They Chose the Cheaper ERP. Twenty-One Months Later, They Chose Again.

Twenty-one months.

That’s how long it took for our newest customer to come on board.

I could tell that story like it was some brilliant long-term sales strategy, like we knew exactly what would happen and patiently waited for the market to prove us right.

That wouldn’t be true.

The truth is, when they picked somebody else, I didn’t understand it. They had told us what they needed. We showed them what they asked for, and I believed we gave them that plus a lot more. Still, they chose another system.

Twenty-one months later, they came back. By then, the question wasn’t whether one ERP cost about $30 less per user. It was what that $30 had actually bought, what it had failed to buy, and how much work the company had rebuilt around it.

This is a story about software, but it’s really a story about how we measure cost.

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The Demo I Lost

I met this company shortly after I joined ERP.Aero. I’m going to leave the company name out of it, because the lesson is bigger than the logo.

They were a very good fit for us. They’re primarily a supplier. About 40% of their transactions are brokered. The other 60% combines distribution and inventory, some stocked, some moving through catalogs. Their system has to understand inventory when they own it, sourcing when they don’t, and the handoff between the two.

They were having issues with their provider. They needed something more efficient, something that could grow with them. So we did a demo. Then another. They asked for a sandbox, and we gave them one. We walked through the workflows and answered their questions.

Then they didn’t pick us.

I knew we weren’t going to win every deal. Nobody does. But this one bothered me because the match seemed obvious. They wanted X. I believed we had shown them X, plus the connected work before it, after it, and around it.

What I didn’t understand then was that they weren’t comparing the full operating cost. They were comparing the number that was easiest to see.

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Twenty-One Months Later, One Sentence Changed Everything

Fast forward to MRO Americas in Orlando.

I ran into someone from the company at the convention center or the hotel where the show was being held. We started talking, and the first meaningful thing he said to me was this:

That’s a satisfying sentence to hear. I’m human. Of course it is. But it also carries weight, because nobody says that after a software decision unless something happened between the promise and the daily work.

We went our separate ways that day. The next day, around midday, we crossed paths again and sat down. He started asking, “Can you show me this again? Can you remind me how you do that?”

So I did. Top to bottom. Their VP of Sales was there, along with someone who works between sales and operations. I wanted their warehouse person in the conversation too, because the warehouse is where a lot of impressive sales-demo language either becomes real or falls apart. They were tied up at the time, so we kept going with the team we had.

After the show, we went back and forth. Then we held a larger demo with more people from their company. We covered what ERP.Aero could do when they first saw us, and everything it had become in the 21 months since.

Another aviation operator described that kind of second look almost perfectly:

The customer in front of us was ready to move. That’s exactly when I slowed the conversation down.

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The $30 a User Savings That Wasn’t

Before we talked about starting, I asked the question I should have asked more directly 21 months earlier: Why didn’t you pick us the first time?

He could have given me a polite answer. He could have blamed timing, implementation, internal politics, or one feature that wasn’t ready. Instead, he said:

Our price is pretty damn good, if I can say that myself. Implementation includes training. It includes data migration. It includes getting the team ready to use the system, not just giving them logins and wishing them luck.

But they were buying roughly 14 or 15 licenses, and the other provider came in about $30 less per user. On a spreadsheet, that’s an easy comparison. One number is lower. Decision made.

Except the subscription price wasn’t the cost of the operating model. It was only the cost of admission.

I’m not saying price doesn’t matter. Of course it does. A company should understand every implementation dollar, user fee, integration charge, and obligation behind the proposal. But the comparison has to be honest. If one price includes the work required to operate and the other creates three more bills after signing, those aren’t equivalent offers. A lower number can still produce the more expensive decision.

Another brokerage team that also came on board recently put the danger plainly:

That team eventually timed real POs, multiline sales orders, and exchanges. The replacement was slower. That’s the test. Not how slick the screen looks or how good the story sounds. Put real work through it and see what your people still have to do when the demo is over.

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Software Doesn’t Get Cheaper When You Rebuild the Missing Parts

The system they chose is slick. It talks a very good game. For a two- or three-person shop, I can see why it may feel like a dream. It can digitize the workflow those people already have.

But digitizing a workflow isn’t the same as transforming the company.

After they signed, they needed a second service to collect RFQs so their people wouldn’t have to copy and paste everything manually. Their real documents remained scattered across two online storage systems. Now the “less expensive” ERP had another RFQ bill, multiple document repositories, and the human work required to hold everything together.

This was the pattern pattern:

That’s what most software comparisons miss. A second tool solves one missing piece. A document platform solves another. A spreadsheet closes the gap nobody planned for. Then your people become the integration layer. They remember where the document lives, which RFQ was copied, which vendor replied, which record is current, and what has to be entered again.

More software isn’t automatically more capability. Sometimes it’s just more places for the work to hide.

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Before We Said Yes Again, I Put On the Brakes

When they came back ready to move, I didn’t want a decision based on the emotion of being disappointed by the other system. That might feel good in the moment, but it’s a terrible foundation for an ERP implementation.

So we went back through the work.

We walked the actual chain: an RFQ arrives, vendor replies populate the transaction, and supplier performance and approval history stay connected to the purchasing decision. The point wasn’t a score on a screen. It was less re-entry, better evidence, and a controlled decision about who to buy from.

When price and lead time are close, the system should show why one vendor is the safer choice, not leave that knowledge in somebody’s head.

They described the sourcing problem this way:

That’s why the second decision felt different. They weren’t buying a promise to make software look easier. They were looking at the work that needed to disappear: RFQ entry, vendor quote entry, document hunting, disconnected follow-up, and repeated data movement.

We weren’t asking them to believe a category claim. We were walking the transaction.

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What They Got This Time, and What I Learned

They signed with ERP.Aero while they still had two months left on the other contract. So yes, they’re paying two software bills right now. That isn’t ideal, but sometimes the cheapest move is to stop extending the wrong one.

They already have a full data migration. Their team members have each been trained at least twice. Their RFQs and vendor quotes can be converted into the ERP through the automated workflow. And they have started using our new vendor-scoring and automated reapproval capability.

A real migration isn’t just copying tables. The company has to find its history, trust what moved, train its people, and handle the first unusual transaction. The normal quote is easy. The brokered line, catalog item, old document, or vendor response in a strange format is where implementation becomes operational.

For the price of admission, they didn’t get another login. They got the migration, the training, and the connected operating workflow they thought they were saving money around the first time.

Changing direction can be expensive, especially after a contract is signed. But sometime you have to do what you have to do:

When teams think seriously about migration, they don’t ask only for part numbers and open orders. They want their operating history, because the new system has to move the company forward without erasing how it got there.

I wish every story looked this clean in hindsight. They don’t. In the moment, losing this deal didn’t feel like the first chapter of a good customer story. It felt like losing a deal we should have won.

I’m old enough, and hopefully still humble enough, to admit that I don’t know everything. Maybe they needed to make that first decision to understand the second one. Maybe we needed those 21 months to build more, prove more, and be ready for the company they were becoming.

There’s a lesson for us too: help the buyer see the operating model behind the number, including what is manual, what needs another tool, and who owns the data and training.

What I do know is this: price is what you pay for the software. Cost is every person, workaround, extra subscription, missing document, copied RFQ, delayed vendor response, and disconnected decision the software leaves behind.

The number on the proposal matters.

The work after the proposal matters more.

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I’m grateful for the customers who tell us the truth, even when it takes 21 months to hear it. I’m grateful for the team that kept building, improving, and proving what ERP.Aero could become during that time. And I’m grateful to work in an industry where trust, operational knowledge, and honest conversations still matter.

We don’t win every decision the first time. We just keep listening, keep building, and keep doing the work.

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