How Compelling ROI Unlocks Your Team’s Sales Potential. No ROI. No Sale

No ROI. No Sale

No ROI. No Sale

Tuesday 11 February 2025

How Compelling ROI Unlocks Your Team’s Sales Potential

The Art of ROI – Why Building A Compelling ROI is Your Sales Key

No ROI. No Sale. As sales leaders, we are all aware of the problems that late/last-due deals slipping create, particularly in enterprise sales. But very often, it’s not that they aren’t interested—it’s that they don’t believe in the full value that your solution delivers.

In my 20+ years of sales leadership experience, I’ve found the best sales teams are those that understand how to sell to the buyer’s problem—not the features of the product. And the ability to quantify the cost of being wrong with respect to the solution is often the missing element in making lengthy sales cycles shorter and avoiding discounting. How Compelling ROI Unlocks Your Team’s Sales Potential

Here’s why this matters:

Financial Consequences of Procrastination

The longer it takes to finalise the deal, the more expensive any delay in closing is. A business with £150M in revenue could be suffering from £3M–£10M in losses a year because of inefficiencies, lost sales opportunities, and internal costs associated with chasing leads that go cold. Sales teams can create urgency with the way they present the cost of inaction to the buyer, which literally pushes the buyer to move forward with the sales process instead of delaying the decision-making process.

Business Alignment

The entire business should be involved in closing the deal: the CFO, CEO, VP of sales, and IT, even. Each persona comes with its own challenges and pain points:

The ROI and cost savings matter to the CFO.

The CEO is considering long-term growth and strategic value.

The VP of Sales focuses on team performance and sales productivity.

Mapping your ROI to each persona gets everyone on the same page, so each decision-maker is on board.

Decrease Discounting, Improve Predictability

Too often, we use discounting as a blunt tool to close deals when sales cycles go too long. However, discounting to “win” shrinks your margins and diminishes the value that your solution brings. A direct ROI related to business impact leads to more deals closing at full price, preserving your bottom line and margins.

Strategy and Coaching: The Next Step

The next step after building the ROI for each persona is to educate your sales team on how to articulate that value properly. Regular sessions dedicated to building your sales strategy, along with focused coaching, will make sure your team isn’t just talking about features but about problems, the solutions to them, and value at every stage of the sales cycle.

In fact, after putting these practices into place, many sales teams have achieved a 50% reduction in slippage, closed deals faster and at higher margins, and formed deeper relationships with the leadership team—because when you speak the language of ROI, you speak the language that resonates in the account and its business needs.

Are you all selling problems or products? What is deal slippage costing your company?

Let’s talk about how we can change the way you sell and achieve results that create enduring value.