The Audience of One

In 2017 I wrote a two-part piece called Show Me The Money. The last piece of advice in it was this: socialize your case with as many people as possible.

If you drop an ROI analysis into a proposal to justify your pricing and the customer hasn’t participated in the building of it, you’ve wasted your time. When they see it they think, “Where did these numbers come from? Will I get these same results? They must be doing this so they don’t have to negotiate with us. Couldn’t we get the same benefits from the competition?” To them it feels like they are being sold to versus partnering with you. And when you leave the room they toss your analysis into the trash. On the other hand, when you include the customer in building the case, they lean in. They get you the best inputs, they make assumptions they can defend, they verify the improvement rates to expect. This is when the transfer of ownership occurs. It moves from the vendor’s business case and becomes the customer’s. Once their fingerprints are on it, there is nothing left to attack. That skepticism becomes conviction.

None of that was theory to me. I built and led the value organizations at Splunk, Databricks and Harness, and have done more than a thousand business cases myself. The number was consistent: opportunities with a customer-approved business case won at nearly five times the rate of those without one.

But win rates only tell you what happened at the end of the process, not what happened inside the document along the way. No prior study could see that either. They all relied on what buyers and sellers remembered.

This report goes deep inside the process. Minoa looked inside the business cases themselves as they were being built. They looked at who opened them, how many people, and how much time they spent. A case read by a second person on the buyer’s side wins substantially more often than one read by a single champion, and the effect holds when reading time is held constant. It is not attention. It is how many people had to reconcile the same numbers with each other.

I have spent a career telling sellers to socialize the case. On this evidence, I was clearly underselling it. It’s not a best practice, it’s a requirement.