EN A feature is what you have; an outcome is the change it creates; money is that change written into his ledger. "We automate reconciliation" is a feature; "finance works forty fewer hours a month" is an outcome; "you save 110k a year in labor and cut another 60k of error loss" is the only cell he can actually sign off on. Most salespeople stop at the outcome and assume they've made the case — but a nod is not a decision. The brain can only compare two options after converting both into a common currency; if you don't do the conversion into money, he has to, and most people won't bother — so they don't buy. Every number in your math has to trace back to data he gave you, never an industry average you pulled from the air.
EN Your real competitor isn't a rival vendor — it's "keep doing what we do," which is free, risk-free, and requires no meeting. To move it, put a price on the status quo: how much is the company quietly bleeding each month by not changing? Reframing "what you could gain" as "what you're currently losing" multiplies the pull of the very same number, because losses loom larger than equivalent gains. Draw the two lines — a one-time investment that flattens, against an inaction cost that keeps climbing — and "let's wait" stops being the safe default and starts being a decision with a monthly price tag. The one rule: the bleeding has to be real and drawn from his numbers. Invent the fear and you've crossed from selling into manipulation, and finance will catch it.
EN You can't get into the meeting where it's actually decided; the person speaking for you is your champion — the internal advocate who wants this to happen. What you hand them shouldn't be a thirty-page deck but a one-page business case: problem, cost of inaction, solution, investment, payback, and the source of every assumption, written in language finance can paste straight into an approval form. The easier it is to read and repeat, the more credible your proposal looks in a room you're not in. A clean, concrete one-pager literally gets judged as more true — fluency reads as credibility — while a fat deck he can't recite means your value simply evaporates when the vote happens.
EN Executives apply an automatic discount to any vendor's ROI — say 300% and they've already mentally cut it to 80%. So don't compete on who quotes the biggest number: quote a conservative one you'll happily let finance tear apart line by line, and you've done the discounting for them. Counterintuitively, a figure precise to the last digit (saves 437k) is believed more than a round one (saves about 500k), because it reads as "someone actually did the math." Push the claim too high and you trip the "this is a sales pitch" alarm, and the whole number gets discounted; too low and it isn't worth acting on. The credible middle — precise, sourced, checkable — is the one that survives the CFO.