Why Nobody Is Going to Hand You the Numbers to Build Your Business Case

In Article 1 of the Value Stack Series "You're Leaving Value on the Table: Here's Where to Find It", I introduced the Value Stack — a framework for mapping how your solution creates value downstream through operations and upstream into business outcomes. In that piece, I acknowledged that the main reason teams struggle to build a quantified value stack is that the numbers are hard to get.

And that was a gross understatement.

In the twenty‑five years I've navigated technical sales, I’ve rarely seen a tenured sales team proactively quantify their solution's value across their customer's business without being pushed to do it. Not because they’re lazy. But because those numbers are incredibly difficult to uncover.

And until we can recognize why, we can't build a plan for what to do next.

1. The data you need doesn’t live in one place

When you enter an opportunity, you enter through one door. Your entry point team gives you access to their world: their pain, their metrics, their language. This is also the place where your company has provided you with value messaging and customer success stories. It's a place where we can focus on budget and business fit because the data to build a value statement is relatively easy to get.

But the Value Stack requires data from people you haven’t met yet, in departments that don’t know you exist, about problems they may not even realize connect to your solution.

A cybersecurity seller may enter through IT Security. The value there is obvious: faster threat detection, fewer incidents, reduced exposure. But the full business impact of a breach sits elsewhere:

• regulatory fines in Legal and Compliance

• remediation costs in Finance

• customer loss to Sales

• reputational damage to the C-suite

Your IT contact doesn’t own those numbers. When you ask for it, they genuinely don’t know where that data lives or who they might contact to get it. So they look at you like you're speaking a foreign language.

The information you're asking for exists. It’s just scattered across people who work in their lanes and have never had a reason to correlate it for you.

2. Your contact may not know their own numbers

Even inside their own world, your contact often can’t give you what you need because nobody has ever measured it.

Most organizations don’t quantify the cost of inefficiency because they don’t realize that the inefficiency exists. Things break, people compensate, work gets done eventually, and the organization moves on. Nobody stops to calculate what the break actually costs the business.

A hospital dealing with EHR outages knows that the outages are painful. Clinical staff intimately understand the impact to patient care. But has anyone calculated the total hours lost across staff per outage, the number of outages last year, the fully loaded cost of that time, or the impact on patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes? That data exists somewhere, but it’s never been correlated to the events your product addresses. Not because it isn’t important, but because nobody had a reason to do it until someone asked.

3. Even when they have the data, they may not see why it matters

From your contact's perspective, you're a vendor trying to build a business case — of course you want numbers that make your solution look compelling. But why would your customer spend time and political capital hunting down data across departments they don't control, for a conversation that primarily benefits you?

Your IT contact doesn't lie awake thinking about working capital. Your supply chain contact isn't losing sleep over customer retention. Until someone connects those dots, and explains why spending hours collecting that data matters to them, the data stays hidden — not out of resistance, but out of irrelevance.

4. They understand why it matters, but they’re busy

Maybe your contact realizes that quantifying the impact matters. They know the data exists and they intend to go find it. And then the week happens.

First, a fire drill in operations. Next, an emergency meeting they aren't prepared for. Then their manager suddenly needs a report. Then another fire drill. And it isn't even Wednesday yet.

Your request slides to the bottom of a list that never gets shorter. Your customer's best intentions slip into the ever growing pile of chaos.

5. What you're asking for carries political risk

Even when your contact wants to help, getting the data means walking into departments they don’t have relationships with, asking for information those teams have never been asked to produce, and justifying why they need it for a vendor. That alone puts them in a vulnerable position.

The deeper truth is that political asks carry personal risk. Crossing boundaries, exposing potential gaps, and putting their name on a request they can’t control doesn’t just feel uncomfortable — it feels unsafe. And when the choice is between taking that risk or staying in the safety of their lane, their lane will win every time.

Why understanding this matters

In many enterprise opportunities, sales teams are either too intimidated to move outside of their entry-point comfort zone, never really try to get the data, or they retreat to entry-point value when they hit resistance. They build a business case around the pain they already know and the numbers they know how to get. Then they wonder why the proposal stalls when it reaches someone three levels up who deprioritizes the purchase because the value isn't compelling enough.

The C‑suite isn't rejecting the solution. They're rejecting a business case that doesn't speak to their priorities — because the seller never got the data that would have shown them why it should.

The problem isn’t that teams don’t know they should quantify value. The problem is that organizations are structurally incapable of easily producing the data required to do it.

Getting the data is hard. But hard is not the same as impossible — and the sales teams who figure out how to navigate these information challenges build business cases that reach the C-suite and survive the conversation.

Bottom Line: We have to stop pretending that 'value' is something we can just declare in a slide deck. True value is unearthed, not announced. It requires navigating the messy, political, and siloed reality of how businesses actually run. Hard is not an excuse for the sales team to settle; it's the signal to dig in.

This is the second article in a series on the Value Stack. The first article introduced the framework and walked through examples of how to map value across an organization. Over the next few articles, I'm going to go deep on each of the reasons teams struggle to get data — what's really happening, why it's harder than it looks, and what the best sellers do about it.