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.
For one thing, they can take weeks, depending on the complexity of the deal. That’s because an audit involves interviewing key stakeholders (from customer personnel in production, to executives for between 30 minutes to an hour). It could also involve up to five people on your own internal team. Which means your labor cost is high (and I’m not even including travel expenses).
Compared to this manual effort, commercially available value tools researched and written specifically for a vendor’s solution is a minimal expense. Let’s review an example of how this plays out in contrast to a manual audit.
At this point, you’ve hopefully sidestepped having to undergo a proof-of-concept proposal. However, if all else fails, you can produce the proof-of-concept but set boundaries to control the scope of it.
By this time you will have worked your way through a tough couple of months. You've overcome objections, negotiated several technical hurdles, and developed a champion. The good news is your champion is now feeding you actionable intelligence, in order to prepare for the economic buyer’s presentation.
Here’s where I have really good news for you: because you’ve uncovered a lot of pain, quantified the customer's current state with an assessment tool and validated the value of your solution with a value calculator, now your rep can use an ROI tool to pull the data together and make the final entries.
Let’s consider the information the sales rep has at his or her fingertips when preparing to use an ROI tool to create a business case:
With one click, the rep gets a branded, professional PDF document, with all the data required for the customer’s CFO to evaluate the deal.
In the end, you get an advantage because your business case is based on hard data and a virtually indisputable set of numbers to support the price, value, and ROI. All because you laid a trail of foundation stones in the form of an assessment tool on your website.