Selling money and how outsourcing sales can provide useful leverage
Because we are an outsourcing sales organization for technology, professional services and complex sales, we have to do our job with the most efficiency and effectiveness possible; so, it is critical that we are exceptional in selling money early and fast. We do this by creating a clear ROI Value Statement. This is key if you are committed to a repeatable and scalable sales process. As an outsourcing sales company, we are all about sales process. When you get this right it allows you to leverage your outsourcing sales team to do five things simultaneously:
- Qualify the business opportunity with the technical buyer and get the technical buyer to involve the business buyer in the decision at the beginning of the sales process.
- You can do this without involving your team’s sales engineer or the top professional service producers.
- Quickly figure out if the technical buyer has the juice to get budget if no budget exists.
- Set the precedent that access to your company’s senior talent (especially with professional services) will be limited until you are talking about transacting.
- Set the expectation that until you know there is budget or the potential budget available, you won’t go into significant technical discussions.
The formula is simple:
- My company /service will create an X (month, quarter, year) program that over the life of that program will produce and estimated $X dollars (go for the big deal upfront).
- This will mean an estimated % increase in profitability or % decrease in cost.
This part of the formula and ROI value statement can be used early in the sales cycle. It saves both parties time. The prospect is either interested in the return or they are not. If they are interested, you can then offer to do a more detailed analysis of their specific return after you understand their specific needs. After doing that scoping, you will add the following:
- Over the course of the program we will drive:
– Time period 1 $X
– Time period 2 $X
– Time period 3 $X
– Year 4 ~ $ 1,935,000
- Cost of delay of 1 quarter would be $X (which would require more detailed analysis)
- Cost of delay of 1 year would $X (which would require more detailed analysis)
In addition to shortening the sales cycle and getting deals that are going nowhere out of the pipe, the ROI value statement also has the following ancillary benefits downstream.
- Generally, you will get a meeting with the Business Buyer early in the sales process
- Demonstrates that your company’s senior talent is valuable. This builds credibility and value
- Expectation that you expect full boat on the deal
- Allows you to leverage digital content in parallel to do the technical qualification
- If there is not already allocated budget, it gets the budget allocation process started at the start of your sales cycle to increase your sales pipeline velocity by months or quarters (depending your sales cycle).
