1 min lesson
The business case in the buyer's dialect
Tell someone how to act on this idea: "Every technical metric you cite has to land in the buyer's currency or it's just trivia."
Step 1 of 3
Engineers measure in tokens, latency and merged PRs. Buyers buy in dollars and throughput. Every technical metric you cite has to land in the buyer's currency or it's just trivia.
Learn more
Advanced table
Reference table
- Technical metric
- Time-to-first-commit for new hires
- Buyer's dialect
- Onboarding ramp → weeks of salary recovered per hire
- Technical metric
- Cycle time / PR lead time
- Buyer's dialect
- Throughput → more features per quarter, same headcount
- Technical metric
- Review & CI toil reduced (BugbotCursor's automated PR reviewer that posts inline findings and can push fix commits from isolated VMs. Press Enter for the full definition. averages ~90 seconds, finds ~10% more bugs, costs ~22% less per run)
- Buyer's dialect
- Senior-engineer hours returned → $ at fully-loaded cost
- Technical metric
- Cloud-agent fix proposals
- Buyer's dialect
- Bounded fixes prepared remotely → reviewer hours saved when accepted
- Technical metric
- Migration effort (Box: 80–90% less)
- Buyer's dialect
- Project cost avoided → headcount freed for roadmap
| Technical metric | Buyer's dialect |
|---|---|
| Time-to-first-commit for new hires | Onboarding ramp → weeks of salary recovered per hire |
| Cycle time / PR lead time | Throughput → more features per quarter, same headcount |
| Review & CI toil reduced (BugbotCursor's automated PR reviewer that posts inline findings and can push fix commits from isolated VMs. Press Enter for the full definition. averages ~90 seconds, finds ~10% more bugs, costs ~22% less per run) | Senior-engineer hours returned → $ at fully-loaded cost |
| Cloud-agent fix proposals | Bounded fixes prepared remotely → reviewer hours saved when accepted |
| Migration effort (Box: 80–90% less) | Project cost avoided → headcount freed for roadmap |
If you can't name the dollar or throughput equivalent, you haven't made the case.
Box: 85%+ daily active, 30–50% throughput increase, 80–90% less migration effort, +75% usage in 6 weeks driven by mentorship. Cursor is trusted by 64% of the Fortune 500. Use these as social proof, not as guaranteed outcomes for the prospect.
Lead with the metric the specific buyer loses sleep over:
- A platform VP buys cycle-time and review toil.
- A CTO scaling a team buys onboarding ramp and time-to-first-commit.
- A CFO buys throughput-per-dollar and migration cost avoided.
One product, a different opening line for each chair at the table.
"Your new hires take six weeks to their first meaningful commit. If Cursor takes two off that, across 40 hires a year that's 80 engineer-weeks back - call it your fully-loaded cost times eighty. That's the line your CFO will care about, not the seat price."
Learn more
Optional practice