Everyone remembers the scene.
Cuba Gooding Jr. has Tom Cruise on the phone and will not let up until Jerry shouts the words back to him, again and again, louder each time. “Show me the money”. I’ve heard those exact words in a hundred customer conversations, just usually without the shouting. They love the technology. They want it. But wanting it is not the same as funding it, and in any serious buying climate the business case and the ROI are king. Before anyone signs, you have to show them the money. Not the price. The return.
There is no single right way to build a business case. Some are a napkin. Some are a forty-tab spreadsheet model. The format never mattered as much as one thing: whether the people holding the budget actually believe in the need and the value, and rank it high enough to fund now. That is the whole job. Belief, not spreadsheets.
After years of building these, and just as many years sitting on the other side of the table getting pitched, here are the four things that decide whether they show you the money or show you the door.
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Tell a Story, Not a Spec Sheet
A business case is, by definition, the rationale for change. And a rationale lands far better as a story than as a table of numbers.
Chapter one is the why. Put your champion’s own business goals on the screen and show how your project moves at least one of them. Do that, and your project is no longer a nice-to-have, it is strategic, which is another word for funded. Then show the current state and the barriers standing between them and those goals, and make it sting. Remind them of the outage everyone is still mad about. Describe the future state they want and the requirements any real solution has to meet.
Only then, after all of that, do you talk about what you are actually selling. Now the benefits mean something, because the audience has felt the cost of not having them. Those benefits usually show up in the same few currencies: revenue, cost, and risk. Close with an action plan, the path to realizing the value and the dependencies that could trip it up.
Give them all of that, and your story tends to end the way you want it to.
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Show Your Work
Have you ever had someone put a number in front of you and felt your gut tighten before your brain even caught up? Something about this isn’t right.
Almost always, it is because they left out the math. When you cannot see how 1 + 1 = 2, the natural human reaction is not curiosity. It’s doubt. Where did the 2 come from? It does not mean the person is hiding anything, but the moment doubt enters the room you’ve built a wall that was not there a minute ago, and doubt is awfully hard to talk someone out of. So do not make them take your benefit numbers on faith. Show the calculations. Show the assumptions. Ask them if it seems reasonable. Walk them through the arithmetic as part of the story, and instead of bracing against you, they will be nodding along.
The fastest way to be believed is to make yourself easy to check.
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Stop Stacking Assumptions
I have been handed plenty of business cases that lost me on credibility alone, because the whole thing balanced on a tower of “if’s”.
If it’s sunny tomorrow, and the Red Sox win, and there’s four inches of fresh snow in the Andes, and Delta Airlines has 99.4% on time performance, then the savings are enormous. You get the idea. Pile on the assumptions and your audience quietly checks out, filing your case under “too theoretical to trust.” Keep it to one or two assumptions, make them reasonable, and back them with the real world wherever you can. The strongest backing is other customers who have hit the same result and said so publicly. At one of the platforms where I ran value teams, we benchmarked across thousands of customers and could tell a prospect, with a straight face and a paper trail, that we would cut their critical incident frequency by 25% or more. We handed them named customer stories to prove it. They believed the case, because we gave them little to argue with.
Simple survives scrutiny. Clever rarely does.
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Socialize It Before You Present It
The best idea in the building still fails if it shows up as a surprise.People support what they helped build. Bring them into the analysis, let them poke at the case, take their edits, and get their fingerprints on it before it ever reaches the decision maker. There is a deep human reflex at work here. Spring a change on me with no warning and I will fight it on principle. Involve me, let me understand it, fold in my feedback, and I am suddenly invested in seeing it succeed. Then when the final authority looks up and asks the question that sinks so many proposals, “Who else is behind this?”, you have a list of names, or better yet, those people sitting right there backing you live. This is not running your case by committee. It’s making sure it’s not yours alone.
A case with allies walks into the room already half-approved.
Get Your Kwan
So when someone tells you to show them the money, do not reach for a bigger spreadsheet. Reach for a better story, honest math, and a room full of people who already believe you. That is what turns a number on a slide into a decision.
Do all of it and you do not just get the budget. You get the whole package: the belief, the momentum, the kind of partnership that outlasts the deal. You get your kwan.
The whole job of a sales team or a marketer is learning to see through their eyes before you ever ask them to look through yours.
