You've got a deal that went quiet after everyone said yes. The champion is in, the demo landed, the verbal came through, and then nothing. Before you go back in and pitch it again, run it against what the buyer's finance team checks. The miss is almost never the product. It's the case for change.
1. It furthers a current company objective
Name the priority their leadership is already working on, and the number they want to move. Put both in the first paragraph. If the case doesn't say which priority and which number it helps, finance assumes it helps neither.
2. The budget covers implementation
Show the full first-year cost, not just the license: services, integration, and the internal time to stand it up. Then the plan for the change, who does what and when. The plan is what de-risks the number.
3. Someone owns it after go-live
Name who runs it after go-live, the team and the person, and how much of their time it gets. Finance checks, because they've funded software nobody owned.
4. The other teams it touches have signed off
List every team the change touches, IT, security, the operations lead whose workflow shifts, what it asks of each, and that they've seen it. A dependency that shows up for the first time in the review stops the review.
5. There's an early, low-risk way to prove the value
Give them a leading indicator they can check inside a quarter: a number that moves early and shows the path to the full value, on a scope small enough to be low-risk. Finance funds what it can verify early. A case that asks for a year of faith gets "let's revisit next year."
6. There's a reference their CFO can call
Give them a peer at a company like theirs who will take the CFO's call, not a logo slide. Most cases fail this one, and it's the check a CFO uses to end the conversation.
Running a stalled deal against it
Pick the deal and go down the list. Most stalled deals miss two or three, and the champion found that out live, in a meeting you weren't in. Give them the two or three things the case was missing, in the buyer's own numbers, before the next review.
If you want a read on how your team's cases hold up across all six, there's a two-minute scorer, no signup: supercase.ai/diagnostic.
