Should you build the ROI analysis for your buyer, or with them?
Build it with them. When buyers help construct the value case, using their own inputs, assumptions, and benchmarks, they own the number and defend it internally. Ecosystems found that deals with an engaged buyer collaborator in the value assessment win at 3.4x higher odds. Presenting your own polished ROI, by contrast, tends to backfire. The fix is co-creation, not abandonment.
By Bruce Scheer, Co-Founder and CEO, ValuePros.io
“Why the business case your buyer helps build, not the one you build for them, is the one that gets funded, and the fastest cure for ‘no decision.’”
–– Bruce Scheer
There’s a chorus out there telling you to put the ROI analysis down. Don’t lead with ROI. Buyers don’t trust a vendor’s numbers. ROI is fantasy. And there’s even hard data behind the doubt: Gong found that presenting ROI at any point in the sales process correlates with a 27% drop in close rates (Gong).
I’ve heard every one of those objections. Some of them are fair. And that Gong number is real.
But here’s the problem. That data caught a bad habit, not a bad tool. It measured sellers presenting their ROI, the vendor’s number, dropped on the buyer’s desk to accept or argue with. Of course it backfired. Lead with a polished figure the buyer had no hand in, and you trip every skeptical instinct they have. The issue was never the ROI. It was whose ROI it was.
When the analysis is yours, the buyer reads it like marketing. When the analysis is theirs, they carry it upstairs and defend it like their own reputation is on the line, because it is.
That’s the whole game. So the question I want to put in front of you isn’t “should you lead with ROI.” It’s this: whose fingerprints are on the analysis?
That is what it means to help your buyers buy with ROI.
The problem isn’t ROI. It’s the analysis nobody owns.
Start with how seldom this actually happens. In twenty-five years of building value calculators, my rough count is that maybe one in ten sellers even attempts to build the business case with their buyer, and fewer still do it well. Meanwhile the buyer is drowning. Gartner found that when buyers face too much high-quality but conflicting information, they are 153% more likely to settle for a course of action smaller and less disruptive than they first planned (Gartner, 2019). Left alone with the numbers, buyers shrink the deal, or they shelve it.
Ask a room of sellers why they don’t step in, and you hear the same four things. It’s too hard, and I’m not a finance person. The buyer won’t believe my numbers. Value engineering owns that, and they’re swamped. And honestly, the deal feels like it’s moving, so why throw a spanner in the works and slow it down? A business case only complicates things.
Each of those has a grain of truth. Together they add up to a seller who hands over a glossy, vendor-built ROI the buyer had no hand in shaping. It looks impressive. It reads like a brochure, or a vendor black box full of fuzzy math and hyped-up assumptions. And it dies quietly in the value fog, because no one inside the buyer’s building will stake their name on a number a salesperson typed, the kind of number a CFO looks at and asks, where did this even come from?
What the missing analysis really costs
Left alone, this is where deals go to stall.
40 to 60% of qualified pipeline ends not in a competitive loss but in “no decision” (The JOLT Effect, Dixon and McKenna, 2022). 86% of B2B purchases stall somewhere in the buying process (Forrester, 2024). Your buyer isn’t choosing your competitor. They’re choosing nothing, because they can’t build enough conviction to choose at all.
Now add the gatekeeper. 79% of B2B purchases require CFO sign-off (TrustRadius, 2024). Picture your champion walking into that CFO’s office holding your ROI deck. They didn’t build it. They can’t defend the assumptions. The CFO asks one hard question about the payback, or whether the return clears the company’s internal hurdle rate, and your champion folds, because it was never really theirs to defend.
Remember what a big-ticket purchase is from the other side of the table. Every big-ticket purchase is a big bet for the buyer. Your champion is betting their credibility, sometimes their standing, on this working. They will not place that bet on a spreadsheet covered in your fingerprints and none of their own.
And when you can’t make the value case, you compete on the one thing left: price. Flip it, and a real analysis protects your price. The big-four consultancies have understood this for years. They price on the value of the outcome to the organization, not the hours of work behind it. Quantified value is what lets you hold the line, and it is what helps your buyer clear the internal hurdle rate their finance team demands before anything gets funded. Help them build to that bar, or watch a rival’s priority clear it first.
The outcome: an analysis with the buyer’s fingerprints on it
Now picture the opposite.
You don’t present a finished ROI. You build one with your buyer. Their inputs. Their assumptions. Their benchmarks, in their language. Somewhere in that process the thing changes hands. It stops being your claim about their business and becomes their conviction about their business. Sales veterans have preached a version of this for decades: the customer has to own the number. Not you, not the vendor. The customer.
The numbers here are striking. Ecosystems, in its own published research, analyzed 2,960 sales opportunities across five B2B SaaS companies ranging from $300M to $8B in revenue. When the buyer engaged as an external collaborator in the value assessment, the odds of winning the deal ran 3.4x higher. When collaborators on the seller’s own side got involved, 2.4x higher (Ecosystems, 2024).
Here’s the part that should stop you. In that same data, the ROI figure itself, the polished bottom-line number, correlated only weakly with closing. What moved the deal was the engagement: the buyer in there, changing inputs, testing assumptions, arguing with the model. It was never the math. It was the hands on the math. That is the very thing Gong’s 27% was measuring from the wrong side. Present the number and it repels. Build the number together and it convinces.
That is why co-building works even when your buyer starts out skeptical of ROI. You’re not asking them to trust your number. You’re handing them the pen and letting them build a number they trust, because they built it.
And it forces the alignment that matters most. When buyer and seller agree on the core problem, win rates climb about 38%, yet only 45% actually align after discovery (Corporate Visions and Emblaze, 2024). You cannot co-build an honest ROI without first agreeing on the problem it solves. The analysis drags the alignment into the open.
How to help your buyers buy with ROI
So how do you actually do this? Six moves.
Pull up the second chair
Don’t email the ROI. Sit down and build it together, on a shared screen or a whiteboard, and test every benefit line with them. Some they will throw out. Labor savings? I can’t fire anybody, so scratch that. Some they will fight for. Shrinkage, though? We lose wine to the staff every week, put that number back in. The moment your buyer strikes one line and defends another, the model stops being yours. Every input they supply is a fingerprint, and every fingerprint is a reason they’ll defend the result when you’re not in the room.
Quantify the cost of doing nothing
This is the half everyone forgets. A real analysis doesn’t just price the upside of buying. It prices the downside of standing still. What has the status quo cost them up to today, and what will it cost them a year from now? Roll those two numbers up and you usually land on something big, too big to keep sweeping under the rug. Call it the cost of inaction, the cost of delay, the pain of same. 57% of buyers now expect to see ROI within three months of a purchase (G2, 2024 Buyer Behavior Report). If the clock is running on their return, it is already running on the cost of waiting. Put a number on it.
Cast the Return on Future
Some value won’t fit in a payback cell, and it’s often the value that matters most. Drawing on options theory, every serious investment opens doors that weren’t open before, or keeps doors from closing. I call that Return on Future (ROF): the strategic value of the options an initiative creates or protects, before you can credibly model the payoff. Think of a carrier weighing a new network build. The sharpest question isn’t this year’s payback. It’s what that network will let them do next. Strategic value is what you can’t count but can’t afford to miss. Name it in the case, even when you can’t fully price it. I go deeper on this in Return on Future.
Frame the risks, then mitigate them
A number without a risk section is a wish. A strong business case says it plainly: here are the risks to hitting this ROI, and here’s what we will do together to reduce each one. Years back I built a comprehensive value calculator for a company called RealPage, and the part that earned the most trust wasn’t the return. It was the honesty about what could go wrong, drawn from experience with other clients, and the plan to handle it. That is what lets your champion walk upstairs and hold their ground. They’re not selling a fantasy. They’re managing a bet.
And that same risk framework keeps working after the deal closes. The risks you named are the things to watch. Is the value showing up? If a benefit is lagging, what do you do about it? Frame the risks and mitigations before the sale, and you’ve handed your buyer the early-warning system that protects the win you just made.
Make it real with AI
This is one place AI genuinely earns its stripes. Use it to frame a defensible analysis, to find the benchmark data and research that ground your value claims so the numbers aren’t a finger in the air, and to personalize the case to one buyer’s context, industry, and language instead of generic cross-industry vendor math. That relevance is what moves ROI from “fantasy” to a real value case built for one prospect, hyper-personalized to their world. Keep the three things that make an analysis credible in human hands: defensible benchmarks, real grounding, and collaboration, because your champion has to stand on their own two feet and sell it when you’re not in the room. Use AI as a partner, not a proxy. The buyer still has to hold the pen.
Don’t stop at the sale
The analysis you build to land the deal is the same one that keeps it. Inside it are the benefit metrics the buyer should monitor, and the risks and mitigations that tell them what to do when a number drifts. Hand them that scorecard and revisit it on a cadence, quarter by quarter: here’s what we promised, here’s what showed up, here’s what we adjust. Do that and you’ve done two jobs at once. You won the deal, and you built the value realization that renews it.
Next steps
- Take our AI tool ValueNavigator for a free trial. Pick one prospect, or one existing client you want to sell a new solution into, and run a defensible, personalized, collaborative analysis with them. Even if you don’t move forward with the tool, it will at least show you what a defensible, personalized, collaborative, CFO-ready financial analysis actually looks like. valuepros.io/solutions/value-navigator
- If you want a hand building your first few, you know where to find me. Let’s talk.
- And I’d love your feedback on this point of view. Are you helping your buyers buy with ROI, or still handing them one? Hit reply, comment, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
The best ROI analysis you’ll ever bring to a deal is the one you never actually present, because by the time it matters, your buyer is the one holding the pen.
So before your next big deal, ask the only question that predicts whether it gets funded: whose fingerprints are on the analysis?
Author
Bruce Scheer is CEO of ValuePros.io and the author of Amazon Best Seller Inspire Your Buyers. He helps B2B revenue teams help their buyers buy by finding, communicating and quantifying the real value of change. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Research cited
- Gong, 30 Mind-Blowing Sales Stats / Gong Labs: presenting ROI at any point in the sales process correlates with a 27% drop in close rates. gong.io
- Gartner, 2019 (sense-making / B2B buying research): buyers who encounter too much high-quality but conflicting information are 153% more likely to settle for a course of action smaller and less disruptive than originally planned. gartner.com
- The JOLT Effect, Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, 2022: 40 to 60% of qualified pipeline ends in “no decision” rather than a competitive loss.
- Forrester, The State of Business Buying, 2024: 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process.
- TrustRadius, 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect Report: 79% of B2B purchases require CFO approval.
- Ecosystems, Transforming Value Selling with Collaboration and AI, 2024: across 2,960 opportunities at five B2B SaaS firms ($300M to $8B revenue), deals with an engaged external (buyer) collaborator in the value assessment won at 3.4x higher odds, and internal collaborators at 2.4x, while the ROI figure alone correlated only weakly with closing. ecosystems.io
- G2, 2024 Buyer Behavior Report: 57% of buyers expect ROI within three months of a purchase. g2.com
- Corporate Visions and Emblaze, 2024: win rates rise roughly 38% when buyer and seller agree on the problem, yet only 45% align after discovery.
Frequently asked questions
Lead with the buyer’s problem, then quantify it together. The pushback, and Gong’s finding that presenting ROI correlates with a 27% drop in close rates, is aimed at vendor-built ROI decks buyers never touch. When the buyer helps build the analysis, that trust problem mostly disappears, because the numbers are theirs.
Yes, and this is where AI has closed the gap. A rep can now frame a defensible analysis, pull relevant benchmarks, and personalize it to one buyer in an afternoon, work that used to sit in a specialist queue for a week. The tooling is no longer the excuse.
The cost of inaction. Most cases price the upside of buying and skip the price of standing still. Quantify the cost of the status quo, to date and going forward, and you give your champion the urgency they need to move a decision off “later.”
ROI models the payback you can count. Return on Future captures the strategic options an investment creates or protects, the value that won’t fit in a spreadsheet cell but often matters more. A complete case names both.
About ValuePros
The fastest way to a “yes” is a business case your buyer helped write.
At ValuePros.io, we help revenue teams gain the Value Edge by eliminating buyer indecision and making value unmistakable, so decisions happen faster and revenue growth accelerates. We help revenue teams work with their buyers to find, communicate, and quantify real value, so their CFO can say “yes.”
Let’s talk about how to strengthen your go-to-market approach and lead buyers with value.
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