You've done everything right. Great demo. Strong champion. Real pain. Then silence. The deal goes dark.
It's not that they chose a competitor. They chose nothing. Finance couldn't justify the spend. The business case didn't hold up. Your champion couldn't defend the purchase.
This is the most common way B2B deals die—and the hardest to diagnose.
The "No Decision" Problem
Sales teams obsess over competitive losses. Win/loss analyses dissect why deals went to other vendors. But the biggest category of losses often goes unexamined: deals that simply stall, get deprioritized, or die in budget review.
These aren't competitive losses. The buyer didn't choose someone else. They chose to do nothing—at least for now. The project got pushed to next quarter, then next year, then indefinitely.
The pattern is predictable: strong early engagement, multiple stakeholders involved, technical validation complete, then a wall. The deal enters "pending budget approval" and never emerges. Your champion stops responding. The opportunity sits in your CRM, technically still alive, practically dead.
Understanding why this happens is the first step to fixing it.
Why Finance Keeps Saying No
CFOs and procurement teams aren't trying to block deals. They're trying to allocate limited budget to investments that will actually pay off. Every dollar spent on your software is a dollar not spent on something else. That's not obstruction—that's their job.
When they reject a software purchase, it's usually because:
The ROI numbers look made up or optimistic. Finance teams have seen enough vendor projections to be skeptical. When your business case shows 400% ROI based on assumptions your champion can't explain, the default response is discount or reject. The burden of proof is on you, and "trust us" isn't proof.
There's no clear payback period or risk analysis. A projected ROI without a timeline or risk acknowledgment isn't a business case—it's marketing. CFOs want to know when they'll see returns, what assumptions drive the projection, and what happens if those assumptions are wrong.
The "savings" are soft costs that won't hit the P&L. "Your team will save 10 hours per week" doesn't mean much if those hours don't translate to headcount reduction or measurable revenue impact. Productivity improvements are real, but finance needs to see how they connect to financial outcomes.
The business case was built by the vendor, so it's not credible. When the ROI calculation comes from the company selling the product, it's inherently suspect. CFOs know you're motivated to make the numbers look good. They trust analysis their own team has validated far more than analysis you've provided.
The problem isn't your product. It's the business case.
What a CFO Actually Needs to See
A business case that gets approved isn't a sales deck with ROI claims. It's a financial document that answers specific questions:
What's the total cost of ownership, including implementation and ongoing costs? Not just the license fee. Include training, integration, internal resources required, potential consulting costs, and the opportunity cost of the implementation project itself.
What's the expected return, and over what time period? Annualized ROI is a start, but CFOs also want to see Year 1 vs. Year 2 vs. Year 3 projections. Front-loaded benefits are more valuable than back-loaded ones. Cash flow timing matters.
What assumptions is this based on, and how sensitive is the outcome? Every projection relies on assumptions about adoption rates, efficiency gains, market conditions. A credible business case acknowledges these assumptions, documents their sources, and shows what happens if they're wrong by 20% or 50%.
What happens if we do nothing—what's the cost of the status quo? This is often more persuasive than ROI projections. Quantifying the ongoing cost of the current situation reframes the decision from "should we spend money" to "can we afford not to act."
Who else in our industry has seen these results? Third-party validation—customer references, analyst reports, industry benchmarks—adds credibility that vendor-generated numbers lack.
If your champion can't answer these questions, the deal stalls. If they can, deals move. It's that straightforward.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
"No decision" isn't neutral. Every month a buyer delays, they're paying the cost of the problem your product solves.
This is the most underused lever in B2B sales: quantifying inaction. While most vendors focus on the ROI of their solution, the cost of doing nothing is often more compelling—especially to CFOs who are naturally skeptical of projected returns.
Consider what the buyer is already paying:
Lost revenue from inefficient processes. If your product accelerates sales cycles or improves win rates, every day without it is money left on the table. For a $10M pipeline with a 20% win rate, a 5-point improvement is $500K annually. Delay costs roughly $40K per month.
Excess spend on tools they're trying to replace. The legacy system has costs too. License fees, maintenance, workarounds, consulting to keep it running. These are real dollars going out the door while the replacement decision stalls.
Opportunity cost of the team's time. When employees spend hours on manual processes your product would automate, that's time not spent on higher-value work. This is a soft cost, but when quantified properly—with realistic assumptions about what that time would otherwise produce—it becomes concrete.
Competitive disadvantage vs. companies that already adopted. If competitors are already using solutions like yours, delay means falling further behind. This is harder to quantify but often resonates with executives concerned about market position.
Reframing the conversation around cost of inaction shifts the dynamic. You're not asking for money; you're showing them what they're already spending by not acting. That's a fundamentally different conversation.
Why Spreadsheets Don't Cut It
Sales teams have been building ROI calculators in Excel for decades. It feels like the right approach—flexible, customizable, no software to buy. But spreadsheet-based business cases fail for predictable reasons:
Every rep builds a different version with different assumptions. When there's no standard model, methodology varies wildly across your sales team. One rep quotes 200% ROI; another quotes 400% for a similar deal. The inconsistency undermines credibility for everyone.
The math is hidden in formulas that look like a guess. Spreadsheet formulas are opaque. When a CFO asks "where does this 35% improvement come from," and the answer is "it's in cell D47," the business case loses credibility. There's no documentation, no source citation, no defensible methodology.
The output looks like a sales tool, not a financial document. Formatting matters. A spreadsheet screenshot in an email signals "vendor trying to sell something." A professionally designed financial summary signals "analysis worth taking seriously." Perception shapes reception.
There's no benchmark data to support the projections. Spreadsheet calculators rely entirely on vendor assumptions. There's no built-in industry data, no third-party benchmarks, no external validation. Every number comes from you—which means every number is suspect.
It takes hours to customize for each deal. Building a credible, deal-specific business case in a spreadsheet is time-consuming. Many reps skip it entirely or use a generic template that doesn't reflect the specific opportunity. The deals that need business cases most—complex, multi-stakeholder, high-value—are exactly the ones where generic templates fail.
Buyers see through it. Finance dismisses it. The deal stalls anyway.
For teams serious about value selling, the spreadsheet approach has run its course. Modern alternatives exist that address these limitations—purpose-built tools that combine the flexibility of spreadsheets with the credibility and consistency of professional business case software.
How Winning Teams Solve This
The teams that consistently get deals approved do things differently. They don't treat ROI justification as an afterthought—something to produce when procurement demands it. They make it a core part of how they sell.
They build the business case with the buyer, not for them. When the business case is co-created with your champion—using their inputs, validated by their assumptions—it becomes their document, not yours. They can defend it because they helped build it. This is fundamentally different from handing over a vendor-generated ROI estimate.
They use third-party benchmarks to support their assumptions. Instead of "we typically see 30% improvement," winning teams cite specific sources: industry research, analyst reports, documented customer outcomes. These aren't always perfect data, but they're infinitely more credible than unsourced vendor claims.
They model multiple scenarios, including conservative ones. Showing only the optimistic case invites skepticism. Showing base, conservative, and optimistic scenarios demonstrates rigor. Interestingly, the conservative scenario is often what CFOs approve—because it feels realistic and defensible.
They deliver polished documents that look like finance built them. The output format matters more than most sellers realize. A one-page executive summary with clear methodology, documented assumptions, and professional design gets taken seriously. A spreadsheet attachment gets filed and forgotten.
They quantify the cost of inaction, not just the ROI of action. Reframing the decision from "should we invest" to "can we afford not to" changes the conversation entirely. When delay has a quantified cost, urgency is built into the business case itself.
This isn't about being slick. It's about giving buyers what they need to defend the purchase internally. Your champion wants to buy. Your job is to arm them for the fight with finance.
Signs Your Deals Are Stalling on ROI
How do you know if ROI justification is your bottleneck? Look for these patterns:
Deals go dark after the champion says "I need to get budget approved." This is the clearest signal. If deals consistently stall at the budget approval stage, the business case isn't strong enough to survive internal scrutiny.
Finance asks for a business case and you scramble to build one. If the request for ROI justification catches you off guard, you're reactive rather than proactive. By the time finance asks, you're already on the defensive.
Buyers love the product but can't articulate the value to their CFO. Your champion says all the right things in your calls but struggles to explain why this investment makes sense. They don't have the language or the numbers to advocate internally.
You're discounting to close because you can't justify the price. When price becomes the primary objection, it's often because value isn't adequately established. Discounting is the symptom; weak business case is the disease.
Competitors with weaker products win because they quantify better. This is the most painful pattern. You know your product is superior, but the competitor who can articulate value in CFO language wins the deal.
If any of these sound familiar, your business case is the bottleneck—not your product, not your pricing, not your sales team's effort.
The Fix
Stop treating ROI justification as an afterthought. Make it a core part of how you sell.
Define your value drivers before you pitch. Understand the specific ways your product creates measurable impact for each buyer persona. Cost reduction. Revenue acceleration. Risk mitigation. Time savings. Map these before you start selling, not after.
Build the business case during discovery, not after. The questions you ask in discovery should populate your value model. By the end of discovery, you should have the inputs needed for a credible business case—using data the buyer owns and can defend.
Give buyers deliverables they can use internally. Your business case materials should be designed for the buyer's internal audience, not for you. What does the CFO need to see? What does procurement require? Give your champion materials formatted for their recipients.
Use real data, not hopeful projections. Source your assumptions. Cite benchmarks. Document methodology. The difference between a credible business case and a dismissed one often comes down to whether you can explain where the numbers came from.
The teams that do this win more, win faster, and discount less. The teams that don't keep losing deals to "no decision"—and keep wondering why.
The challenges outlined in this article—inconsistent business cases, unexplainable assumptions, deals stalling on ROI—are exactly what ValueNova was built to solve. Our value selling platform helps you build defensible business cases that survive CFO scrutiny, using real benchmarks and professional deliverables your champion can use internally. Request early access to see how it works.