Sales Tip: Tread Carefully with ROI Calculators
I’m a big proponent of discovering the potential value to your prospect of acquiring and utilizing your products and services. One of our core concepts is: People make emotional decisions for logical reasons.
The potential value to a company of changing how they operate can often be the logic they need in order to help them make a purchase or subscription decision.However, I have some concerns about existing “ROI tools” and how they are used by salespeople in the sales process.
Here are a few things to consider about ROI tools and calculators:
- They typically represent what someone in your company thinks is important to your prospect – not what the prospect organization has told you is important.
- Your prospect has probably equipped its sales team with a similar tool. They are familiar with its intent.
- They know what you are trying to do – convince them to purchase your product or service.
- The potential savings variables contained in the ROI model are typically pre-determined before even knowing what is important to the prospect and what they are trying to accomplish – resulting in you misdiagnosing and being viewed as manipulative.
- Potential revenue improvements that the prospect thinks are possible are often overlooked and can be very compelling.
- They almost always include variables that most prospects and salespeople don’t understand – net present value of money, hurdle rates, etc.
- Salespeople themselves typically don’t understand the potential value of their offering. They leave it up to the prospect to figure it out.
- Salespeople hand the ROI tools to their prospects and ask them to fill it out.
- Salespeople view them as ‘proof’ when in fact they are purely a projection of what might be accomplished.
Instead, we advocate facilitating the development of a relatively a simple cost/benefit analysis – the price of your products and services and the potential benefits the prospect has told you they believe they will receive over some period of time. Why?
- It is easier to understand – you don’t need an MBA!
- You, as the seller, own your costs.
- The prospect owns their potential benefit – what they have told you they believe is possible after implementing and using your offering to address their goals, problems or needs. NOT what you have told them or projected.
- You don’t own or have to defend the prospect’s potential benefit – the prospect does
- They can revise the potential benefits up or risk adjust them down.
- It gives them the information they need to compete with other projects for funding internally.
- It has the ability to differentiate you from your competitors.
The B2B Playbook for Revenue Growth
Successful companies have realized that attaining sustainable revenue growth means more than getting new clients under their belt. Download the B2B Playbook for Revenue Growth and we’ll show you a two-pronged effort for gaining new logos while retaining existing clients, allowing your company’s revenue to grow over the long term.
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