We lost a $3k/mo deal to a Google Sheet. How do you sell against spreadsheets?

I just got off a brutal call with a prospect we’ve been courting for six weeks. They are a mid-sized logistics company, exactly our ideal customer profile. We did the demo, they loved the UI, and the VP of Ops said our automated reporting would save his team hours every week.

Then he asked about the price. When I quoted our standard $3,000/month plan, he went quiet.

An hour later, he emailed me saying they decided to pass. They are going to keep using the Excel spreadsheet their intern built three years ago.

I was shocked. Our product solves the exact pain point they complained about. But when I dug deeper, the reality hit me: their current spreadsheet is "good enough." It’s a mess of broken macros and manual data entry, but it costs them $0 in software spend and they already know how to use it. The friction of learning our tool and migrating their data (plus the $36k annual price tag) outweighed the pain of the spreadsheet.

I realize I’ve been pitching features and time savings, but I haven’t been pitching the cost of their inefficiency hard enough.

For those who sell B2B SaaS: How do you build a business case that beats the "free" spreadsheet?

Do you focus on the risk of human error, the hidden labor costs, or do you offer a migration service to make the switch frictionless? I need to figure out how to make the status quo feel more expensive than our software.