When the count for a resolved ticket or qualified meeting lives in the buyer’s systems, outcome pricing puts your price on a meter the buyer controls. The buyer records the number and approves the invoice built from it.
Definitions move after the work is done. A ticket marked resolved on the 28th is reopened on the 3rd, and a lead counted as qualified gets downgraded when the receiving rep applies a different threshold. A workflow change on the buyer’s side can quietly stop writing the field your billing job reads. None of it requires bad faith. It still arrives as a line item someone wants removed, in the week you are closing the month.
So settle the meter in the contract: which system of record produces the count, what query runs against it, how many days after month end the count stays open, and who decides when the two sides read the same data differently. Then price a platform fee that covers deployment whether the volume arrives or not. Without a fixed definition, discretion over your revenue stays with the buyer.
In diligence I would ask for four quarters of credits and billing adjustments on outcome-priced invoices, by account and requester, next to days sales outstanding for the seat-priced book. If the outcome book collects two weeks slower, the vendor is financing those extra two weeks from working capital. If nobody can assemble the report, the vendor cannot tell whether it controls the meter or merely invoices against the buyer’s version of it.