Sales and marketing professionals often seek a TCO analysis to help grow sales and 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?”
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:
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).
