Prospective buyers often ask vendors to provide them with a business case during the selling cycle. In response, sales and/or marketing teams often create a spreadsheet to show the financial justification of their solution. However, this approach has many pitfalls and often leads to deals just fading away… the dreaded “no decision.”
Consider the following:
1) Prospective buyers question the credibility of spreadsheets created by vendors. In contrast, ROI calculators created by third parties are viewed as trustworthy.
2) It is difficult to create compelling summary reports within spreadsheets. Prospects prefer PDF reports that not only look professional but are easy to share with colleagues.
3) Spreadsheets suffer from low adoption rates by salespeople due to their inherent complexity. Today’s new ROI tools provide a simple, attractive user interface.
4) Spreadsheets are notoriously difficult to maintain for a host of reasons. The current ROI platforms are centrally managed and maintained, and thereby eliminate version control issues, outdated data, field modifications and unauthorized usage.
5) It is problematic to provide online access to spreadsheets. Web-based value-calculators can be integrated into a web site and act as an effective lead capture mechanism.
For more information on how to build a quantifiable business case with value calculators and ROI tools and to see examples of value calculators, visit the ROI Selling home page.
