You’re Leaving the Most Powerful Value Out of Your Business Case. Here’s How to Fix It.
Do you think you could convince legendary Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt to eat a steady diet of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets in the days leading up to the biggest race of his life?
Good news. You won’t need to. Because that’s precisely what he did at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing right before his world record performance.
Not because he loved fast food. And not because he didn’t care about winning gold. Quite the opposite. When Bolt arrived in Beijing and realized the local food didn’t agree with him, he had a choice. Risk getting sick. Or go all-in on a more processed food source that, while not ideal, met his high protein requirements without the intestinal drama.
Think about that for a second. The greatest sprinter in history, preparing for the most important race of his life, making what looks from the outside like a completely insane nutrition decision. And yet, from the inside, it made total sense. He wasn’t optimizing for what looked good on paper. He was optimizing for an emotional outcome: confidence and certainty.
Your customers make the same types of feeling-based business decisions every day. But most salespeople fail to fuel that appetite. Instead, they continue to serve them a steady diet of boring facts, figures, and ROI calculations that make them sound identical to every competitor in the room.
A Great Business Case Isn’t Enough
We’ve been trained to believe that buyers make decisions based on logic, data, and measurable returns. Build a strong enough business case and the deal takes care of itself. But that’s not the case. In fact, in an analysis of over 100,000 video sales presentations, the team at Gong found that using lavish ROI language in sales presentations resulted in a 27% decrease in close rates.
The problem isn’t that business cases are bad, or that sellers talk too much about ROI. The problem is that they stop there. They build their pitch around the things customers can measure, just like their competitors. Elements like cost savings, efficiency gains, and revenue impact take centre stage while the even more powerful forces customers feel but never put in a spreadsheet are completely overlooked.
Those unmeasured feelings? They’re often what actually cause buyers to choose you!
As I’ve written before, value and ROI are not the same thing. ROI is an objective statistic. Value is a subjective feeling. In fact, feelings of value are often binary; either you believe in the value or you don’t (in Sell The Way You Buy, I call this the binary paradox of ROI). And while ROI can be thought of as a subset of the overall value, it’s a much smaller piece of the decision-making process than most sellers realize.
When it comes to your business case, the only thing that matters is whether your customer believes in your value. In other words, do they believe that what you said it going to happen, is going to happen?
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The ROI Clients Never Measure
After kicking off a recent training engagement, the CRO of the company reached out to tell me that one of her reps sent her a lovely note of thanks. The rep was genuinely moved and grateful that the company had made the investment in their professional development.
I stopped her there.
“Think about what just happened,” I said. “That person feels seen, valued, and invested in. How hard do you think he’s going to work over the next six months?”
Harder. Obviously.
“Do you think he’s more or less likely to stay at the company for longer now?”
More likely. No question.
“And in terms of recruiting top talent, when his high-performing friends ask him what it’s like to work here, what do you think he’ll say?”
She smiled. She knew where I was going.
Here’s the thing. None of that shows up in a training ROI calculation! And while employee engagement surveys can reveal that sentiment, no one measures the downstream training impact of an employee who feels like their company actually cares about them. But did that CRO believe it had serious value? Absolutely! Would she make that investment again? Without hesitation.
She didn’t just buy training and the revenue lift that comes from reps using the tactics I teach. She bought the feeling of being the kind of leader who invests in her people and the goodwill, engagement, and discretionary effort it unlocks in them.
Tremendous value. It just doesn’t live in a spreadsheet.
The 35-Page Document Nobody Read
Earlier in my career, I was leading the solution engineering team at a software company, trying to win a 7-figure deal with a large manufacturer. We were close to the finish line when their IT leader stepped in and asked if the solution could integrate with their SAP back end.
Between us, we’d technically never actually done that before but we knew it was within our capabilities. So we told them it could and scheduled a follow-up call to review the details.
After the meeting, my CEO pulled me aside. “I need you to create a document that explains how the integration works.”
As a former research scientist, I knew how to write a lab report but I understood this task wasn’t just about communicating technical ability. It was about instilling confidence so overwhelming that there was no way their IT department would stand in the way of closing the deal.
So I went to work! I put together a gleaming 35-page integration document. Structured. Thorough. Full of details and diagrams. We sent it over before our next call. When we got on the call and asked if they’d received it, the response was immediate.
“We sure did! 35 pages. Amazing!”
Nobody on their team had read 35 pages. That’s not why they were impressed. What that document communicated, what it actually sold, was rigor, experience, and depth. While the content was sound, it was its polish and size that conveyed the confidence the customer was looking for. We ended up winning the deal.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean your primary pitch should include heroic stories of your technical documentation prowess or ability to drive employee retention. It’s to recognize that compelling value is hiding in places most sellers never think to look and that some of those places are absolutely worth leading with.
Building These Levers Into Your Pitch
Here’s where most sellers leave serious value on the table. In a world overrun with solutions that (let’s be honest) all sound the same to your customers, it’s easy for even the best vendors to be seen as a commodity. So while you might be the best, when you’re going up against three other vendors who all say they can all do the same thing, the breakthrough is rarely the feature list. It’s the emotional alignment you create.
So the question you need to ask yourself is, what feelings are my customers buying from me that they can’t easily get anywhere else?
In other words, think about the emotional value hiding inside the things you do but aren’t leading with.
For example, maybe you have an incredible customer success team and implementation approach. To a buyer who has been burned by a failed rollout before, that isn’t a process detail. It’s certainty and relief. It’s the feeling of walking into their next boardroom knowing this one won’t just be successful, but isn’t going to blow up in their face.
Maybe your customer service experience and response time are genuinely exceptional. Not the old “we offer 24/7 support”, only to be stuck talking to the most useless AI chatbot on earth. But a named support rep assigned to your account, so when something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong), you’ll never be bounced around to random support reps that take forever to understand your problem or have to chase anyone for updates.
That might sound like a small thing, but for a busy executive managing a dozen vendors? That type of security and peace of mind is something they’d pay and stay for, even when a competitor offers a competitive solution at a lower price.
In my practice, one of the feelings I lead with is intimacy. I embed myself in my clients’ teams with content and access-rich engagements that unfold over time. It means I can only work with a limited number of companies each year, but the experience feels personal in a way that a large training firm or a fully online course platform simply can’t replicate. My clients aren’t just buying unique content, they’re buying the feeling of working with someone who’s always accessible and fully invested in their success. That’s not something I mention after explaining my curriculum and approach. It’s something I lead with. You should too!
None of these are features. All of them are feelings.
And when you articulate them by saying things like “our customers tell us they chose us because they needed this project to succeed and we’re the team they trust when failure isn’t an option”, you’re speaking a completely different language than your competitors.
The Practical Takeaway
Next time you’re building your pitch or refining your value proposition, go beyond the ROI model. Ask yourself: what does your customer feel when they choose you? Not just what they gain.
What fears are you eliminating? What certainty and confidence are you creating? What does it say about them, as a leader or a professional, to have chosen you?
Those feelings won’t show up in a business case. They won’t be line items in a procurement review. But they will massively influence the decision.
Usain Bolt wasn’t just thinking about the optimal grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. He was thinking about the confidence he needed to feel walking up to that starting block.
Your buyers are thinking the same way. The sellers who not only understand that, but who build their pitch around it, are the ones who win even when the spreadsheet says it should be a coin flip.
PS – Did you find this approach helpful and want to learn how to create powerful, emotional connections with your customers that make you stand out? Check out the popular Cerebral Selling Sales Academy training program!
