Every time I step out of a hot shower, I think to myself, “Can you believe I just did that?” For me, that comes from spending quite a few years of my life with no hot water.
Here’s the thing, though—it is remarkable. You turn a handle, and within thirty seconds, perfectly heated water rains down on you from above. For as long as you want. In your own home.
A hundred years ago, that was a privilege reserved for the genuinely wealthy. The kind of wealthy that had servants and estates. The average person? A weekly bath. Cold, shared water. If you were lucky, someone heated it on the stove first. The idea that a working-class person in 2025 has daily access to something that robber barons in 1920 considered a luxury is, honestly, extraordinary.
But here’s the human condition: we forget.
We forget because the baseline shifts. We forget because we spend more time scrolling headlines about what’s broken than reflecting on what works. We look at the world and see war, poverty, disease, and division—and we conclude that things are terrible, maybe the worst they’ve ever been.
Except they’re not. Not even close.
By nearly every measurable standard—global poverty, child mortality, access to clean water, literacy rates, life expectancy—we are living in the most prosperous, safest, healthiest era in all of recorded human history. The data isn’t subtle. It’s overwhelming. But we don’t feel that way, because we aren’t comparing our reality to what came before. We’re comparing it to a version of the world that has never existed.
And your prospects are doing the exact same thing to your proposal.
The Imaginary Competitor You’ll Never Beat
There’s a moment in almost every sales cycle where you lose the deal to something that isn’t real.
It’s not a competitor with a better product. It’s not a lower price down the street. It’s the prospect’s mental image of what the perfect solution would look like—built from the best features they’ve ever seen across every vendor they’ve ever talked to, priced the way they wish things were priced, delivered on a timeline that doesn’t exist, with a support team that never sleeps.
You are not being compared to your competition. You are being compared to a fantasy.
And the brutal part? No one can win that comparison. Not you. Not your competitor. Not anyone. Because that solution doesn’t exist.
When a prospect says, “We’re going to keep looking,” they often aren’t looking for something better. They’re chasing a feeling—the feeling that the perfect answer is still out there, just around the next demo, just one more RFP away. It’s the purchasing equivalent of waiting for a perfect moment that never comes.
Your Job Is to Reset the Frame
This is one of the most underrated skills in sales: helping prospects compare your proposal to reality, not to perfection.
The prospect who hesitates isn’t always greedy or indecisive. They’re often just measuring your offering against a mental model that can’t be built, bought, or budgeted. Your job isn’t to outbid the imaginary competitor. Your job is to make the imaginary competitor visible—and then help the prospect see it for what it is.
That’s a conversation, not a pitch.
Try something like this:
“Help me understand what the ideal solution would look like for you. Walk me through it.”
Then listen. Because somewhere in what they describe, you’ll find the fantasy. You’ll hear features from three different vendors blended into one. You’ll hear price expectations that reflect a market that doesn’t exist. You’ll hear timeline assumptions based on a team that hasn’t been assembled yet.
That’s your opening.
“I appreciate you walking me through that. A few of those things—[X and Y]—I want to be transparent, I haven’t seen anyone in the market deliver that combination at that investment level. Who have you seen do that?”
Often, the answer is silence. Or, “Well, nobody yet, but…”
There’s your moment. Not to pounce—to problem-solve together.
“So the real comparison isn’t us versus some other vendor. It’s us versus waiting for something that may not come. What does that cost you in the meantime?”
Real Options vs. Theoretical Ones
The hot shower analogy isn’t just a fun history lesson. It’s a thinking framework.
When we evaluate quality of life, we should compare our reality to the actual available alternatives—not to some idealized world where every problem is solved and nothing costs anything. The person who refuses to appreciate modern medicine because hospitals aren’t perfect yet is going to spend their life miserable and ungrateful for something genuinely extraordinary.
Your prospect who won’t move forward because your solution isn’t perfect is doing the same thing. They’re so focused on a ceiling that doesn’t exist that they’re ignoring a floor that’s pretty remarkable.
The question to get them asking themselves: “Compared to what?”
- Compared to waiting another 6 months while the problem continues?
- Compared to the competitor who has a lower price but also 60-day implementation timelines?
- Compared to doing nothing, which is always a decision with its own cost?
When the comparison is “us vs. a fantasy,” you lose every time. When the comparison is “us vs. the actual alternatives in the real world,” the conversation changes completely.
Let’s Get Practical
Here are three ways to bring this into your next sales conversation:
1. Name the fantasy out loud. Ask your prospect to describe their ideal solution in detail. Then gently ask who provides it. This isn’t confrontational—it’s collaborative. You’re helping them discover the gap between their expectations and the market together, rather than letting them discover it on their own after they’ve walked away from you.
2. Anchor to the real cost of waiting. Prospects who are chasing perfection often underweight the cost of delay. If their current situation is painful, every month they spend looking for the perfect answer is a month the pain continues. Make that cost explicit and specific. “What does another quarter of [problem] cost you in revenue/time/morale?”
3. Redefine “the best option.” The best option isn’t the one closest to perfect. The best option is the one that solves the problem better than any real, available, deployable alternative. Help your prospect build a decision framework anchored in what actually exists—not in what they wish existed.
The world is better than the headlines suggest. And your proposal is better than the fantasy it’s being compared to.
Your job is to help your prospect see both of those things clearly.
Not by arguing. Not by pressuring. By asking the right questions and letting reality make your case for you.