How Asking for the Cost of Inaction Won the Deal - software sales - Closing the Deal with Fexingo

Topics in this episode

software sales Closing techniques sales negotiation cost of inaction procurement stalemate

Episode notes

In episode 174 of Closing the Deal, Lucas and Luna unpack a procurement stalemate that broke only when the rep asked a deceptively simple question: 'What does it cost you to do nothing?' The case: a mid-sized logistics company that had been sitting on a software proposal for six months while its manual dispatch process bled an estimated forty thousand dollars per quarter in overtime and missed pickups. Lucas walks through how the rep turned that soft, unspoken number into a hard line item on the buyer's own spreadsheet, shifting the conversation from price per seat to cost of delay. They talk about why most reps never ask this question, how to frame it without sounding pushy, and the one follow-up question that turns a vague 'we're still evaluating' into a real deadline. Luna pushes back on whether the tactic works outside enterprise sales, and they land on a practical rule of thumb for when to pull it out. Listeners get a concrete script for quantifying inertia, plus the cautionary tale of what happens when the number is too small to matter.

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