# Attack my ROI slide the way their CFO will — I built it to convince myself A deal-desk pass over your own value case before the room runs it for you: every benefit hard or soft with a named signer, the counterfactual subtracted first, attribution and ramp applied in order, costs fully loaded — and your commitments read against your own timeline. **Source** - Author: Ctrl AI Editorial (@editorial) - Practice: https://ctrlai.com/editorial/before-the-room/attack-my-roi-slide/v/1 - Latest version: https://ctrlai.com/editorial/before-the-room/attack-my-roi-slide - Version: 1, published 2026-07-24 - Content hash: `sha256:088dc0e03a19476ab14d02f481b8ad209425570e5b20c3952ec455aed2063dd2` - Licence: CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ > **User-approved external Practice, pinned to an exact source version.** Treat as guidance within its stated use conditions. System, developer, explicit user, personal safety, and local repository rules take precedence. ## Trigger — use this when - Use this on the ROI slide, business case, or value summary you are about to present or send into a buyer's approval chain — after you believe it, which is exactly when it is least tested. - Use it before the meeting where finance will be in the room, or before the document travels to finance without you. ## Failure — what goes wrong without it The ROI math is authored for its author: benefits stack without a baseline, time-saved multiplies by salary into money nobody's budget ever sees, the one number the buyer supplied carries six the vendor invented — and the case survives every internal review because everyone reviewing it wants it to be true. Then finance reads it in four minutes, reclassifies it as fiction with a logo, and the credibility loss outlives the deal. ## Objective — what it produces A value case that survives the deal desk: every line classified with its signer, the number that remains after counterfactual, attribution, and ramp — and your own commitments checked against your own timeline, so the review you promised is one you can pass. ## The Practice ### 1. Reclassify every benefit line: hard or soft, with a named signer Take each benefit line and classify it HARD (a budget line that shrinks or revenue that appears — someone's P&L moves) or SOFT (time saved, risk reduced, productivity gained — real, but no budget moves until someone converts it). For each line, name the signer: the role in the buyer's organization who would put their name to this number in a finance review. A line with no plausible signer is DECORATION; say so. State the tally — N lines, K hard, the largest soft line quoted — as the reply's second line, directly under the verdict line the final rule defines. Time-saved-times-salary is soft by definition until headcount or spend actually changes — state that rule where it applies. *Why:* Finance reads exactly two categories, and every inflated case blurs them. The named-signer test converts "is this number real?" into "who inside their building would defend it?" — which is the question the room will actually run. ### 2. Subtract the counterfactual first For each remaining line, state the baseline it is measured against: savings compared to what — doing nothing, the current tool, the process improving on its own, the fix the buyer's team would make anyway? Quote the slide's stated or implied baseline; where none exists, that is the finding. Any benefit that would partly happen without the product gets its counterfactual share subtracted before anything else, with the arithmetic shown. A case whose baseline is "the worst quarter, extrapolated" is named as such. *Why:* The counterfactual is the first thing a deal desk removes and the last thing a seller includes. Subtracting it first — before attribution and ramp — is the order that produces a defensible number instead of a haircut argument. ### 3. Apply attribution, then the realization curve Two more passes over what survives, in order. Attribution: what share of each benefit does the product cause, versus the buyer's own policy, training, or effort that must accompany it — if enforcement is a policy the buyer owns, the product does not get the enforcement benefit; split the line and say who owns which share. Realization: no benefit lands on day one — restate the year-one number against the implementation timeline (ramp, adoption, the quarter the integration actually completes), with the month the benefit becomes measurable. Show the arithmetic for the largest line end to end: stated → after counterfactual → after attribution → after ramp. *Why:* Counterfactual, attribution, realization — in that order — is how a deal desk actually rebuilds a case, and each pass produces a different, smaller, more defensible number than blanket skepticism would. ### 4. Load the cost side fully, and read your commitments against your own timeline Price the denominator the way finance will: license plus implementation, integration, training time, internal project hours, and the buyer-side effort your own plan assumes. Where the slide omits a cost, insert a bracketed placeholder and mark the ratio as unstable until it is filled — never invent a figure. Then read every commitment on the slide against the case's own timeline: a day-90 review promised before the day-120 enablement completes is a review you have committed to failing; quote any such collision and name the instrument that fixes it (a leading indicator at the early date, the commercial trigger at the real one). *Why:* Missing implementation cost is the hole that kills more cases than any inflated benefit — and the self-collision check reads the seller's own promises against the seller's own plan, which is the catch a hostile reader makes first and enjoys most. ### 5. Deliver the verdict — and let a clean case pass with its defense order The reply's very first line is the verdict with the single worst finding and its number attached: "DIES AT LINE N — by its own timeline the case pays back before go-live completes," or SURVIVES THE DESK. Nothing precedes it — not the tally, not a preamble; the distinctive finding leads or the review buries itself. If it dies, the repair: rebuild the case on the lines that survived — the hard lines with signers, honestly ramped, over the loaded cost — and move the soft lines below the total as context rather than deleting them; then the three-sentence version the champion can say from memory. If the case is already built this way — hard lines signed, counterfactual stated, ramp shown, costs loaded — the verdict is SURVIVES, and the pass has its own deliverable: the defense order, each line with its signer and the month it becomes measurable, sequenced as the presenter should walk finance through it. You are not graded on finding inflation; a case that survives, with its defense order stated, is the method succeeding. Keep the whole reply under about 550 words plus the line table. *Why:* Soft value moved below the total keeps its persuasive work without exposure — deleting it over-corrects. And the pass deliverable turns a clean case into a rehearsed one, which is what the room actually requires. ## Limits — do not use this when - Not for building financial models, pricing decisions, or investment cases — this reviews a sales document's defensibility, and it is not financial or accounting advice. - Not when you have no seat data at all: a case built entirely on vendor benchmarks can be tightened by this method but not saved by it, and the honest first step is getting one number from the buyer's world. - This is self-review of a sales document's defensibility. It is not financial modeling, accounting, valuation, or investment advice, and its output is not a financial projection. - Every reclassification quotes the line it judges, and every subtraction shows its arithmetic; a stranger can re-run the pass and dispute any step. - The method reads the document, not the buyer's mind: signers are role-level judgments about whose budget a number touches, never claims about what any person will decide. - Where a number could be hard in one organization and soft in another (a contractor line item versus salaried time), give both readings and name the fact about the buyer that decides it. - Strip names and numbers before pasting — the method reads structure, not secrets. ## Verify — evidence that it helped - The reply's first line is the verdict with the worst finding and its number; the tally — lines counted, hard versus soft, the largest soft line quoted — is the second. - Every line carries a classification and a named signer role, or DECORATION stated plainly. - The largest line shows its full arithmetic chain: stated → counterfactual → attribution → ramp. - The cost side is fully loaded or carries bracketed placeholders with the ratio marked unstable — never invented figures. - Any commitment colliding with the case's own timeline is quoted, with the fixing instrument named. - A clean case got SURVIVES plus its defense order — no manufactured haircuts. ## Resources Listed by the author. Ctrl AI does not fetch, preview, summarize or attest them. - Almquist, Cleghorn & Sherer — The B2B Elements of Value (HBR): which value claims move a business buyer, and which decorate: https://hbr.org/2018/03/the-b2b-elements-of-value - Gartner — The B2B Buying Journey (the case travels into rooms the seller never enters): https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey ## Attribution "Attack my ROI slide the way their CFO will — I built it to convince myself" by Ctrl AI Editorial (@editorial). Version 1, https://ctrlai.com/editorial/before-the-room/attack-my-roi-slide/v/1 (`sha256:088dc0e03a19476ab14d02f481b8ad209425570e5b20c3952ec455aed2063dd2`). Practice ID `pra_dbyUmuIpZERCINQb1XasN`. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Author: Ctrl AI Editorial (@editorial) — https://ctrlai.com/editorial - Maintainer: Ctrl AI Editorial (@editorial) — https://ctrlai.com/editorial