R8 — The tool's number IS the buyer's anchor; sales must be ready to MEET OR EXPLAIN it — bait-and-switch destroys the trust the mechanism case earns

Rule: Before any customer-facing tool ships, confirm that sales can meet or honestly explain the number the tool will display. The tool's output IS the buyer's anchor — anchoring is robust even with experts (Northcraft & Neale (1987) — anchoring replicates with REAL-ESTATE EXPERTS: agents' valuations track arbitrary listing prices, despite experts' confidence they don't) and even with judges (Englich, Mussweiler & Strack (2006) — anchoring replicates with JUDGES: sentences track dice rolls, despite judges' confidence they don't).

Why: Anchoring (Anchoring effect (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) — the first number presented becomes a reference point that pulls all later judgments, even when arbitrary) sets the buyer's expectation. Gartner's 69% website-vs-rep inconsistency finding (Gartner (632 B2B buyers, Aug-Sep 2024) — 61% prefer overall rep-free buying; 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach; 69% report inconsistencies between vendor website and what reps tell them) is the warning of what happens when on-site numbers and rep numbers diverge — buyers avoid those suppliers. A bait-and-switch tool destroys the trust the mechanism case earns.

How to apply:

• Pre-launch coordination meeting: tool team + sales team align on what the tool will say.
• If sales cannot meet the number for some segment, the tool's scope must exclude that segment OR the tool must explicitly mark it as "range / depends on assessment."
• Mirror the calculator brief's R7 — Treat every public number on a client site as an anchor; design accordingly — same rule, applied at the operational interface between tool and sales.