Present the Number They Already Cut
Build the business case Before vs After, list every assumption, then invite the customer to haircut it. Present their conservative floor — never your headline.
The slide said $18.4 million in annual value. Big font, vendor logo in the corner. The CFO looked at it for maybe four seconds and asked the only question that mattered: "Who built this number?" The vendor had — from industry benchmarks, a value calculator, and optimism. The CFO nodded politely, and the business case was dead before the third slide. Not challenged. Worse: dismissed.
Every executive who controls a budget has been burned by a vendor ROI slide. They have learned, through experience, that vendor math inflates. So the moment your number appears on screen, the buyer's job switches from evaluating your case to discounting it — silently, on assumptions you can't see, to a floor you'll never learn. Whatever survives that mental haircut is the number you're actually selling. You just don't know what it is.
The fix is not a better calculator or a more defensible benchmark. The fix is to run the haircut yourself — with the customer holding the scissors.
The discipline: Before, measured — After, claimed
The Business Value Assessment in my system is one page (Template 6 in the Field Toolkit), and its structure enforces intellectual honesty:
| Bucket | Before (current state, measured) | After (future state, claimed) | Annual Delta ($) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ↑ Revenue | |||
| ↓ Cost | |||
| ↓ Risk |
Two labels do most of the work. The Before column is measured — not estimated, not benchmarked from a whitepaper. Customer data, customer quotes, customer volumes. If discovery was done right, every Before cell traces to a source: "4.1 million alerts a year at 22 minutes each" came from their workforce data, not your TAM model. The Before column should be so grounded that the customer reads it and says "yes, that's us" — because they gave you every number in it.
The After column is honestly labeled claimed. You are asserting the future state, and the label admits it. That candor is not a weakness; it is what earns you the right to the next step. A vendor who marks their own claims as claims is a vendor whose measurements can be trusted.
Three buckets, because value only ever comes in three flavors — revenue up, cost down, risk down — and because forcing every impact into one of them kills the vague ones. "Improved agility" doesn't survive the table. "Backlog eliminated before the regulator's Q3 review" lands in the risk row with a number attached.
Every assumption listed — and customer-adjustable
Below the table sit the assumptions, numbered, in plain sight: analyst fully-loaded cost, automation rate, adoption ramp, alert growth rate. This is the part most teams skip, and it is the part that decides everything, because the assumptions are where the buyer's skepticism lives. Hide them inside a spreadsheet formula and skepticism attacks the headline. Print them on the page and skepticism has somewhere productive to go.
Then comes the move that separates a business case from a brochure. You hand the model to the customer and say:
"These are the assumptions. Change any of them. If the seventy percent automation rate feels aggressive, cut it. If the adoption ramp is too fast, stretch it. I'd rather present a number you believe than a number you have to defend against."
Invite the haircut. Insist on it, if you have to. Because something important happens in the ten minutes the customer spends cutting your model: they stop being your audience and become your co-author. A champion who lowered the automation rate from 70 to 55 percent has engaged with the math. She knows why the number is what it is. She has, without anyone calling it that, pre-run the exact skeptical review her CFO will run later — and the model already survived it.
Present the floor, never the headline
Now you have two numbers. The headline value — your model, your assumptions, the big one. And the conservative floor — what's left after the customer's own haircut. The discipline, and it is a discipline because everything in a seller's body resists it, is this: the floor is the number you present.
Not buried in an appendix. Not as the low end of a range with your headline doing the anchoring. The floor is the business case. If the customer cut $18.4M to $9.6M, then $9.6M goes in the executive summary, on the first slide, in the Value Delta One-Pager — with one quiet line noting that the customer's own conservative adjustments produced it, and that the upside case is available for anyone who wants it.
Watch what this does in the executive read-out. A vendor headline invites attack — that is its function in the buyer's immune system. A customer-cut floor inverts the room. When the CFO probes the automation assumption, your champion answers before you can: "We already cut that. Original model said seventy percent; we didn't believe it, so it's at fifty-five. This is the number after our haircut." The CFO is no longer auditing a vendor's claim. She is reviewing her own team's analysis.
That is the whole principle in one sentence: a number the customer cut themselves is a number they'll defend to their CFO. Your headline can be attacked all day, because it's yours. Their floor cannot, because attacking it means attacking their own judgment.
And here is the part sellers fear and shouldn't: the floor almost always still clears the bar, hugely. A deal that only works at the headline was never a deal — it was a rounding error wearing a business case. If $9.6M against a seven-figure investment doesn't carry the room, more optimistic math wasn't going to save you; better discovery was.
Close the loop with the POV — and the clock
Two attachments make the floor unassailable.
First, validation. The BVA is drafted in discovery from measured Before data, and then the proof-of-value exists partly to convert the biggest claimed cells into measured ones. When the evaluation demonstrates the automation rate on the customer's own data, that assumption graduates from claimed to observed — and the floor, already conservative, is now conservative and evidenced. This is why the value model and the POV success criteria should be the same numbers: the evaluation isn't a technical exercise; it is the audit of the business case.
Second, the cost of delay. Divide the conservative floor by twelve and you have the one number every person on the account team must be able to say in one sentence: "Every month this decision waits costs roughly $800K — and that's by your team's own math." The floor makes the case credible. The monthly clock makes it urgent. A business case with no clock is an interesting document; a business case with a customer-authored clock is a compelling event.
What leaders should inspect
The failure smell in deal review is a value number nobody can source. Ask "whose assumptions are in this model?" and listen. "Industry benchmarks" means the case is a brochure. "Ours, validated on their data" is better. "Theirs — they cut it themselves and this is their floor" is a deal.
Three moves for this week:
- Ask one question in your next deal review: "Who cut this number?" If the answer is "no one," the business case hasn't met a skeptic yet — and the first skeptic it meets will be the CFO, at the worst possible moment. Send the team back to run the haircut session before the executive read-out.
- Relabel your value template's columns: "Before (measured)" and "After (claimed)." Two words each. They force the team to admit which cells are evidence and which are assertions — and they tell you exactly what the POV needs to prove.
- Ban the vendor headline from executive presentations. House rule: the number on the first slide is always the customer's conservative floor, with the customer's haircut noted. Your top sellers already do this instinctively. Make it the standard, and your sixth-best seller's business case starts surviving CFO review too.
The instinct to present the biggest defensible number is the instinct that kills business cases. Present the number they already cut. It is smaller, it is theirs, and it is the only number in the deal that walks into the CFO's office with a defender already attached.
Go deeper. The one-page Business Value Assessment — Before/After across revenue, cost, and risk, the assumptions block, and the conservative-floor convention — is Template 6 in the free Field Toolkit, companion to The Value Engine: How Elite Enterprise Sales Teams Turn Buyer Pain into Forecastable Revenue by Rudy M. Celekli. Get the book and run the haircut session on your biggest Q2 deal.