Content marketing is an integral piece of today’s B2B marketing approach. However, pushing out content just to prove you have a content marketing strategy rarely generates meaningful results. To be meaningful, you have to help buyers realize why they should work with you. One of my clients, Nuance, does this by showing prospects how much the status quo is costing them.
Background
Nuance’s document workflow and automation tools deliver measurable productivity and reduce costs by streamlining how people create, share, store, and use office documents. However, many prospects in Nuance’s target vertical markets such as legal, finance, government, construction, education, and insurance are unaware of their true cost of lost productivity and unnecessary expenditures.
Hidden Costs
Gartner’s study, “Why You Should Manage Your Office Printing,” called office printing “an unexploited savings opportunity” and pointed out that companies can reduce office printing spending by 10% to 30% “through active management.”
Even if you don’t happen to be an expert in print-and-document management, which I’m sure most readers aren’t, it’s not difficult to imagine benefits such as:
- Less time wasted by employees,
- Better optimized printer fleet,
- Less maintenance,
- Decrease in help-desk calls,
- Reduced consumption of supplies.
We decided that if we could help Nuance communicate these opportunities, then Nuance’s value would be more tangible and real to prospects.
Value-Based Positioning
Our approach was to create a value calculator that provides prospects with a cost breakdown and savings summary of using Nuance’s print management and document scanning and conversion solutions. Users can enter their own data or use the pre-populated data to estimate cost savings in categories. These would include, for example:
- IT labor,
- Office worker labor,
- Office supplies,
- Document storage,
- Hardware.
Once buyers realize how much they can save -- and where the savings come from -- Nuance sales reps can have a useful dialog with prospects about value. Another benefit is that prospective buyers can generate a business case to support the need for Nuance’s solutions. This is also a point made in the Gartner study, and one we at Stratavant have articulated for years: a great antidote to buyer inaction is to give buyers the economic reason to make a change. Armed with a compelling business case, buyers can justify the value of your solution and help them realize why they should work with you.
Stratavant tools can be used to quantify the value of your solution and capture more leads. How do you communicate the value your solution? Leave your thoughts in the comments section or email me at dsvigel@stratavant.com.
