5% of Buyers Bought for ROI. Your Team’s Still Pitching It First.

ROI Feels Smart. It’s Actually a Stall.

If you’re leading a sales team and still coaching them to “sell the ROI,” it’s time to re-evaluate this tactic through a buyer’s lens.

ROI is safe. It’s what we all want – a future state where everything is fixed. It sounds like value. But most of the time, it becomes a way to avoid what is actually happening: the buyer hasn’t committed to fixing anything yet.

The buyer isn’t feeling the impacts to the problems you solve, because your team didn’t uncover them, nor dive deep enough. And if that’s the case, it doesn’t matter how compelling your ROI slide is, the deal is already in trouble (hence long sales cycles and ghosting).

What the Data Tells Us

In the Gap Selling Buyer’s Survey “How B2B Buyers Want To Be Sold, only 5 percent of buyers said ROI was the reason they made a purchase.

Read that again. 5%!!!!!!!

The overwhelming majority moved forward because:

• A business problem needed to be fixed

• There were impacts (revenue leakage, etc.)

• The cost of inaction had become too big to ignore

That’s what drives change. Not potential ROI. Not hypothetical outcomes.

What Happens When Teams Lead With ROI

When reps are trained to lead with ROI as the case, this is what actually happens:

1. They start with the future in mind

They pitch features and benefits and a desired state before they’ve diagnosed what’s happening right now.

2. They create false urgency

They focus on the upside instead and fear of missing out vs. the actual impacts of the current problems.

3. They build weak deals

Let’s face it, many opportunities in the pipe are super weak. They focus on the buyer not having your team’s solution. That is not a case. That is a case of hope.

4. The buyer has to connect the dots

The rep provides the ROI, and the buyer now has to piece together their own case.

5. The kicker – weak discovery

When there’s no real problem uncovered (or multiple – let’s face it, your team should know the 3-4 business problems you solve for customers), ROI becomes the default. It’s the safety blanket that each rep clings to and most likely all of your decks talk about. It actually shows that there is weak discovery happening (and that’s your burden to carry as a leader).

The Leadership Miss

Here’s the part that stings: sales leaders often cause this. Sorry, not sorry I said it. It’s you!

You say you want “better” discovery. You want urgency. You want higher close rates and shorter sales cycle lengths.

But then you ask, “What’s the ROI?”
And in that moment, you train your team to skip over the most important part of the sale: the problems, impacts of those problems and what they stem from. To actually make a case. To actually have an opportunity that is so full of information and buyer input data and a huge cost of inaction that it makes you tear up.

Anchor to the Problem or Lose the Deal

The next time you review a deal, shift from, what can we do for them, to “what problems are they experience and what are the impacts of those problems? If you don’t get hard facts and generalities, you know your team is most likely selling to a future state.

If your team can’t clearly define the problem in detail and what it’s costing the buyer, and why it matters RIGHT NOW, they are not selling. They are doubling down on the hope that seeding ROI will be enough to close the buyer.  Si, they’re not selling anything but hope.

And hope doesn’t close deals.

PS. I’d also suggest you hold a mirror up to your own buying habits. Do you buy on ROI, or are you making the case for inaction in your own head as you are close enough to the problem to be able to make the correlation?