“We don’t have the budget.”
“It’s going to have to wait until the new fiscal year.”
“We’re not at the stage where we can afford that.”
You’ll eventually hear all the financial reasons why a company doesn’t plan to buy the thing that you know they need. These responses aren’t the end, however. And they’re not terrible.
Most companies don’t know what they “must” spend. They only go off of what they know. You don’t KNOW you need bottled water at a restaurant in certain foreign countries until you find out the hard way. Then you suddenly “have” the budget for it.
If you tell a company or client that they need a piece of hardware and they don’t have the budget, then you have to show them one or two things: 1) what the cost benefit is of buying the item 2) what the cost or risk is of not buying the item.
A purchase should either make money for a company or save money, or both. It’s very easy to not have the funds. But it’s not easy to quantify the risk of avoiding or delaying the purchase. That’s where you have to look a comparative risk. These are rarely absolutes.
examples using made-up statistics:
It’s “better” to get the redundant hard drive array rather than a single drive.
The single drive costs less than the RAID.
You can buy 2.5 single drives for the cost of the RAID.
The cost of the company being down if the single drive fails is $3,250 based on payroll and billing rates.
The cost of the RAID reduces the likelihood of the drive failure by 8 times.
Once a decision-maker is armed with these kinds of facts, they can decide if they want to earmark funds. It’s very, very rare that a small business truly “doesn’t” have the money. There was no money for the Department of Homeland Security. Then 9/11 happened. Then suddenly there were funds available.
Your business (or your customer’s business) should be able to allocate funds for critical purchases, and hopefully without having to suffer a major loss.