Opening with ROI on a first call is not confidence
Opening with ROI on a first call is not confidence.
It is a tell.
It tells the buyer you have not found the real cost yet.
Seventy percent of reps missed quota in 2024. Win rates sit around 17 to 20 percent. Sales cycles are 38 percent longer than in 2021.
And still, call one sounds like this:
“Twenty percent efficiency.” “Six month payback.” “Seven figure impact.”
The room goes polite. Then quiet.
Early ROI is a shortcut. It lets you sound commercial before you have quantified the pain.
In enterprise deals, finance, ops, and legal all get a vote.
They are measured on avoiding mistakes.
So quantify the cost of staying the same.
Before your next call, use AI to prepare properly.
Ask it for 3-5 peer companies in your buyer’s industry, similar size, who improved [industry metric]. Pull the benchmarks. Time saved. Cost reduced. Headcount avoided.
Bring that to the call.
Then ask:
“You run [industry metric] at X per month. If nothing changes, what does that cost over the next year?”
Now you are not pitching upside.
You are putting a number on inaction.
Look at your last stalled deal.
Did you lose on price, or did you start talking about ROI before you proved what the problem was already costing them?
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