How To Write A Business Case That Gets My Approval | Ep. 17

Most sellers lose the deal in a room they were never invited to. Your champion is excited, but unless they control the budget, they're walking into a leadership meeting where 10 problems are competing for a budget that covers three. What they can say without you there decides the outcome.ㅤMeredith Chandler, Head of Sales at Aligned, breaks down the four pillars of a business case that makes your champion sound like the smartest person in that room. She covers writing the current challenges in the buyer's own words instead of translating them into sales language, putting a number on the pain, extending that number forward in time until it becomes unignorable, and choosing a case study your buyer can actually see themselves in. She closes on the section most sellers skip: predicting the objections your champion will face and answering them before anyone gets to ask.ㅤ📌 What We CoverWhy top reps aren't better at selling, they're better at enabling buyers to sell internally when they can't be in the roomPillar one: describing the pain in your buyer's language, using their KPIs and their priorities, in one or two sharp sentencesWhy "reps are wasting hours rebuilding the same proposal" belongs in your document as they said it, not translated into "inefficiencies in the sales workflow"Putting a number on the pain: 12 AEs losing five hours a week becomes roughly 3,000 selling hours per yearPillar two: extending the number forward in time and converting it into dollars, because 3,000 selling hours is the output of one extra rep carrying a million-dollar quotaPillar three: the time to value formula, a company like theirs, in this timeframe, hit this metric they care about, in the same unit as their cost of inactionWhy naming OpenAI as your customer example backfires when you're selling to a Series A startupPillar four: preempting the "Yeah, but" on budget, security, integration risk, adoption, other initiatives, and bandwidth, and working with your champion to name which ones will actually come up ㅤ🔗 Resources MentionedFree business case template (link in the episode description)Aligned, the AI deal workspace for large multi-stakeholder deals