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WhatTheyThink Blog
Want to Increase Your Sales? Be Prepared to Prove Value.
By David Dodd
Published: January 20, 2011
My latest white paper - How Much is a Marketing Asset Management Solution Worth to My Company? - describes how corporate marketers and financial executives can estimate the value that would be created by implementing a marketing asset management/web-to-print solution. The same process can be used by solution providers to develop value estimates and ROI calculations for their prospective customers.
Recent research by IDC shows why it's critical for sellers to be prepared to prove the value of their solutions. The findings summarized below relate specifically to technology buyers and purchases, but they are equally applicable to other B2B sellers who offer complex and relatively expensive products or services. More importantly, since MAM/web-to-print systems are technology solutions, these findings are particularly relevant for web-to-print solution providers.
- Ninety percent of companies surveyed say they require quantifiable proof of financial benefits for most projects.
- Sixty-five percent of surveyed buyers say they don't have the knowledge or tools they need to perform business value assessments.
- Over 80% of surveyed buyers say they expect vendors to quantify the business value of their proposed solutions.
If you don't (or can't) show your prospects how your solution will enable increased revenues, lower costs, and/or improved profits, you are leaving your potential buyers on their own to determine the value of your proposed solution. This can lengthen the sales cycle, as prospects struggle to pull together an estimate of value, or even worse, it can cause your prospects to dismiss your solution altogether because they underestimate the benefits and value. And leaving the value estimate completely up to your prospects will often have a big negative impact on your pricing, even if you close the sale.
The bottom line? If you want to grow sales of MAM/web-to-print solutions, you need to make a value estimate/ROI calculation an integral part of your marketing/sales process.
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