement everything, it goes on implementation.
4. Your economics. A programme should cost what a realistic number of qualified enquiries can pay for. If it cannot, the diagnostic will say so before you spend more.

Performance fees, and why not yet

We do not take a percentage of whatever revenue gets attributed to AI. That arrangement invites arguments about branded searches, existing customers, other campaigns, sales follow-up and delayed purchases. A performance-linked component can be added later in an engagement, once there is an agreed definition of an accepted opportunity, visibility into your CRM, duplicate handling, a measurement window and a way to resolve disputes. Fixed economics first, reliable outcome reporting second, a narrow performance component third.

What you can get without paying anything

The free demand snapshot is a real deliverable, deliberately capped: one buyer journey, about a dozen questions, two surfaces, repeated observations, with its limitations stated. It qualifies demand. The paid diagnostic is what qualifies the investment.

If you want to test our reasoning first, the methodology documents how we measure, the evidence register grades every claim we make, and what GEO costs covers what the wider market charges and where the money goes.