Here is a thing every seller of a real product learns and few ever say out loud: you do not know, and you will never know, the whole of what your buyer intends to do with what you sell. Not because you were lazy about discovery. You can ask every question and get an honest answer to each one and still walk out with a fraction of the picture, because the rest of it is secret, or unformed, or scattered across departments and quarters your one contact has no way to see, let alone describe to you.
Precise, and aimed at the wrong thing
Say you are selling into a call center, and you do your homework, and you build your understanding around the calls it handles today, the retail line where everyone knows money leaks out. You have the wrong picture, and you cannot tell. What the buyer actually has in mind is a product they have not launched, and the thing you are selling is for that, not for the traffic you were looking at. They cannot say. It is under wraps, sometimes literally under an agreement that forbids them a word. So your careful understanding is precise, and it is pointed at the one use that does not apply.
Or you are selling data, and you are across the table from the person in claims, and you ask that person everything and they answer everything, generously and in good faith. You still do not have the story, because that person is quietly working to get marketing and pre-fill and the actuarial team to split the cost of the data across the whole enterprise, and none of it is settled while you talk. What you understood as a tool to catch fraud in claims may end up feeding four departments, or one, or none of the ones you were told about. The uses are being decided in rooms you are not in, by people you will never meet, on a timeline that has nothing to do with your quarter.
The contract already confessed
The industry knows this, and the proof is sitting in the contract. When we license data, we do not try to list what the buyer may do with it inside their own walls. We could not if we wanted to, so we stopped pretending. The grant of license says, in plain words, that the data may be used for internal business purposes without restriction. That single clause is a confession. It is the industry admitting, in the one document where it would most love to be precise, that the internal life of a product is unbounded and unknowable, and that the only honest move is to quit trying to enumerate it. We watch the products a reseller builds, because those we can see and license. What happens inside we let go, because you cannot license what you cannot see.
The fog hides the upside too
And the unknowing runs in both directions, which is what keeps it from being a lament. Sometimes the use you could not see turns into revenue you never forecast. A product manager gets approval to build something new, quietly stands up a beta on top of your data, and one day there is an upsell you did not chase and could not have predicted. It happens more than anyone tracks, precisely because most of these betas and demos never ship, so even the buyer could not have told you which ones would become real. The same fog that hides the downside hides the upside. You are selling into a future no one, on either side of the table, has finished writing.
Why the number is a fiction
Which is exactly why a demand for a return calculation is a fiction, and not an innocent one. To compute a return you need to know what the thing will be used for and what that use will be worth, and you have just seen that you cannot know either, that often the buyer cannot know either, that the contract itself gave up trying to know. So the number, when it is produced, is not a measurement. It is a confident guess about a use you cannot see, dressed as arithmetic and carried into the room as if it described the buyer. It never did. It described the one scenario you happened to imagine, frozen at the one moment you imagined it.
Selling into the fog
There is a calmer way to hold all of this, and it starts with noticing what the buyer already told you. People guard their time. Someone who takes a meeting, who spends an hour of a defended calendar with you, has already rendered a verdict on whether your thing is worth their attention, long before you say a word about value. So stop trying to prove a case they closed the moment they agreed to coffee. You cannot see the whole use, so quit pretending to price it. Price the thing itself, honestly, for what it is, and let the buyer’s uses be the buyer’s, most of which you will never learn, some of which will surprise you years later with a check. Selling a product that people put to work means selling into a fog. The good ones do not pretend the fog is not there. They price for it, they stay close enough to catch the surprises, and they let the rest remain what it has always been, none of their business and not their number to make.
A companion to Nobody Asked You for an ROI. On why the worth of a thing lives in a use the seller cannot see, and often the buyer has not yet chosen, which is the same reason a return calculation was never a measurement in the first place.