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.
The decision maker at Phase 4 is usually someone from the financial team (often the Chief Financial Officer) who will want to see a business case before they free up company funds and allocate them to your project. The challenge here is to create a comparison of results between what your offering can do and what the prospect’s current business state is (aka, what they’re currently doing to solve their problem, which may be nothing).
This is where an ROI tool can be an invaluable asset to you. One of our best examples to illustrate this is a story about a special kind of packaging material developed by one of our clients. The initial trouble with the new packaging material was price -- it was 5-10 times more expensive than the existing material customers were using (and customers were already pretty happy with the results they were getting with the existing material). Without a business case to show how the new material was a wise investment, the client’s sales reps were left to sell on price alone. Understandably, they were getting laughed out of the offices of purchasing managers around the world.
We worked with the client and walked them through the four phases of the Value Lifecycle. We also performed a full ROI analysis to compare total costs of the new material versus the existing material and made some very interesting discoveries. For one thing, we discovered that the new packaging material would allow the client’s customer to fit two to three times more of its product into each package. For another, we found that it would use far less energy, produce less waste, and be less labor intensive. In fact, in almost every aspect of the comparison, the new packaging material almost always yielded a lower total cost of packaging than the current material.
We built an ROI tool to clearly illustrate that value and turned it over to our client to use on their sales calls. In the end, our client went from getting laughed out of meetings to becoming the standard provider of packaging material for eight of the top 10 companies in their industry in just a few years. The ROI tool was the game changer that helped them convince their customers that there was greater value to be had from the new packaging material, even with a significantly higher purchase price than that of the existing packaging material.
Again, a cost-justified business case is key to convince a financially minded approver that an investment in your solution is in their economic best interest. That’s why it’s so important to understand how CFOs think. According to IDC research, an IT investment of one million dollars is typically associated with a decision cycle that lasts for 18 months. When a customer is able to measure the business impact of the investment, however, research shows that 65% of such purchases occur in 6 months or less.
So if a CFO has a million dollars to invest, you want to make sure you’re able to make a convincing case for why it’s worthwhile to spend the money with you as opposed to funding other areas of the business or simply putting off a decision indefinitely. If you can show them the money, your sales team should have very little problem closing the deal.
Interested in learning more about ROI tools? See an example here.
