Most sales processes begin with a question the seller asks of themselves: is this deal worth our time? It is a sensible question, and qualification frameworks exist to answer it. The difficulty is that it tells the customer nothing. From the buyer's side of the table, being qualified feels like being assessed, and it rarely moves their thinking on.
Evidence Based Sales starts with a different question: what is this problem costing you, and who feels it?
One frustrated user is an anecdote
A single person's complaint is easy to set aside inside a large organisation. Several people feeling pain that connects to the same root cause, with the consequences written down and priced, is much harder to ignore. So the first job is to find those people and record the pain in their own words: what happens, how often, and to whom.
Cost it in a way anyone can check
Each consequence becomes an annual cost through a simple formula: volume per year multiplied by unit cost. Every figure carries its source, whether that is a platform report, a finance ledger or someone's estimate. The model is deliberately plain. Its value comes from being checkable rather than impressive.
Invite the challenge
The next step is to put the model in front of the people who feel the cost and the people who could champion a change, and ask them to challenge it. This is where most sellers hesitate, because a challenge usually means a smaller number. It is also where the case is won.
In our worked example, the seller's first model came to £1.39m a year. The customer's finance team disputed one assumption: that 20% of discounting was avoidable. Loyalty and clearance discounts, they pointed out, are not. Their analyst settled on 15%, and the total fell to £1.24m. The seller gave up £150,000 of headline value and gained something worth far more: a number the finance director's own team had corrected, and which he would therefore defend.
Why it matters
A champion who repeats a seller's claims is exposed the moment someone asks where a number came from. A champion who owns a cost model they helped correct can answer that question in any room. That is the difference between enthusiasm and evidence, and it is why we treat the cost of inaction as something to build with the customer rather than present to them.
Only when that is true do we move on to finding out who decides, and what they will need to see.