Value selling and ROI calculators do not originate from customer requests. They are imposed from inside the seller’s own organization, a box to check in the CRM and a required slide in the approved deck. Performed at the customer, the ritual lands as an insult, because the person across the table already knows the value of what your solutions do, and the financials behind them, in more detail than you ever will.
The buyer already did the math
In enterprise selling, the lead that matters has self-selected. Whether they came to you or engaged when you came to them, the self-selection is the tell. The value was computed before the first conversation, inside their building, by people who understand their own problem in a detail you will never be shown.
So when a rep opens the ROI template, fills it with figures pre-set internally as representative, or lifted from industry averages, or handed over by the customer as blended distortions (“our fully burdened call costs $37.94”), and passes it back as if it settled something, the buyer is watching an outsider do their own arithmetic, worse than they can, on numbers the outsider assembled.
Most of what enterprise reps sell does not even belong in a return calculation. Return on investment, net present value, payback: these are the tools of capital budgeting, and for a capital investment, a machine or a building bought once and held for years, they are exactly the right tools.
An operating expense is a different animal
You do not run a payback calculation on the electricity, or ask what the lights earned last quarter. A baker does not compute the return on eggs. Try, and you get nonsense: two cents of margin per scone, as if the egg were earning interest in the batter. The egg earns nothing alone; without it there is no scone. The worth never lived in any single input; it lived in the combination. Economists have a name for inputs like these, complementary and non-separable, necessary together and meaningless apart, so the return on the egg is a malformed question. Treating an operating expense as a capital investment is the category error underneath the whole ritual.
The shape holds across nearly every domain
A security team weighing post-quantum encryption is not running a value calculation. It is pricing a future risk, the harvest-now-decrypt-later attack, where an adversary steals encrypted data today to open it once a quantum computer can. The conversation is near-term cost against long-term risk, regulation, and the size of the potential loss.
Even genuinely new technology turns on fit, not return. A drug developer hearing “chemputing” for the first time wants to know whether it can turn digital code directly into physical molecules on demand, and if it works, whether it is commercially viable. The value of programming matter is self-evident the instant it lands, and no one on that call reaches for ROI. The real question is whether that buyer is willing to be the test case.
The origin of the ritual
So where does the ritual come from? From inside the selling organization, usually from the top. The people who run companies today overwhelmingly rise through finance and operations; very few come up through sales. To a leader whose native language is the scalar, a price is a number, and a number must be answered with another number. They assume the math turns every decision into a no-brainer, and they are baffled when the deal does not close in the meeting.
That bafflement is the sound of someone who has never carried a complex deal and does not know that the energy feeding it, moving it forward, is information, relationship, fit, and risk. If a return calculation were all that stood between the company and the signature, there would be no reason to employ salespeople. You would sell the two-hundred-megawatt battery array straight off a web page.
There is an officer in Catch-22, Scheisskopf, obsessed with staging parades no one wants to watch, drilling his troops so the parade will be flawless. Value and ROI selling is that parade. It satisfies a process rather than a person, and the customer is made to stand and watch it when they came to talk about their own actual problem.
The client is a salesperson’s master class
Underneath all of it is one principle, the operator’s version of respect: assume competence. The buyer is an expert in their own business and their specific function, not a generic “decision-maker” or “influencer.” Handled well, that person becomes a partner rather than an adversary, someone whose own expertise makes the deal better for both sides. And that person is the salesperson’s master class, whether or not a contract is ever signed. Their grasp of the in-house solutions already in place, and of the requirements still percolating internally, is exactly what the rep has to learn, compress, and fit a solution to.
ROI was never the determining factor
A return on investment is a single number stapled onto a decision that was never a number. Reduce the buyer’s specific, thwarted situation to a universal figure and you have thrown away the only thing that mattered, the exact shape of their problem, for an abstraction nobody asked for. So stop leading with value. Ask what they are actually up against, and fit your solution to that. The value will take care of itself. They worked it out long before you ever spoke. That is why you are talking at all.
A companion to “Better Is a Lie” and “What Do You Mean, Value”: each swaps a scalar, or a comparison, or an empty word, for the one thing that decides a deal, the fit. On the price itself, see “Backing Out of Your Own Number” and “The Naked Price.”