Ask anyone selling ERP or CRM platforms like NetSuite or Salesforce, and they’ll tell you the same thing: the product isn’t the problem. The pitch deck is polished. The platform is powerful. The demo runs like clockwork.
And yet, one year post-sale, 75% of mid-market customers aren’t live.
Let that sink in. These companies have sunk over $300K into licenses and services. For many, that means $225K of sunk cost and no working system. The solution promised digital transformation, but they’re still wrestling with spreadsheets, misaligned teams, and fractured workflows.
The most common diagnosis?
“Implementation failure.”
But what if the real issue starts earlier? In how you sell?
When Selling More Features Sells Less
In technical sales, especially with products as layered as ERP and CRM, there’s a dangerous instinct: prove value by listing features. Dashboards. Modules. Customizations. APIs.
It feels comprehensive. It feels reassuring. It gives the illusion of control.
But to the buyer, it often sounds like noise. Especially when they’re not sure what they really need.
What they are sure of:
- Their business is growing, and their current systems can’t keep up.
- Teams are manually duplicating work across tools.
- Reporting is delayed, fragmented, or missing.
- They’ve outgrown spreadsheets but aren’t ready for an IT overhaul.
They’re not asking for feature parity. They’re asking:
“Will this system finally solve our chaos?”
And too often, they don’t get a clear answer. They get a 40-slide walkthrough of everything the software can do. No story. No throughline. No shared vision across stakeholders.
Why Visual Storytelling Wins
Here’s the truth: features don’t close deals, clarity does.
Especially in complex sales cycles, what actually moves the deal forward is a shared understanding of:
- What the current system looks like
- Where the pain is
- What will change
- And what success will look like
That understanding needs to span technical buyers, functional leaders, finance, IT, and often the CEO. It’s rare that a feature list can achieve that.
But a simple visual story can.
When AEs and solution consultants switch from feature dumping to diagramming the transformation, they shift the dynamic. They stop being vendors and become problem-solvers. Trusted guides. Translators.
Buyers don't remember what features you demoed. They remember the moment they saw their broken process mapped out in front of them, and thought:
“Finally, someone gets it.”
Selling the Why Before the What
The ERP and CRM buying journey is littered with sunk costs, false starts, and orphaned implementations. Even customers who get live often take 3 years to fully activate the features they expected from day one.
Why? Because the system was sold as a solution, but delivered as a toolkit.
The promise of transformation was real. But the path was never clear.
That clarity, that shared map, should start during the sale. And it needs to be more than a pitch deck.
It needs to be:
- A visual representation of the customer’s current state
- A concrete sequence of problems being solved
- A phased rollout that tracks to real business priorities
- A set of diagrams the buyer can take back to their team and say: “Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s why.”
That’s what makes the difference between buy-in and buyer’s remorse.
Aligning Around the Messy Middle
One of the toughest parts of ERP and CRM deals is that the pain is real, but the requirements are fuzzy.
Stakeholders often can’t articulate exactly what the current system does, or doesn’t. Priorities change mid-cycle. Implementation gets bogged down by outdated assumptions.
Sales teams often navigate this by defaulting to more features, more demos, more reassurance. But that only fuels the fog.
What works better?
Helping stakeholders tell their own story, and then shaping the solution around that.
Imagine this:
- Instead of emailing back-and-forth over requirements, you walk into a meeting with a simple diagram of their quote-to-cash flow.
- You highlight where things break down today.
- You show the future state: cleaner handoffs, fewer systems, measurable gains.
- And you explain how your product enables that, module by module, step by step.
Now, you’re not just a salesperson. You’re the architect of their future system.
The Sales Asset That Keeps Selling
ERP and CRM sales don’t stop at “closed-won.” The real friction starts after the contract is signed.
New stakeholders enter. Priorities shift. And the original vision, the one that got everyone excited, gets lost in Slack threads and PDFs.
But when that vision is captured in a clear, visual format, it travels. It sticks. It becomes the blueprint teams rally around; during onboarding, configuration, go-lives, and even post-launch expansions.
A diagram is harder to misinterpret than a paragraph. A visual flow can outlast a champion’s exit. A shared map can defuse blame when things get bumpy.
That’s why more winning sales teams are shifting toward visual, narrative-driven sales assets, not just decks and datasheets.
They’re selling transformation, not tools. And they’re showing it, not just saying it.
Bringing Product Thinking to the Sales Cycle
Here’s the irony: ERP and CRM platforms were built to bring structure to chaos. But the industry delivering them? Often runs on chaos.
Sprawling spreadsheets. Vague documentation. Ad hoc requirements. Handoff hell.
It’s no wonder customers feel burned. The process depends too much on human services and tribal knowledge, and not enough on repeatable systems.
The fix isn’t just better selling. It’s a more productized, visual approach to the entire buyer journey. One that starts with sales and carries through implementation.
That’s the shift top teams are making:
- Replacing static documents with live diagrams
- Aligning stakeholders around flows, not just features
- Building sales assets that turn into delivery blueprints
- Organizing pre-sales into repeatable, collaborative workspaces
It doesn’t just win deals. It makes them deliverable.
If you’re selling complex systems, here’s the takeaway:
Don’t just tell the story.
Show the story.
Make it visual. Make it specific. Make it easy for others to share, explain, and champion.
That’s how you break the cycle of feature dumps, failed implementations, and frustrated customers.
That’s how you sell what your product actually delivers: clarity, structure, and transformation.
And that’s how your sales process becomes part of the product.