Most finance teams file software under expenses. It sits in the budget next to office supplies and travel, and the goal with an expense is simple. Spend as little as you can.
That framing quietly shapes how software gets bought. The license fee becomes the number everyone watches, and the cheapest option that checks the boxes looks like the responsible choice.
The right software is an investment, though, and investments are judged by what they return. In software, that return comes from one place. The people on your team using it every day.
Unused software is the most expensive kind
When software doesn't pay off, the problem is rarely the technology. It's that people don't use it. Pendo's Feature Adoption Report found that 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. Zylo, which tracks enterprise software spending, reports that the average organization uses only about half of the licenses it pays for and loses nearly $20 million a year to unused ones.
An unused platform is the worst investment you can make. You pay full price and still do the work the old way. A platform your team opens every morning is the opposite. Every search, every analysis and every logged call adds to the return.
That changes the question worth asking during an evaluation. "What does it cost?" matters far less than "Which platform will be so indispensable to my teams that they want to use it daily?"
What gets in the way of daily use
A few common habits work against that, often without anyone noticing.
The people choosing aren't the people using. When a tool is picked for a team instead of by it, it fits how someone imagines the work. People drift back to their spreadsheets.
Price decides too early. Once cost is on the table, it tends to settle the decision, even when the gap is small next to the return at stake.
Promises get scored like products. In a sales cycle, "coming soon" costs a vendor nothing to say. Some of those features have a real date on a real roadmap. Others haven't been planned at all. Either way, your team can't use them today, and the hours they were supposed to save don't come back. Ask what's live now, what's scheduled and when, and what's still just an idea.
Launch gets treated as the finish line. Logins go out, a training happens, and the vendor moves on to the next account. Daily use, which is where the return comes from, is left to chance.
What investment-minded buyers look for
They let the people doing the work define the requirements, then keep pricing out of the room until the team has picked the tool it would actually use. They give more weight to what works today than to what's promised. They look for software simple enough to use without a manual. They plan configuration and training before anyone logs in. And they choose a vendor that will partner with them for the long haul. They will still be tracking usage, prioritizing feature requests, and helping their team long after the contract is signed.
Another key thing component investment-minded buyers look for: speed of innovation. Is the team investing heavily in continuing to optimize and accelerate their offering? Or are they focused on playing catch-up with other providers in their space.
None of this is about spending less. Often it means paying more for the vendor most likely to earn the return and then some.
The ROI of land acquisition software
Few industries make the return on software easier to see than land acquisition.
Land is one of the largest checks a homebuilder writes. M/I Homes spent about $1.17 billion on land in 2025. Across the industry, the finished lot made up 13.7% of the average new home's sales price in 2024, according to NAHB.
At that scale, small gains turn into large numbers. During our recent webinar with M/I, Prophetic founder and CEO Oliver Alexander walked through the math. One more acquisition per division per year, or a land team that works 20% more efficiently, adds up fast across 17 divisions. "We're talking eight or nine figures of ROI here," he said.
“I think that’s really what M/I was looking for from day one is saying we’re not buying software, we’re buying an outcome. And where is that outcome most likely to be achieved?” – Valerie Mangum
The time math is just as clear. Land teams often spend about 80% of their time on legwork, like finding parcels, checking zoning and updating spreadsheets, and 20% talking to landowners. Software that flips that ratio moves the team's hours to where deals get made, because the landowner conversation is the one part of the job AI can't do.
Prophetic customers see that return show up quickly.
- City Homes had worked one market for 15 years and guessed 150 lots were available. Prophetic found 364. "It was crazy how confidently misinformed we were," said CFO Jimmy Bagley.
- Legacy Home Builders acquisitions analyst Andrew Byrd closed 10 to 15 off-market deals in his first quarter on Prophetic. That's roughly $15 million in acquisition value and more than $50 million in projected value once built.
- Pahlisch Homes land acquisition manager Keith Caylor put it simply. "What used to take hours of research now takes minutes."
Daily use is where the return is earned
Every one of those results depends on people using the platform every day. M/I Homes built its rollout around that.
The evaluation started with the users. A committee of land leaders wrote the requirements, and pricing stayed out of the committee room. Prophetic wasn't the lowest-priced option M/I considered, but it was ready. "The other vendors were telling us what they could do," said Valerie Mangum, Director of ERP at M/I Homes. "Prophetic was ready. That's the differentiator."
Then M/I planned for daily use before launch. The committee agreed on pipeline stages, tags and required tasks so every division would work the same way. Divisions trained together on-site. Land teams went first, and executives waited until there was real activity for them to see. The day after training, M/I's Chicago team had already entered more than 40 deals.
Key M/I divisions now see daily use above 100%, because people keep working on weekends and from the field. Across Prophetic's enterprise customers, daily use runs at 95.3%.
Valerie still keeps an eye on it. "The key is that they want to use it and they are using it," she said. "I want to make sure they don't stop using it."
Prophetic's team keeps watching too. Client services meets monthly with every M/I division to review usage and find where teams can get more from the platform. Support tickets are answered in under two hours on average, and live chat in under four minutes. When help comes that fast, people keep using the tool instead of working around it.
Five questions to ask before you invest
Whatever kind of software you're evaluating, these questions help you find the vendor that will deliver the biggest return.
- What return are we expecting? Put it in your team's terms, like hours back each week, deals evaluated each month, or acquisitions added each year.
- What will get our team using it every day? Look at how simple it is, how it will be configured, how training will work, and what ongoing support looks like.
- What can it do today? Ask to see your own requirements working on your own data.
- Who chose it? The people who will use it every day should shape the decision, ideally before price enters the conversation.
- What happens after the contract? Ask who will track usage with you, how often they'll check in, and how fast support responds.
Treat it like an investment
The license fee is the easiest number to see, which is why it gets so much attention. The return is much larger, and it depends on something no price sheet shows. Whether your team opens the platform tomorrow morning, and the morning after that.
Choose the vendor most likely to make that happen.
Watch the full M/I Homes webinar to hear directly how one builder did it, or book a demo to see what Prophetic can do in your market.
