The Business Case for Your Purchase Was Written Without You

← Back · ACT II · Chapter 14: Who Controls Value Engagement?

Most buying teams have never met the discipline that writes the financial case for their own purchases.

Most of my career was spent on the seller’s side of enterprise deals, a good part of it building the financial cases that justified them. The discipline has a name, business value engineering, and some version of it exists inside most large vendors. Its practitioners assemble the baseline, the projected return, and the benchmarks that make a number look conservative. Where all that work goes next depends on the deal. On the largest ones it may reach the CFO with the vendor’s logo on it. In many deals below a million dollars, and inside many midsized organizations, it lands with a primary contact or a sponsor below the executive level, and sometimes it simply gets lobbed over the wall in the hope it will socialize itself, because somewhere along the way the business case became a box to check rather than a document anyone intended to read. In all those years, I could count on one hand the number of times a procurement or buying team asked to meet us.

Vendors Have a Team That Writes Your Business Case

The discipline is more than two decades old. It has a career path, conferences and a software category of its own, and dedicated teams at most of the vendors you buy from. If your organization acquired enterprise software in the last ten years, this work almost certainly touched the justification somewhere, whether or not anyone told you its name.

Yet the engagement almost never runs through the people who own the buying process. We worked with a sponsor or a champion on the business side, built the case with them, and presented it upward to an executive audience. By the time procurement examined the deal, the financial story was already written, and nobody whose job was scrutiny had been in the room where it was assembled.

What Goes Into a Vendor’s Business Case

What tends to surprise buyers who finally look inside this discipline is how much of it there is. A baseline of your current performance, sometimes assembled from your public financials before anyone from the vendor has met you. Driver trees connecting the product to your operating metrics, each link carrying a benchmark range drawn from customers whose names you will never learn. I wrote cases that discounted our own projections to a fifth of modeled value or less, because experience had taught us that most of what a model promises never arrives, and the honest practitioners built that into the number rather than hoping nobody would check.

Some of that work was more rigorous about the customer’s business than the customer’s own planning documents were. I say that with mixed feelings, and it is the detail I would most want a buyer to sit with.

What Vendors Know About Your Business, and How They Learned It

Sales organizations are confident they understand what buyers want and how to influence them. I sat in the meetings where that confidence got manufactured, and the evidence underneath was thinner than anyone in the room acknowledged. Win and loss reports written by the people who had just won or lost. Personas authored by marketing. Customer interviews conducted in the middle of a pursuit, which is the moment no customer says the unhelpful thing. The buying office itself rarely appears anywhere in the source material, for the simple reason that it was rarely in the engagement.

So a strange situation develops. The vendor’s model of your business can be detailed enough to make you uncomfortable, while its model of how your organization actually buys is mostly guesswork. Both get presented with the same confidence, because the same team built both, and nobody on your side ever inspected either one.

Why Vendors Built Business Case Teams and Buyers Did Not

Nobody designed the asymmetry. Deals needed financial cases, someone had to write them, and vendors funded the teams. Capability accumulated where the budget was. Over the same twenty years, buyers built procurement functions around price, terms, and risk, and hired nobody whose full-time job was verifying value. I’m not blaming anyone for it. Vendors paid people to work on value full time, while most buyers left it to whatever document arrived with the deal.

What a Vendor-Built Business Case Costs the Buyer

The consequences are easy to miss because everything looks rigorous. The number that justified your purchase was assembled from assumptions you never saw and benchmarks from companies you cannot call, and the realization discount, which is the most consequential judgment in the whole model, was chosen by the party whose deal depended on it. When outcomes drift after signature, the only review on offer usually comes from the vendor, who also decides when it happens and supplies the data it runs on. I watched this pattern hold across every industry I sold into. The cases were polished enough to get approved, and nobody measured what followed.

How to Meet the Team Behind the Business Case

You do not need a new department to change this. The next time a business case shows up in a deal, ask to meet the team that built it, not just the account team presenting it. Ask for the model rather than the summary, which means the baseline and where it came from, the provenance of the benchmarks, the realization factor and the reasoning behind it, and what evidence would prove the projection wrong. Keep the baseline in your own files. Get the value review onto your calendar before signature, chaired by someone who works for you, and notice how each vendor reacts to being asked, because the ones who welcome it are telling you something useful about the ones who don’t. A vendor whose numbers hold up gains from this too, because a case the buyer has checked for itself is much harder for a later budget review to throw out. A buyer-governed standard turns these moves from occasional acts of skepticism into ordinary operating practice, and that is the work The Value Standard formalizes.

The discipline that writes the case for your money is real, and at its best it is careful, serious work. I spent a career doing that work, and in all that time it never once belonged to the buyer.

Keep reading: ACT II · Chapter 14: Who Controls Value Engagement?