<img alt="" src="https://secure.half1hell.com/195196.png" style="display:none;">

Jim Sargent

Recent Posts

How to Help Buyers Make Better Purchase Decisions

During my 20-year career in sales, I’ve watched customers get smarter and smarter. As we all know, this is due in large part to the buyers’ ability to research products and solutions online. They visit vendor websites, follow vendors on social media, download content assets, tune into webinars, and attend conferences. In the process, they pick up a vast amount of knowledge about vendors and products.

Most salespeople today understand this. What they fail to understand, however, is that knowledgeable buyers are not necessarily more effective buyers. In other words, better access to more information does not always lead to better purchase decisions.

How to Leverage an ROI Tool in the Sales Process

An ROI tool is the best and most efficient way to build a winning business case. Before you can effectively use an ROI tool, however, there are several critical steps you need to take, starting with your lead-generation efforts. 

Because your typical customer does so much research online before talking with you, the process starts with marketing and the tools they make available on your website. Ideally, you want to make a value calculator available so that customers can find it during their research phase. Their inputs into that value calculator will provide critical insight into the current state of their business, which is key to building a business case to support purchasing your solution.

It is nearly impossible to provide accurate ROI calculations use in your business case without first assessing the current state of the customer's business and establishing the value of your solution. What’s the best way to assess your customer’s current state? Manual audits are one common option. But I don’t recommend them for a number of reasons.

Comment