Build the cost of carrying on as they are with the buyer, from their figures, and put staying put on the slide as one of the options before the demo. Not for a renewal, and not for a convinced buyer who has gone quiet.
The buyer agrees the problem is real. Then they compare you with the other vendors on their list, and nobody compares any of you with doing nothing, which is what they end up choosing.
Build the business case with the buyer, from their figures, and include what it costs them to carry on as they are. A number the buyer worked out survives their internal meetings. A number you worked out gets discounted.
Put the same idea in the pitch. Most pitches set your product against the other vendors. Add the option the buyer takes if nothing happens, staying put, and give it its own line with its cost next to it. Lay out the ways the buyer could tackle the job, say what each costs them, and get them to agree out loud what a good answer looks like before you show the product.
This is for a buyer who is not yet convinced the problem matters. For a buyer who is convinced and has gone quiet, the largest call dataset says it makes things worse.
Jen Allen-Knuth's cost of inaction. Four steps: the organisation's goals, the buyer's current way of doing the job and what they like about it, and the hidden costs of keeping it. Her line is that return on investment is a maybe and the cost of inaction is a fact. Her only worked example is a consumer one: a packable raincoat against forgotten umbrellas and surge-priced rides to arrive dry, about two hundred dollars a month against a one-off hundred dollars. She publishes no worked B2B case.
April Dunford's alternatives step. Her pitch opens with an insight, then the alternatives, then what she calls the perfect world, and only then the product. For Help Scout, the alternatives step opens "You have choices in the approach you take to customer service." A shared inbox comes first, with its downside: as you grow you will want more advanced features and have to move. Then a traditional help-desk tool, with its downside: it was designed to cut costs, not to serve customers well. The perfect-world step fixes the criteria before the demo, describing the ideal tool and ending "Would you agree with that?" The full structure is in her book Sales Pitch.
Staying put as its own line. Both Help Scout alternatives are tools. Dunford names doing nothing elsewhere. Her post on positioning and competition asks what a customer would do if your product did not exist, and says the answer is sometimes nothing: the spreadsheets and the manual process carry on. Her post on buyer-centric positioning splits the buyer's options into keeping what they have, choosing something new, and abandoning the purchase. No published source shows a criteria sheet with staying put scored as a row.
Gong's case as a before-and-after story. Gong builds the case as a customer story with a before and an after, with the financial figures as supporting detail, and reports that presenting return on investment at any point in a deal goes with a 27% drop in close rates. Gong sells the software that produced the figure and publishes no method.
Nobody has tested the move. No published study compares a case built with the champion with one built by the seller, or a pitch that names staying put with one that does not.
What has been measured is the size of the hole, and who the move is not for. Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna's call research, described with its sources and its conflicts of interest under Take the risk off the table, puts 40% to 60% of deals lost to buyers who say they intend to buy and then do not act. When buyers got cold feet, Challenger's write-up of the research says 73% of reps went back to arguing that the status quo was a problem, and in 84% of those conversations that made losing the deal more likely. Challenger sells the training. That buyer, convinced and afraid, is the one this move is not for.
The one controlled test of opening on a cost the buyer had not counted is Corporate Visions' experiment with Zakary Tormala, described under Teach them something that reframes the problem. The same researcher found the reverse with existing customers, as At renewal, remind them why they chose you sets out: provocative messages left them 10% more likely to switch or shop around. Pointing a cost-of-inaction case at a renewal is the wrong move.
Losses weigh more than gains, within limits. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's prospect theory, in 1979, established that a loss weighs more than an equal gain, the reason framing inaction as a cost can work. David Gal and Derek Rucker's 2018 review finds no general tilt towards losses at small stakes, and John List's field studies of experienced traders found the attachment to what people already own fading with market experience. Procurement professionals are experienced decision makers.
Why staying put feels safer than it is. Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron asked 53 students about a disease that kills 10 in 10,000 children and a vaccine that prevents it but can itself kill. Asked the highest vaccine death rate they would accept, 23% said none at all, even where the vaccine saved lives on balance, and only 9% accepted the highest rate that still saved lives. When the children who might die from the vaccine were described as the same children who would otherwise die from the disease, 47% accepted it. Christopher Anderson's review in Psychological Bulletin groups this preference for harm by inaction with putting off choices and sticking with the status quo, and names expected regret and the difficulty of choosing among the causes. Noel Brewer and colleagues' review of 81 studies found that the regret people expect from not acting predicts what they do more strongly than the regret they expect from acting.
Laying out options can backfire. Ravi Dhar's seven studies found that people put off choosing when no option has a clear advantage, and that making the options look closer in appeal made them put it off more. A list of approaches helps only if one of them clearly wins.
Nobody has compared a case built with the champion with one built by the seller. The call data behind the warning is private and observational. The research on loss and on preferring inaction used students and traders deciding for themselves, not a buying group with a budget and a boss.
Build the cost of carrying on as they are with the buyer, from their figures, and put staying put on the slide as one option among the others before the demo, so the criteria are agreed while the buyer is still deciding whether the problem matters. Do not use it on a renewal. Once a buyer who agrees the problem is real goes quiet, the call data says stop arguing the status quo and take the risk off the table instead.