Almost every Sales Director we speak to asks the same first question: “What’s the ROI if we work with you?”
It’s a fair question, but there’s a more important question they should ask before it: “What is it already costing us to do nothing?”
We call this the cost of inaction.
What is the difference between ROI and Cost of Inaction?
Return on Investment (ROI) looks forward. It’s a projection – useful for building a business case or justifying spend to a CFO, but ultimately a number that describes a future that hasn’t happened yet.
The Cost of Inaction (COI) is different because it’s already here. While you’re waiting for the right moment to act, deals aren’t getting done, qualified prospects are going uncalled and your sales team is spending time on cold contacts and admin that should be going on conversations that convert.
None of that shows up anywhere on a dashboard – it just shows up six months later when you’re explaining a soft quarter, or 12 months later when you find out a deal you should have won closed for a competitor instead.
That gap between where your pipeline is and where it needs to be has a cost. Most sales leaders know the gap is there. Few have sat down and worked out what it’s actually worth.
Summary
Most sales leaders ask about ROI before asking the more important question: what is it already costing you to do nothing?
ROI describes a future that hasn’t happened yet. The Cost of Inaction is already here – every week your pipeline sits below where it needs to be, qualified prospects are going uncalled and deals are closing for competitors instead of you.
In the GRC sector, organisations are navigating more than 250 regulatory changes per day. Budgets are being released and decision-makers are actively evaluating solutions.
A sales leader carrying a £2 million target who misses it by 25% has lost £500,000 in unrealised revenue. If 30% of their time is going on prospecting rather than selling, that’s around £3,000 a day pointed in the wrong direction.
The question is how much it’s already cost you to wait.
Why is now a particularly important time for GRC technology vendors?
The regulatory environment is driving genuine buyer urgency across the GRC sector right now. Organisations are navigating more than 250 regulatory changes per day according to recent industry analysis – a pace that compliance teams simply can’t keep up with manually. Financial crime legislation, data privacy frameworks, ESG governance requirements – budgets are being released to address all of it, and decision-makers are actively evaluating solutions, not just researching them.
That matters because motivated buyers move fast. By the time you’re in front of someone who has already had three conversations with competitors, the shortlist is effectively written – you’re not being evaluated, you’re being compared against a benchmark you had no control in setting. In a market where regulatory pressure is creating genuine buying windows, timing is part of the product.
How do you actually calculate the Cost of Inaction?
Start with your revenue target and work backwards.
Take a sales leader carrying a £2 million annual target. If they miss that by 25%, that’s £500,000 in unrealised revenue – roughly £10,000 for every working day of the year.
Now ask how much of their time is going on prospecting rather than selling. If it’s 30%, you’re looking at around £3,000 a day in revenue-generating capacity that isn’t generating revenue – and that’s before you factor in the deals that simply never entered the pipeline at all.
In the GRC space, where individual contract values regularly run to six figures, a few missed conversations a month adds up to a material number fast.
The commercial case for bringing in a specialist agency to handle appointment setting gets a lot clearer once you’ve done that sum honestly.
Why do sales leaders still hold off, even when the case is clear?
A few objections come up in almost every conversation we have.
Bad experiences with other agencies
It’s the most common one, and it’s entirely understandable. An agency that delivered outdated contacts, booked meetings with people who had no authority or budget, and left your sales team chasing leads that were never going to go anywhere. Beyond the wasted spend, there’s the credibility hit internally, the demoralised sales team and the harder business case next time around because someone will remember the last one.
The lesson isn’t to stop outsourcing – it’s to stop outsourcing to agencies that don’t know the difference between a compliance budget holder and a general IT manager. That distinction is exactly what 18 years working exclusively in GRC gives you.
"Gungho is very focused on the industry, and you understand the challenges, pains and problems in detail – someone who is calling every other industry in the world and then suddenly coming to RegTech just can't do that. It's a mixture of the senior people as well as understanding the industry that really helped."
Building an internal SDR team instead
The appeal is obvious – your own people, direct management, full control. What tends to be underestimated is how long it actually takes. Hiring alone is months. Then onboarding, product training, data build, script development and a ramp period before anyone is producing at the level you need. After all of that, SDR attrition – consistently among the highest of any role in a sales organisation – means a significant number of businesses are effectively starting again within a year.
There’s a time and a scale at which building internally makes sense. If your pipeline needs feeding now, it’s usually the most expensive and slowest route to get there. The average tenure of a Business Discovery Agent (BDA) at Gungho (our term for an SDR) is 2.4 years. Industry data puts the average SDR tenure at around 14 months, with more than half not lasting a year. The people calling on your behalf aren’t learning on the job; they’ve been doing this for years.
"The benefits of using Gungho are that you don't have to wait for a lead time and a ramp-up – they are ready to go as soon as your campaign starts, and you will see results instantly."
Waiting for the right moment
“After the board review.” “Once the new CRO is settled.” “When Q3 budget confirms.” The reasons are always specific and always sound sensible. The problem is that the pipeline gap doesn’t wait with you – it gets wider. And the business case you were waiting to make in better conditions becomes harder to make, not easier, because the hole is larger and the pressure to show fast results is higher.
So should you be thinking about ROI or Cost of Inaction?
ROI and COI do different jobs. ROI validates a decision once you’ve made it. The Cost of Inaction is the reason to make it.
Before you ask what you’ll get if this works, ask what you’re already losing because you haven’t started. If your pipeline is thin, the deals that should be in it aren’t there by accident. If buyers in your target market are signing with competitors while you’re still building your outreach strategy, that cost is real and it’s already in the numbers – most sales leaders just haven’t added it up yet.
"Within 12 months we took that customer from £100,000 spend to a £1.1 million spend, and within 3 years we had gone from £1.1 million to £3 million just by going through that process."
Gungho generates over 500 qualified appointments per month for GRC technology vendors, drawing on a database of 800,000+ risk and compliance professionals worldwide.
If your pipeline isn't where it needs to be
Questions we get asked
Isn't the Cost of Inaction just another way of creating urgency?
If your pipeline is below where it needs to be, the revenue impact is already there – it’s just distributed across future quarters rather than visible on today’s dashboard. You’ll see it eventually, but the question is whether you see it in time to do something about it.
We've had bad experiences with lead generation agencies before. Why would this be different?
Most of the time the problem wasn’t outsourcing itself – it was outsourcing to an agency without the sector knowledge to do it properly. GRC technology buyers have distinct buying criteria and a well-developed radar for callers who don’t understand their world – and they can tell within seconds of a call. Gungho works exclusively in this market, and that makes all the difference.
Why wouldn't we just build our own SDR team?
You might, eventually. But if your pipeline needs filling now, the internal build route can take 6–12 months to reach full performance – and that’s before accounting for the attrition that restarts the cycle. Every Gungho BDA goes through a two-week GRC specific training academy when they join, with individual coaching for 14 weeks during their probation, and ongoing coaching after that. They arrive on your campaign knowing the sector. You’re not paying for them to find their feet.
What kind of results do your clients actually see?
It varies hugely depending on the nature of the campaign, the market being targeted and the product being sold. But to give you a sense of what’s possible – LexisNexis has a 45% opportunity rating from Gungho-set appointments. AuthenticID saw a 20% increase in their opportunity pipeline after working with us. And some clients have built multi-million pound revenue streams from campaigns we’ve run for them.
“We found that Gungho delivered more meetings than our internal SDR resources, approximately double the number of appointments, especially when reaching out to brand-new prospects. Unlike our SDRs, who often work with warmer leads, Gungho successfully engaged cold audiences, which shows their expertise in navigating fresh, untested segments.”
Marcella Janmaat, Senior Director of International Marketing, Global Nexis Solutions, LexisNexis
“Gungho are our sole source of generating leads or getting a meeting. Our work with you is imperative.”
Senior Vice President, Silent Eight
About the Author:
Harry Whitewood, Head of Business Development
Harry Whitewood is the Head of Business Development at Gungho. He joined early in 2025 bringing a background in business development and recruitment, and now leads the sales team connecting GRC and RegTech vendors with the right opportunities. He works day-to-day with the kinds of sales leaders this article is written for and understands their challenges and pain points better than most.
