A SAM review feels collaborative, and that is the point. The more open you are, the more the reviewer learns, and what they learn shapes the commercial position Microsoft takes next. Because a SAM engagement is voluntary and sales led, you control disclosure. The principle is simple: share what is necessary, keep the rest inside your own controlled assessment.
Why disclosure discipline matters
Anything you volunteer becomes the foundation for the next proposal. A casual mention of an upcoming project, a planned migration, or a known gap gives the reviewer a target. Discipline here is not evasion. It is the ordinary care any party takes in a negotiation where the other side has a commercial interest in what you reveal.
What to keep inside your own assessment
- Raw deployment data that you have not yet reconciled against your own entitlements.
- Known gaps or suspected shortfalls before you have measured and addressed them.
- Future plans: projects, expansions, migrations, and budget that signal forward spend.
- Internal opinions and emails speculating about compliance risk.
- Telemetry and access logs beyond what any defined scope actually requires.
What you can share, carefully
You can engage politely, confirm the voluntary nature of the review, and provide narrow, accurate answers to specific questions that fall inside an agreed scope. The aim is to be cooperative in tone while controlling substance. Every disclosure should be a decision, not a reflex.
| Information | Default |
|---|---|
| Unreconciled deployment data | Hold |
| Future projects and budget | Hold |
| Narrow answer inside agreed scope | Share carefully |
Why a SAM tool result is not the line
Do not treat your own SAM tool output as the settled truth and hand it over as fact. Microsoft uses its own counting methodology and its own data from Azure, Microsoft 365, and management tooling. A clean SAM tool view can still differ from the Microsoft calculation, and the Microsoft calculation governs. Keep the tool output as an internal hypothesis.
Your next step
Before you respond to a SAM offer, decide what you will and will not share. For the prior decision of whether to engage at all, read should you decline a SAM engagement, and for sequencing, read the SAM engagement timeline you should set. The full method is in the SAM Engagement Playbook. We work on a Fixed Fee from $18,000 or on Gainshare with no risk to you, and we reduce your exposure or we reimburse our service fee.
If the timeline is already running, we manage the engagement through our SAM engagement response work.