Traditional marketing wisdom tells us that building customer relationships begins with the sales process. Every product, company and industry has its own unique journey, and it’s our job as B2B solution providers to establish trust, credibility and value every step of the way.
As customer acquisition costs keep rising, savvy SaaS providers are focusing on retention to reduce their churn rates. An initial SaaS purchase is just the beginning of your relationship with a new customer. You must keep earning their loyalty to ensure high renewal rates and avoid financial and reputational damage.
In today’s economy, having a compelling business value proposition and being able to deliver against that promise is not a "nice to have," it’s the price of admission. Companies today constantly vie for business decision makers’ attention and the opportunity to sell their product or solution.
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.
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?”
It’s happened to the best of us. You tell a prospect how much your product or service costs and they respond with silence. This is known as “sticker shock” and if you’ve done your job as a salesperson, your customer should never experience this.
Using a value-based sales approach helps sales teams succeed consistently and more frequently. These four tips from the world of value selling can help move deals through the buying cycle faster and increase close rates.
Recently I was reading Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax” with my six-year-old daughter. In the book, the character of the Once-ler says, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.” It struck me that this concept is also applicable in the realm of B2B sales and marketing.
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.
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).
