Ah, the good old days... when you could sell using a list of all the great features in your solution and a few benefits sprinkled here and there. The economy was good and it was easy to get a signature on a purchase contract doing little more than offering “saved effort” or “increased throughput.”
Nothing better makes the case for change in front of decision makers than showing the red ink on your buyer’s bottom line. A value calculator is a highly effective tool for displaying all of that red and identifying that it’s caused by a problem your product or service can solve.
Because an assessment tool is so engaging, it can be used at every step of the sales process. Essentially, an assessment tool is a versatile tool that can be designed to evaluate specific situations and guide the prospect through a customized line of inquiry based upon their answers to previous questions.
Value and total cost of ownership comparisons are important to any B2B sales process. Between them, they attract and justify the selection of your product while building a business case for prospective customers to use when presenting your offering to buying committees and financial approvers. However, they operate in different ways and at different points in the sales cycle. Each tool has a different goal and addresses different pain points, and each is used by a different primary user to different benefit.
The most effective way to motivate buyers is to quantify a solution’s value. While marketing and sales organizations often produce rich content that supports various aspects of the buyer’s journey, they often fail to communicate value as a bottom-line differentiator.
Traditional marketing wisdom tells us that building customer relationships begins with the sales process. Every product, company and industry has its own unique journey, and it’s our job as B2B solution providers to establish trust, credibility and value every step of the way.
Great value propositions are essential if you want to prospect effectively and win more customers. Despite this, we’ve found that these propositions can be tricky for both marketers and sellers alike. Often they simply aren’t sure what their value proposition is. This is common at companies that sell complex products and/or have multiple product lines/business units. Such companies could have hundreds of different propositions aimed at their different market segments. In other cases, marketing and sales teams don’t know their value propositions because their companies have never embarked on the proper process to formulate them.
If you are shopping for an ROI tool, odds are that you already agree with us that a homegrown Excel tool won’t get you the best results. But how do you evaluate vendors and make the right choice? Here are four elements to consider.
Last week I worked with a client to finalize a list of cost savings and revenue gains provided by her company’s offering. During our review, she flagged the section where I had included “sales growth” as a revenue benefit. As she told me, “We’re not allowed to include soft benefits when we present business cases internally.”
We recently wrote about the use case for an ROI tool vs. a TCO tool. Now let’s look at the ROI vs. TCO argument a bit differently, from the buyer’s perspective. Buyers are usually in one of two frames of mind: Evaluating your solution against their current environment. I call this the “Do Nothing” scenario because your prospect is either going to buy your solution or take no action (i.e., live with their current state). Looking at your solution against a competitive offering or another alternative such as a homegrown solution. This is the “What Should We Do?” scenario, because the buyer has decided to act but is uncertain about what to do to solve his or her problem.
