Every sales leader eventually hears some version of this: “We built it in-house. It works perfectly.”
Arguing that their solution is worse usually makes the prospect defend it harder. I’ve started coaching reps to use two questions instead. They work because they move the conversation somewhere the prospect hasn’t prepared for, without asking them to admit anything.
The first question is “What’s next for you guys?”
I don’t dispute that the system works. I ask what they plan to build or change over the next year. That shifts the conversation from the tool they have today to the work they haven’t done yet. Internal systems are usually built for the problem as it looked when the team first built them. The prospect often knows where the gaps are, and this question gives them room to name those gaps themselves.
The second question is “How do you keep yourself busy?”
This one surfaces the hidden cost. A team with a perfect internal solution still has to maintain it, fix it when it breaks, and train new people on it. Asking about their week rather than the tool gets them to describe that load in their own words. For example, a prospect might mention a spreadsheet someone updates every Monday, or a report that only one person knows how to run. Neither comes up when you ask about features.
Those two questions open the door. Two more keep it open.
The first is cost attribution. I ask who pays for the build and the upkeep, and whether anyone tracks that cost against the revenue the system supports. Many teams have never put a number on it. That is useful to learn, and it is nearly impossible to get out of an email thread.
The second is scalability. I ask what happens to the system if headcount doubles, if they enter a new market, or if data volume grows tenfold. Often the honest answer is that nobody has tested it.
Here is why this matters. A prospect can read a case study or a pricing page in five minutes. They cannot read their own maintenance backlog, their own cost structure, or their own growth plan in a case study. Those things come out only in a live conversation, when someone asks the right question and waits for the answer.
So the goal is not to win the argument about build versus buy. The goal is to show the prospect that the evaluation they need to do can’t be handled by sending over a deck. They need a proper conversation to make the decision well, and that conversation is the next step.
In practice, I keep the tone curious rather than combative. If they’ve built something good, I say so. Then I ask what’s next. If they go quiet, I ask how they keep the thing running. And I write down the specifics of their answers, because those details tell me what to offer next.