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.
Most of your prospects will focus on price once they think they have found a product or service that will meet their needs. It’s normal to want to know how much something will cost. However, it’s best to avoid responding directly to this question until you have established the problem and the value of solving that problem.
Figuring out what to charge for your product may seem as simple as adding up what it costs to make plus a percentage you call profit. Unfortunately, this “markup” or “cost-plus” method is common and can result in money left on the table and unnecessarily slower future growth.
B2B sales typically have long marketing and sales cycles due to the nature of the offering. Today’s buyers will put off talking to a sales representative as long as possible before finally committing to a first meeting.
If you aren’t selling on value, you are leaving money on the table. The question is, how much? Let’s go through the three problems with not selling based on value. Each of these events result in lost revenue and profits. Altogether, it can add up to a significant amount of profit lost.
Because an assessment tool is so engaging, it can be used at every step of the sales process. This versatile tool both evaluates and clarifies the prospect's problem at hand.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) are similar methods of proving cost effectiveness that perform best in different situations. In fact, if you use a TCO tool at the wrong time in the sales process, you are taking big risks. Let's take a closer look at which tool is better for your business.
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.
Traditional sales techniques have always concentrated on closing the sale. Once the sale was complete, there was no further reason to engage with the customer until you had another product to sell. Until a few years ago, software solutions were sold the same way.
