I truly believe in the power of ROI tools and value calculators to help generate better, more qualified B2B marketing leads and enhance a B2B sales rep’s ability to close a deal. If I didn't, I wouldn't be in the business of selling them. Here are my responses to common objections to value selling tools:
We recently wrote about the correct usage of the term ROI in a B2B sales. A great follow-up question we received was, “How do I know what to show my customer, ROI or NPV (net present value)?” Let’s take a look at the proper use case for each.
This is Part V of a five-part series about the lifecycle of value in B2B selling and marketing. You’ve set your price, shown the customer the cost of his problem, and proven you’re a better option than your competitors. Congratulations, you’ve now made it to Phase 4 of the Value Lifecycle. This is the point at which you perform a rock solid analysis that convinces your prospect to invest in your offering. If done right, Phase 4 the Value Lifecycle is a lot of fun, because success at this stage means you’ve closed the deal.
This is Part I of a five-part series about the life-cycle of value in B2B selling and marketing. Part I is an introduction and a summary four phases of the value life-cycle. Whether you’re in sales or marketing, it is obviously in your best interest to understand what value you offer to customers. What most sellers and marketers don’t realize is that value has different meanings depending on where you are in the marketing/sales cycle. The “value life-cycle” has four distinct phases (listed below) – as you’ll see, different phases require input from different roles in the company.
For much of his tenure at GE, Jack Welch’s famous mandate to every business unit was to be either number one or number two in their market. If you weren't meeting that standard, you were replaced.
Last week I spoke with Ken Powell, who’s been leading a sales transformation at SunGard in his role as VP of Global Sales Enablement. (He was also a speaker this week at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston.)
I've worked with many clients to help them craft value propositions. One mistake they often make is to mistake quality for value.
There are a couple of categories of value dimensions that will often be challenged by a prospect when you are building an ROI-based business case, and labor savings is at the top of that list. Labor savings tend to be tough to get customer buy-in for a number of reasons: Labor Savings are often spread across many people’s time and thus are considered soft or indirect benefits without real economic impact In order to capture the labor savings, the company often needs to take some action (reduce headcount, avoid hiring more workers, or reallocate employees to other value-added activities) Often the people that you are dealing with when building the business case are the people that will be impacted by the actions required (e.g., selling a technology solution to the IT department that reduces IT headcount may be difficult) Companies have been promised productivity gains many times, but rarely have they seen the results.
Many times an offering may have what a prospect might consider to be indirect benefits. These are benefits that, although real, are harder to directly link to the offering and/or are harder to actually capture. A couple of categories of benefits that often fall into this indirect bucket are labor savings (e.g., productivity gains) or revenue enhancements (e.g., sales growth).
