"This costs more than what we pay now."
Is that compared to your current bill, or to what you expect to pay at renewal with growth?
Do not invent savings. Do not compare to a competitor's price you have not seen.
The objections, discovery questions and competitor answers that come up when you sell observability. Read them free. Or load them into Ghost and have the right one on your screen the moment the buyer says it.
What Ghost shows on your screen during a observability call. The buyer never sees it.
The objections observability buyers raise most, what to say in the next ten seconds, and what not to promise.
"This costs more than what we pay now."
Is that compared to your current bill, or to what you expect to pay at renewal with growth?
Do not invent savings. Do not compare to a competitor's price you have not seen.
"Re-instrumenting everything would take forever."
How are you instrumented today: vendor agents, OpenTelemetry, or a mix?
Do not call a migration easy. Running two tools in parallel costs time and money.
"We run our own open source stack."
Who keeps it running, and how much of their week does that take?
Do not dismiss open source. Many buyers care about it deeply and some of the best engineers on the call maintain it.
"We are too busy to evaluate a new tool right now."
What would make this worth the time: a renewal, an incident, or a new platform project?
Do not push a trial on a team that has no time to run it. It will fail and count against you.
"Security will not let telemetry leave our network."
What does your security team need to see about how data is collected, filtered and stored?
Do not claim certifications or regions you do not have. Do not say data scrubbing is automatic for every case.
"We already have Datadog and everyone knows it."
What do people like about it, and what would have to be true for you to look at something else?
Never run down the incumbent. Do not ask them to rip it out on day one.
Every one of these is a deal that slips a quarter if you fumble it. Ghost puts the answer on your screen while the buyer is still talking.
Give them credit, then ask whether that vendor's strength matters to this buyer.
Datadog is known for broad coverage and a product engineers like to use. How much does cost predictability matter to you at your scale?
Dynatrace is known for automatic discovery and AI-assisted root cause analysis in large enterprises. How hands-on do your engineers want to be?
New Relic has a long history in APM and a broad platform. How does its pricing model fit the way your team works?
Splunk is known for powerful log search and security analytics. Is your main need log analysis, or full application observability?
Grafana is loved for open source dashboards and flexibility. Do you want to run the stack yourselves, or have someone else run it?
Elastic is known for search and log analytics, often already in place for other uses. Is the team running it today also the one who would own observability?
Honeycomb is known for high-cardinality event analysis and a strong debugging workflow. How much do your engineers want to explore data versus follow dashboards?
Chronosphere is known for helping large cloud-native teams control metrics volume and cost. Is data volume your biggest problem today?
Sumo Logic is known for cloud-native log analytics and security use cases. Is logging the main need, or broader observability?
AppDynamics is known for business transaction monitoring in large enterprises. How are you thinking about it alongside Cisco's other observability products?
CloudWatch is already built into AWS and easy to start with. How much of your estate lives outside AWS?
Ask these on the first call. Then dig into the pain when they say it out loud.
Observability tools collect telemetry from applications and infrastructure: metrics, logs, traces, events and profiles. Engineers use them to see what is happening in production, get alerted when something breaks, and find the cause quickly. APM (application performance monitoring) is the older name for the part that follows requests through application code.
The most common are: "This costs more than what we pay now", "Re-instrumenting everything would take forever", "We run our own open source stack", "We are too busy to evaluate a new tool right now", "Security will not let telemetry leave our network" and "We already have Datadog and everyone knows it". Each one above has a line to say back and what to avoid.
Start with: What tools do you use for metrics, logs and traces today, and which one do people actually open during an incident? How did you find out about it, and how long did it take to figure out what was wrong? When incidents drag on, what does it cost you in customers, revenue or engineer time? Is there a renewal date, a migration or a deadline driving this?
Buyers most often compare Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk, Grafana Labs, Elastic, Honeycomb, Chronosphere, Sumo Logic, AppDynamics and Amazon CloudWatch.
Economic buyer: VP Engineering, CTO or CIO. In large companies, a platform or infrastructure leader owns the tooling budget.
Pick the observability market pack in Ghost's setup and every card on this page loads into Ghost. When a buyer raises one of these objections or names one of these competitors on a live call, Ghost shows you what to say on your screen, hidden from screen shares and recordings.
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