ERP · Decision brief 01
Six decisions your executive team is making right now — and what the evidence says about each.
Written for the Chief Revenue Officer of a mid-market ERP or business-software vendor — the seat that owns the number and signs off on how it gets made. Each decision names the seat that owns it and the seat that contests it, and the brief closes with what your CEO, your CFO and your product organization will say when you bring it to them.
8 pages · Evidence as of October 21, 2026 · PDF
Your analyst and review budget bought zero citations in twenty-five AI answers. One domain you may never have heard of was cited in every single one.
Five questions a real mid-market ERP buyer types, scored before retrieval against G2, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, Gartner, SelectHub and Reddit. The only hits were two Reddit citations on one question. Twelve of the twenty-five answers cited nothing at all — and the brief shows the mechanical reason why, which has a direct consequence for where content spend can and cannot reach.
What is in it
- Direct sales, channel, or both — and at what splitDomain 4 · CRO, contested with Finance on margin and the partner organization on account conflict. "Channel partners" grew 48% as a share of all filers while "value added reseller" lost 40% of its share. The structure is expanding and the word for it is being retired.
- How hard to price the on-prem to cloud migrationDomain 2 · CRO with Finance, contested with the CFO on revenue recognition. Your buyer arrives anchored at $150,000–$750,000, and the nine sources that set that anchor are implementation and development firms. "Cloud migration" peaked in filings in 2023 and has fallen a third since.
- AI as a priced module, a bundled feature, or a repositioningDomain 3 · CRO with the CPO, contested with Product on roadmap feasibility. 56.29% of all 10-K filers now say artificial intelligence, against a flat control and no disclosure mandate. Across twenty-five AI-generated ERP shortlists it justified one recommendation, in a sentence sourced to an implementation partner's blog.
- Vertical depth, or horizontal breadthDomain 3 · CRO with the CEO, contested with Product on engineering cost. Marked the thinnest decision in the brief and carrying demand-side measurement only. Every generation sorted vendors by production model rather than by size or price, and three vendors hold the horizontal position in ten of twenty-five answers.
- Where buyers now discover and shortlist an ERPDomain 12 · CRO, contested with Marketing on budget. Primary measurement for this brief: zero citations to G2, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, Gartner or SelectHub across twenty-five generations, and twelve of those generations cited nothing whatsoever — for a reason the brief traces to token counts rather than to editorial choice.
- Customer and partner concentrationDomain 9 · CRO with Finance, contested with the board on risk disclosure. "Net revenue retention" appears in 34 of roughly 6,900 annual filings, peaked in 2022 and is falling. The metric your valuation turns on has no peer set in the public record.
It closes with the executive decision matrix — CEO, CFO, CRO, CPO, Legal and Risk — each with something specific to do in this category, not a generic lens.
What it is not
- Not a vendor ranking. It measures decisions and evidence, not which company is better.
- Not a forecast. Where something is an observation of one window, it says so.
- Not a market-size report. It will not tell you what any of this is worth to you in revenue.
- Not padded. 8 pages because that is what the evidence filled.
How the evidence is handled
Every figure is sourced. Where a number could not be sourced, the brief says so and gives none. Where two sources disagree on direction, it says that rather than picking the flattering one. Where a widely quoted statistic comes from a party with a commercial position, it is flagged — including where that flag weakens a point the brief is making.
The decision-maker and every decision were fixed before any source was read, and were not revised to fit what came back.
None of these your decision?
The catalogue briefs answer the decisions a category shares. A custom brief answers yours: one decision, one decision-maker, your market, with the question and what would prove it wrong registered before any data is pulled. See the custom brief →
Licensing. A brief is sold for use inside the buying organization — read it, quote it internally, build on it in your own planning. It may not be resold, published in full, or redistributed outside your organization. Quoting a figure externally is fine with attribution to CULT+MATH and the as-of date, which is the part that makes the figure meaningful.