SDM cannot stress enough the importance of using a ROI to demonstrate short-term lift or savings. The reason is in today’s volatile and extremely fast-moving technology, Executives want to cut their risk and by undertaking a project in pieces, they can measure results, make changes, and strive for a solid return without finding out to late once they are well downstream.
By having the goal of a project yielding some initial payoff as it is implemented, especially IT solutions, the company can assess how well, it is going and make critical changes before the project could go sideways or have significant scope creep.
Too many vendorsappear to have misinterpreted this as they tend to believe that their Enterprise, mid-market or smaller clients are too aggressive in looking for a 6-month delivery of value. This is a mistake! Actually, if the deal is even small, as in $150-$200,000 (while many are in the millions) executives are open to thinking that they can wait 12 or 18 months to measure value but still want to some tangible gain after 3-6 months. Vendors often make this mistake.
When you plan on offering a short-term value message be sure to align it to the customer’s pain, connect it into their business unit, division of actual department. Align the value as if you work at the company and have to convince your CEO you want to do this. Lay out an Excel first and place all your ROI assumptions in clear view because it is the assumption per claim that validates your ROI. It builds credibility and presents you as an expert in the customer’ eyes.
The benefit of delivering short-term value with your deal is it helps to bolster you’re getting subsequent funding (free “gifts of Knowledge”), for a complete rollout. Many new vendor solutions come from borrowing dollars from a bigger project or securing some leftover funding.
The short-term ROI helps to lock in dollars for the next cycle or New Year. So when you prove you can deliver measurable dollars in the short-run, you secure yourself in the next budget round.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.