Are You Only The Tip Of The Iceberg?
When it comes to the customer’s costs, your price may only be the tip of the iceberg. That is important if you are selling a quality solution and want to avoid being hammered on price. By making your customer aware of The Iceberg Principle you can move the conversation off price and onto value.
Sellers: How To Calculate Your Value? – The Value Equation
Communicating your value to today’s hard-nosed buyers can be a real challenge. You know that your marketing literature won’t do it. You know that your sales pitches and proposals must. Price Versus Value Many buyers have an almost single-minded obsession with price. That makes moving the conversation off price and onto value the seller’s priority. But [...]
Where Have All The Savings Gone? Buyer Leakages As Sales Opportunities
Procurement is under pressure to continually cut costs. However a high level of leakage makes delivering fully on promised savings a challenge. That presents the seller with a number of opportunities.
Why Only Hard Savings Can Close The Deal
Sellers are not the only ones obsessed with making their numbers. Buyers have targets too – typically ambitious targets for cost reduction. However, increasingly only hard savings have the power to close the sale. We all know that buyers are increasingly numbers obsessed. The question is what format must those numbers be in [...]
The Beermat Business Case
Being able to build the business case for your solution is an important sales skill. However the traditional approach to developing the business case fails more often than it succeeds. To address this problem sellers need to start the business case conversation much earlier. They need to adopt ‘beermat’ business case principles because they can’t [...]
Show Me The Money! A Challenge Shared By Buyers & Sellers
Numbers are increasingly a part of today’s complex sale. Yet they can be troublesome, for buyers, as well as sellers. The Problem With Your Numbers Do you ever find yourself getting confused by the numbers in a sales pitch, or ROI calculator? Well, it happens more often than you might think. Every day buyers and [...]
Buyer OCD: The Obsession With Lowest Price
More and more buyers are being diagnosed with Price OCD, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It is causing increased anxiety even frustration among salespeople. Buyer OCD is a diagnosis offered by salespeople who are witnessing first hand the ongoing buyer obsession with price and the compulsive; price checking, competitive tendering and price re-negotiation, that accompanies it. [...]
Get Yourself A New Friend – An Accountant!
Selling to today’s numbers-obsessed buyers requires a new dexterity with numbers. But that poses a challenge for many salespeople. Could you sit down with an accountant (or accountant-type) for 30 mins and absolutely convince him, or her about the merits of your solution? That is a key measure of the type of skill required to sell [...]
Sellers: Are You Leaving Your Buyer Naked?
Many sellers are leaving their buyers naked! They are getting them excited about their solutions and then letting them go off unprepared to their senior management colleagues looking for approval. The Naked Buyer Typical sales proposals fail to provide buyers with the basic undergarments in terms of the justification required for the buying decision. That [...]
Sales Maths: How Well Are You Using Numbers To Increase Your Sales?
Sales people have long excelled at relationship building and communication, but to be truly persuasive in the face of modern buying sellers need a new skill. That skill is maths. But just how good is your sales maths? Could using numbers help you sell more? Selling To Numbers-Obsessed Buyers Today’s buyers are more hard-nosed, results driven and [...]
Price Negotiation: The Buyer’s Broken Calculator
To reduce price discounting sellers need to focus on how buyers do their maths.
How To Make Your ROI More Buyer-Friendly
As with building skyscrapers, the temptation for sellers in building a business case is to add another floor of benefits in a bid to achieve the highest possible ROI for the buyer. However, it is important to remember that the higher the ROI, the greater the danger of the buyer simply toppling your figures. With this in mind, you need to help the buyer create a more credible business case on three levels…
Examining the Business Case – The Building Blocks
The term business case can mean different things to different people. For this reason it is helpful to explain the key elements of a business case in terms of other more universally understood business planning and analysis tools. The business case combines four elements as shown in the diagram. The Building Blocks of the Business [...]
Buyers Face 3 Business Case Challenges
Predicting the future is not easy, but that is exactly what the business case must attempt to do. This is particularly true in a time of market turbulence. Today’s perfect plan could be completely invalidated by a change in the competitive situation, an upset in the market or any one of a host of other [...]
What Is The Business Case?
One of the most powerful realizations for sellers is that when it comes to the complex sale there are no buying decisions, only business decisions. The implication is that buying decisions which in the past focused on the what, where, when and how, are now purely concerned with the ‘why?’ Peel back the layers of [...]
Salespeople Grapple With The Business Case
Would you be surprised to know that many large organizations require a business case for purchases of as little as €20,000? As one UK veteran salesperson told us recently, ‘I have seen more business cases in the past year than I have in the previous 19 years.’ There is more strategic business logic being applied to [...]
Examining the Business Case – The Cost-Benefits Equation
The business case can take many forms, but at its core is one key question — why should we buy? or more to the point: How will this purchase help the organization (department/unit) succeed? The business case clearly outlines the value equation of the proposed purchase that reflects not only costs, benefits and risk, but also how [...]
Examining the Business Case – The Political Dimension
A business case is an economic argument for investing in a project or purchase. However, it is not purely economic, but also political. In this context the successful business case will involve a process of extensive involvement with stakeholders and will be written, or at least reviewed, by cross-functional committees. This is essential to creating [...]
The Role Of The Business Case
Why is the business case so important? Well, the key reasons the business case is now at the center of major buying decisions are listed below. 1. Drives business success: It ensures any projects, purchases or investments enable the organization to achieve its objectives. 2. Allocates scarce resources to maximum effect to get the best [...]
Examining the Business Case – Strategic Fit
When the numbers of the cost-benefit equation stack up and an attractive payback is evident, even making allowance for risk and compliance, is the result a compelling business case? Perhaps not, because managers must demonstrate that the project fits with the pre-existing jig-saw of organizational priorities, goals and strategies. They must demonstrate the purchase will [...]
