July 28, 2026
Hi Everyone,
Forrester’s latest research suggests that a typical business purchase now involves 13 people inside the buying organization. You may meet only a few of them.
The rest will form their opinion in meetings you are not invited to, based largely on whatever your contact shares with them. In most cases, that means a vendor slide deck forwarded by email.
There is a better option: a one-page business case that your internal champion can use to build support for the purchase.
Here is what to include and why you should write it with your champion, rather than simply sending it to them.
What belongs in the business case
1. A headline built around their priority
Put the buyer’s initiative in the headline.
Use the same language their leadership team uses, and connect the business case to a project that already has attention, ownership, and ideally a budget.
Keep your company, product, service, and mission out of the headline. The moment the headline becomes about you, the document starts to feel like a supplier pitch.
For example:
Reducing onboarding time for mid-market accounts before the Q3 renewal cycle
2. The problem, expressed in their numbers
Use a metric the buyer already tracks.
Their own numbers will carry weight internally because the people reading the document already recognize and trust them. External benchmarks are usually less persuasive because they are unfamiliar and easier to challenge.
To uncover the right number, ask:
- How do you measure this today?
- Who reports on it?
- What does the problem currently cost the business?
For example:
Onboarding currently takes 26 days, compared with an internal target of 10 days.
3. The proposed change
Describe what will work differently once your product or service is in place.
A feature list or license count tells the buying group what they are purchasing. It does not tell them what will actually change inside the business.
Instead, name the process that will change, explain how it will change, and identify who will own it afterward.
Your product or service should appear as the enabler of that change—not as the main subject of the business case.
For example:
Move account setup from manual configuration to a templated onboarding process owned by the customer success team.
4. The payoff, shown as a before and after
Return to the metric you used to define the problem and show what it could become after the proposed change.
Then connect that improvement to a financial outcome the company already measures.
This is likely to become the sentence your champion repeats in meetings when you are not there, so it must be clear and persuasive without any additional explanation.
For example:
Reduce onboarding time from 26 days to 10 days, protecting approximately €400,000 in renewal revenue.
5. The full cost of implementation
State the price, the expected setup time, and the amount of work required from the buyer’s team.
That final point matters. Including the buyer’s internal effort may make the proposal appear more demanding, but it also makes it more credible. It shows that you understand the implementation process and are not hiding the work required to succeed.
Don't write it alone
Send your champion a rough version early, while it is still clearly a draft.
Explain that you have written down your understanding of the situation so far, and ask them to correct anything you have misunderstood.
Then ask:
- What would you emphasize?
- What have I missed?
- What would make this easier to share internally?
Nate Nasralla, who has written extensively about selling through internal champions, recommends this collaborative approach because people are more likely to support and defend a document they helped create.
He also advises against heavy supplier branding.
Buyers are often reluctant to forward branded sales materials to senior executives because they look like marketing collateral. Use plain black text on a white page, or place the business case into the buyer’s own internal template.
We have turned these five sections into a simple template you can copy.
Fill it in with your champion, remove the guidance notes, and they will have a business case they can confidently take into the rooms you cannot enter.
Go deeper
👉 Fluint: The 1-Page Business Case — Nate Nasralla's original framework, with worked examples of the wording that gets a business case forwarded.
👉 Gartner: 74% of B2B buyer teams show unhealthy conflict — read this if your deals keep going quiet after everyone in the room said yes.
👉 Forrester: The State of Business Buying, 2026 — see how many people now sit between your pitch and a signature, and where procurement enters the process.
👉 SaaStr: Our champion left the company. How do I stop the deal collapsing? — Jason Lemkin on rebuilding a deal fast when the person who was carrying it walks out.
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow, we'll show you how to plan a year of board decisions that doesn't leave everything for December.
That's it for today!
P.S. We're asking our readers what ExecEdge Pro should focus on before we build it. You can share your thoughts here, and we'll thank you with a free month when we launch.