The ROI You're Not Talking About

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Plato once described the soul as a charioteer being pulled by two horses. One driven by logic and reason. The other by emotion, ambition, and fear. If the charioteer only listens to one, the chariot veers off course. If they can harness both, they move forward with power and direction.

Buying decisions work the same way.

Sellers obsess over the first and ignore the second. That’s why so many deals die or stall, even when the math looks perfect. The buyer isn’t just asking, Does this make business sense? They’re asking, Do I want to bet my name on this?

If you’re not speaking to both, you’re not in control of the deal. You’re just watching deals veer off course without a clue, or feeling the horses pull in opposite directions.

Most sellers are trained to push TROI, Transactional Return on Investment. That is the business case. The financials. The hard-dollar savings. The efficiency gains. The time-to-value metrics. But buyers are doing a second calculation. One they rarely say out loud. They are asking themselves, What happens to me if this goes sideways? That is PROI, the Personal Return on Investment. And if you ignore it, you will keep confusing polite interest for real progress.

What Is TROI?

I think most of us already know what we mean when we say ROI, or the return on investment. For the purpose of this conversation it's important to put an additional modifier on it, i.e., transactional. Transactional ROI is the part of the deal you can justify with numbers.

It usually includes:

Cost savings. Fewer tools, reduced spend, more efficiency.
​Time savings. Streamlined workflows and less manual effort.
​Revenue upside. Larger deal sizes, faster conversion, better retention.
​Time to value. How quickly benefits start to show up.
​Operational risk reduction. Fewer mistakes, stronger compliance, more predictability.

TROI answers the question: Is this good for the business? And that question matters. It gets you into the conversation. But it is not the whole conversation. Because while you are showing numbers, your buyer is asking a different set of questions.

• Do I believe this will actually work in my world?
• Will this add work or reduce it?
• Will I look smart or exposed for backing this?
• What happens to me if we fail?

This is where deals can fall apart. Not because the math is wrong, but because the risk feels unbalanced.

The Trust Gap in Your ROI Story

But let's be real for a second. No buyer ever looks at an ROI slide and takes it at face value. If you're lucky they're curious where the numbers came from. Is this an average? A best-case? A one-off win? Does it reflect companies like theirs, or just the dream scenario? Are they going to try and pin you down on the numbers, maybe, unlikely. They know how easy it is to polish a case study or cherry-pick a data set. And they have seen vendors present inflated returns that never materialized.

So even if your math is solid, you still have to earn belief. Not just belief in the model, but belief in the outcome. If they do not trust your assumptions, they will not trust your promise. And if they don't trust the promise, the ROI data becomes noise.

The Pressure to Perform (ROI Edition)

Sales teams are under constant pressure to lead with ROI. It is what leadership wants. It is what buyers expect. Build the business case. Prove the value. Show the savings.

But here is the part that is rarely asked Who validates those numbers? Who audits the ROI deck? Who follows up when the model doesn’t map to reality? Often, no one. This is not about dishonesty. It is about a system that rewards confidence over caution. So the numbers get padded. The success stories get overplayed. The buyer gets skeptical. And when they get skeptical, they do not argue. They delay. Because the default is not a no. The default is silence.

Want to Prove It? Put Skin in the Game

If you really believe in your TROI, you can tie it to your fees. You can offer performance-based pricing. You can guarantee a time-to-value window. You can share in the upside. That shows conviction. Bold moves that puts your money where your mouth is. Good idea? Maybe.

It also adds complexity. You are suddenly negotiating legal language, terms, and exceptions. You are dragging finance and procurement into conversations they may not want to have. So no, this is not always the right move. But even offering it changes the conversation. It tells the buyer, we are not just claiming value. We are standing behind it. That alone builds trust. And in most deals, something like this is uncommon, so it could set you apart.

“Doing Nothing” Is Safer Than a Failed Bet

So you've got your killer ROI stats and slides and claims. And maybe you even tied it to your pitch or proposal. Shouldn't that just close the deal by itself? Just look at those beautiful numbers.

Credit to the authors of The JOLT Effect for naming this clearly. Buyers are not paralyzed by change. They are afraid of making the wrong move. When they choose to do nothing, it is not because they are lazy. It is because failure from inaction feels safer than failed action.

• Folks are less likely to feel the burn of going with the status quo, or making no moves.
• If they say yes and it blows up, they own it.

So even when the business case is clear, they may hesitate. Because they are not just calculating return. They are evaluating risk to themselves. This is where PROI becomes the real factor. It is not emotional fluff. It is personal calculus.

So What Is Personal ROI?

PROI is the internal and often unspoken calculation that a buyer makes about how a decision will affect them personally, beyond the business metrics. This could be the emotional cost or benefit they receive. The political or reputational costs or benefits that will emerge from the buy. There are the personal risks and rewards that a buyer will recognize once this deal is done, once it's implemented, once the value is supposed to have arrived, once the costs savings should have shown up. It might also show up as something just for them, whether that is more time or faster results, or more accuracy. But more importantly, do they believe that the product or solution is going to give them what it claims, and how fast.

Personal ROI is the buyer’s internal math.

• Will this reduce my stress or add to it?
• Will it make me look better or create problems I will own?
• Is this worth the internal capital I have to spend?

You cannot measure it with a spreadsheet. But you can sense it. And you can influence it.

That is where the RAISE™ framework comes in.

How to Surface PROI Using RAISE

It would be weird to ask someone, “What’s your personal ROI?” But you can listen for the signals. Here are five example questions, each tied to a specific buyer driver.

Recognition​
“If this goes well, how would success show up for you?”

Attention​
“Do you feel like we’re focused on what matters most to you and your team right now?”

Incentives​
“How would this make your day-to-day easier, or free you up to do something you can’t today?”

Support​
“What concerns do you have about getting this live, adopted, or fully supported?”

Experience​
“How has this process felt so far from our side? Anything you’d want done differently?”

These are not tricks. They are trust checks. They tell you how your buyer feels about the decision, not just the solution.

If You Want to Measure It, You Can

You can rate each of these example questions, and there are many more like these, on a scale from one to ten. It is subjective, yes. But if you’re consistent, you will start to see patterns. High scores correlate with confidence, clarity, and momentum. Low scores align with uncertainty, delay, and soft no’s. Ironically, that is your TROI on reading this far. You now have a simple way to qualify the emotional posture of a deal. And it's not a coincidence that salespeople who track PROI, based on a made up study, increase their deal size by 37%, decrease their sales cycle by 22% and increased their conversion rate by 17.4%.

Stop Selling with Half the Story

Keep building the business case. TROI matters. You need it. But stop pretending that logic or TROI alone closes deals. Because there are a number of scenarios that we have all seen that either killed a deal, or slowed it down, or made it crazy fast. There are 4 main scenarios to look at. Let's call them the Chariot Scenarios. We've all been in each of these situations and usually what happens is that you take the feedback, update your CRM and tell your boss where you're at. The point here is to take the scenario you're in and apply a second layer of effort, based on RAISE, with the goal of increasing the trust factor, or have a better of understanding of why this deal isn't going to move forward.

Chariot Scenarios: TROI PROI Matrix

Every deal is somewhere in the matrix and if you know the scenario you're in you'll do better to respond to the situation. It shouldn't be complicated. And if you can't tell where you're at, you've got bigger problems, and it's time to start asking better questions. So why should you care? When you layer in the RAISE framework, three things happen:

1. You get a clearer view of deal health.
2. You get better insight into what the buyer really needs.
3. The buyer feels understood, not sold to.

You cannot control your buyer’s budget. You can't control their timeline. But you can control how well you see the real risk they are taking. Your buyers are like Plato's charioteer being pulled by two independent forces. One horse is looking at the raw facts, the TROI, and how it stacks up for the organization. The other is consequence, is emotional, is political, is reputational, and personal. They can either be pulling in the same direction, fighting each other, or going in different directions. Know which direction each is heading so you can help steer the conversation to the finish line. Qualify your deals better, speak to both kinds of ROI. The one on the slide, and the one in their gut.

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