Q&A: When a CFO asks for ROI on operational alert routing, what do you say?

The question, from a regional security dealer sales manager:

“My techs love what this kind of integration does, but I can’t get my reps to sell it because the customer’s CFO asks ‘what’s the ROI?’ and we don’t have a clean answer. How do you frame it?”

The honest framing.

Your reps are stuck because they’re answering the wrong question. They hear “ROI” and reach for cost-avoidance math, minutes of downtime prevented, and incidents caught faster. That’s a defensible pitch, but it’s a defensive one, and it puts you in a fight you can’t fully win, because the CFO can always argue the bad thing might not have happened anyway. The better move is to stop defending and reframe what the customer already owns.

The answer.

Reframe what the customer already owns. They’ve wired their site with cameras, access control, and sensors, all of it bought to document incidents, satisfy the insurer, and protect assets after something goes wrong. That’s a sensing layer across the entire operation, and today it earns its keep maybe a handful of times a year, when someone needs the footage.

That’s the pitch. Not “this integration saves you downtime.” It’s “you already paid for a nervous system across this plant, and right now it only wakes up when there’s a claim to file. Let’s make it run the business when things are going right.”

Concretely: the same machine-fault signal that today gets logged and forgotten becomes a skill-matched alert that puts the right technician, with the right tool, at the right machine without the fifteen-to-forty-minute scramble of calls and radio chatter that triage usually costs on a routine fault. The infrastructure doesn’t change. The only change is whether it’s doing anything between incidents. As an anecdote, you can put in front of a CFO: there’s a manufacturer that routed its machine-failure events this way, and the savings people there talk about run to around a million a year. No promise it transfers, but the reason it lands is where it came from: hardware already on the books, not a new capital line.

The honest counterweight, because you’ll lose the operations buyer’s trust without it: this only pays off if someone owns the new workflow. Skill-tagged routing means keeping skill assignments current as people change teams, and it means the customer actually has the operational appetite to act on what the system surfaces. Repurposing infrastructure isn’t free; it’s just far cheaper than buying it twice.

The Teldio angle.

The deal closes on a discovery question, not a demo: “What is the equipment you bought for security currently doing for you on a good day?” Most customers have never been asked. The ones who can’t answer have just told you where the value is.

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