Build a customer-specific business case competitors can’t “me too” or undercut.
In trial law, the side has the best evidence doesn’t always win; instead, the side that usually wins is the one with the best lawyers. Similarly, in enterprise software, it’s not always the most feature-rich product that wins, but instead, it's the vendor with the best business case that always wins.
The primary reason for this is because after all the rhetoric, demos and other sales tactics have been tried, enterprise software decision makers (most often the CFO) care more about the dollars and cents of the business case value than they care about fewer critical features here or there.
The next question is, “What differentiates one business case over another?” as all businesses cases are not equal.
The winning business case does the best job of leveraging the unique features of the proposed software to drive the specific financial value (increased revenue or decreased expense) for the customer. Unique and specific are the key words, as a generic business case can be used by all competing vendors.
Leveraging the (accepted by the customer) unique capabilities of our software to drive specific financial value (revenue will increase by x%, or x number of people can be eliminated, for example) ensures that your business case can’t be easily “me too-ed” by the competition.
Too many software companies use generic business cases, and those that rely merely on time savings (which most CFO’s summarily reject) tend not to be winners. If time savings are relevant, define what can the customer do with that increased time (produce more, sell more, etc.) so that it is the result of the time savings that can be leveraged, versus the time savings by itself.
Major software companies, such as SAP and Salesforce have long incorporated strong business cases as a standard practice in delivering their pricing proposals. Therefore, as a small or mid-sized company, if you want to compete and win against major players, a differentiated business case that aligns with the customer’s primary corporate initiatives is a must. Attempting to win without it would be like batting with a wiffle bat while the competition is using a Louisville Slugger.
If your sales team struggles with putting together a unique and compelling business case for your software, I encourage you to leverage moicpartners.com to make the business case method fundamental to your sales process and radically improve your win rate.
