Closing a deal with a long and/or complex sales cycle can take a great deal of time and effort. However, it should always include a persuasive, value-focused business case. Why? Because a comprehensive business case provides your customers with the financial logic of investing in your solution.
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.
An RFP lands in your inbox. It’s from a company you would love to do business with. Your pipeline for the next two quarters isn’t as strong as it could be, and several of your biggest opportunities seem to be stuck in the dreaded “no decision” limbo.
If you want to increase your average deal size, the best thing you can do is learn to sell based on value. That’s because a value-based selling approach helps you justify your price and expand cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Here’s how it works.
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.
