Why €1M in Spain can feel like £20M in London

Closing a €1 million enterprise technology deal in Spain can feel like closing a £20 million deal in London. That is the sales anecdote behind this analysis, not a measured ratio, an exchange-rate comparison or a rule about either country. Its useful question is why the effort needed to win a contract can bear so little relationship to the revenue attached.

Imagine one of Spain’s largest retailers alongside a major UK bank. Both have the scale to invest heavily in technology. In this illustrative comparison, the bank has an approved transformation programme and a mandate to standardise. The retailer is still deciding whether to buy a platform or commission a tailored solution. These are hypothetical buying situations, not reports of either organisation’s purchasing behaviour. They could occur in either market; sector, regulation, deal scope and contract duration also make this an imperfect comparison.

1. Creating the budget is a different job from winning it. In the bank scenario, the seller competes for an existing programme: why this platform rather than another credible option? In the retailer scenario, the first question is whether external software deserves a budget at all. The seller must establish urgency, an economic case and an executive coalition before a vendor comparison becomes meaningful. Financial capacity does not automatically create willingness to buy.

That distinction can explain the feeling behind the headline without claiming that British buyers are easy or Spanish buyers are unsophisticated. A funded programme can still involve demanding security reviews and procurement. A smaller opportunity can require the same executive access and trust-building, plus the additional work of getting a project onto the agenda.

2. The hidden competitor may be “we can build it”. A familiar consultancy can offer a project quote, preserve existing workflows and promise a close fit with internal requirements. In this scenario, those advantages make a custom system easier to defend than a recurring software licence. The rival is not simply another product on the shortlist. It is an established way of getting work done.

There is a legitimate technical question underneath that preference. UK government guidance warns that organisations can overestimate how unique their needs are and that customisation can make purchased software harder to maintain or update. It also recognises that building can be appropriate for a core business competency, and that mixed approaches can work.[1] This is public-sector purchasing guidance, not evidence about private Spanish retailers or British banks. It supports evaluating the tradeoff, not declaring that buying is always better.

3. Control is not the same as ownership of code. A recognised platform may offer common workflows and supported upgrades; a custom system may preserve control over specialised processes. Either can create dependency. A software vendor can lock a buyer into commercial terms or difficult data migration. A consultancy-built system can leave the buyer dependent on the people who understand it. Ask who can maintain, change and replace the system, not just whose logo appears on the contract.

4. Career risk can outweigh a feature comparison. In the hypothetical retailer deal, choosing a known partner may feel safer to an executive than sponsoring a large new platform. A seller then needs more than a convincing demo. The decision must be defensible to finance, IT, procurement and the business owner. A phased rollout, clear responsibilities and agreed success criteria can make the commitment easier to evaluate without pretending to eliminate risk.

5. Buying habits can shape what founders build. Consider a possible reinforcing cycle: corporates commission bespoke work, services firms gain revenue and relationships, and engineers see a credible route to starting another consultancy. A product company must instead finance reusable software and persuade early customers to adopt it. This is an ecosystem hypothesis, not a demonstrated explanation of Spain’s startup market. Consulting can also fund product development, and product vendors often depend on implementation partners.

6. Investment incentives matter, but they do not prove the sales story. HMRC documents income-tax relief for qualifying EIS and SEIS investments and relief for eligible capital losses against income. Its EIS guidance explains that an eligible loss is reduced by income-tax relief already given.[2] These schemes can change an investor’s financial exposure, subject to company, investor and holding-period conditions. They do not make startup investment risk-free.

Spain also offers investment incentives. The Spanish Tax Agency’s 2025 income-tax guidance describes a 50% deduction for qualifying subscriptions in new or recently created companies, with a maximum annual deduction base of €100,000. Eligibility includes conditions on the company, shareholding and holding period.[3] That is a dated description of the cited rules, not personal tax advice or a complete comparison of the two countries. Neither source establishes that tax incentives cause one corporate buyer to prefer SaaS and another to prefer consulting.

For an enterprise account executive, start by diagnosing the buying task. Is there an approved budget, or only interest? Who owns the business problem? Is the real alternative a competing vendor, an internal team, a consulting project or doing nothing? If the account is still debating whether to buy, another feature comparison is unlikely to resolve the disagreement.

Then compare the full economics over a shared horizon, such as five years. Include implementation, licences, staffing, maintenance, integrations, security work, upgrades and exit costs on both sides. Do not hide the vendor’s own integration burden or renewal risk. Ask the customer to validate assumptions and distinguish committed costs from estimates. The goal is a decision-quality comparison, not a spreadsheet engineered to make the platform win.

Bring executives, finance, IT, procurement and business owners into the case early. Show how governance and configuration can preserve necessary control, and where a standard product really would impose a compromise. Use permissioned, relevant peer references privately rather than publishing customer identities. Consider whether the existing consultancy could become a delivery partner instead of treating every relationship as an obstacle.

Scope and sources: this article adapts a supplied enterprise-sales perspective, not an independently verified interview or a statistical study. The opening deal values are illustrative; no customer identities, deal records or confidential procurement details are published. The linked documents support the build-versus-buy discussion and the stated tax rules, not a country-level ranking of sales difficulty. The commercial and ecosystem arguments remain hypotheses to test account by account.