Have you ever heard customers say, “I don’t believe these numbers,” while showing them the business case for your offering? It’s not that the customer thinks you’re a liar. The problem is that many customers come to the table with existing assumptions or prejudices around benefit dimensions. Therefore, your ROI estimates can seem like pipe dreams.
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.
Each year, sales operations and marketing managers purchase sales enablement tools to help their sales teams increase win rates and close deals faster. So why do so many of these tools gather dust in the salesperson’s toolbox? In my experience, this happens for two main reasons.
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.”
Is your offering underpriced? It happens more often than you’d think. For example, during a recent consulting project, I helped a particular business unit at a material manufacturer realize they were charging $100,000 for an offering that was delivering $1.2 million in value.
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.
The way you talk about your competitors tells prospects and customers a lot about your company and the way you do business. Here are some guidelines sellers and marketers can use to avoid leaving a negative impression and potentially losing business.
What’s the best way to get a buyer’s attention, move deals quickly through the buying cycle, and increase close rates? Follow these five fundamental steps. (For a handy summary of these steps, download our tip sheet, "5 Steps to Close More Deals.")
One of my fundamental beliefs is that the strategic marketing team—not sales, finance or operations—should own pricing. The reason is that marketing is best equipped to set the optimal price and maximize an offering's lifetime value.
Quite often sales and marketing professionals seek a TCO analysis to help grow sales when an ROI calculation would actually be a better choice. Many people assume they need a TCO analysis to close deals, when an ROI analysis would actually be far more beneficial. I know this because I get frequent requests to create TCO tools, and my first question is “What problem are you trying to solve?”
