Budget vs. Business Case
When your roof unexpectedly leaked and needed to be replaced, did you let it continue leaking since you had not budgeted for a replacement roof, or did you replace the roof and not spend the money on another initiative? Of course, you installed a new roof and delayed some other pre-planned equivalent expenditure.
In other words, when the need is urgent, budgets don’t matter; this is why the question, “Is the project budgeted?” is largely irrelevant. Instead, a focus on driving a compelling business case is a much better indicator of getting a project funded than some arbitrary budget — budgets are merely placeholders and not a guarantee of future funding.
If a business case is strong enough, however, the company will find the money to support the initiative. So how do you build the business case? It starts with the basic premise that there are two ways to make money: sell more or spend less. Saving money is often easier to prove, but the key element is uncovering how the unique capabilities of our solution irrefutably drive one of those two outcomes.
It’s not enough to generate time savings, as business cases based solely on saving time are usually dismissed by the customer since they don’t directly save money or increase revenue. Instead, determine how a solution directly eliminates revenue leakage (increase revenue) or drives cost savings by eliminating unnecessary processes and/or people (spend less). 
Again, the key is to leverage your unique features as the business case drivers so you’re not delivering a business case that can be leveraged by your competitors. At the same time, it’s best to use the customer’s data so the customer is a participant in the development of the business case. At a minimum, use industry averages for the business case as a starting point and work with the customer to refine it in order to drive the urgency to executing the deal.
The business case shows the cost of maintaining the status quo, minus the cost of the solution, thus presenting the value of the solution while mitigating our software cost. This business case will also be valuable late in the sales cycle, as your project vies for funding. Often, business cases are stack ranked, with only the most compelling ones getting funded.
Ultimately, whether or not there is a budgeted project that could leverage your solution, if you can construct a compelling business case that can only be accomplished with your solution, the project will get funded. If you need help developing a convincing business case, please either ask Virtual Dave or email dave@moicpartners.com.
Virtual Dave is an AI-based virtual sales support tool trained on 40 years of enterprise software sales experience, available 24/7 to enhance sales process consistency.
