There are an endless number of problems that a true entrepreneur could solve, but at the end of the day, all successful B2B businesses fall into one of two categories:
- Those that help customers make lots of money
- Those that help customers save lots of money
While there are other benefits that entrepreneurs can deliver, without a strong economic value, you risk becoming a nice-to-have solution and competing with a “good enough” status quo, making the sales process much more challenging.
By quantifying your economic value, I’m confident your sales will take off. For example, you can:
Generate More Leads – Your sales leads will grow if you can open with “We helped XXXXX lower costs by 20%, we can help you too.”
Win More Deals – If you’re able to quantify your economic value and your competitor can’t, then you’ll speak with more trust and credibility to your business and economic benefit which will help you close more deals.
Shorten Your Sales Cycle – Not only will you be perceived as a more trusted thought leader by speaking with clarity to your business buyer, but you can also accelerate a long sales cycle by explaining that every week/month they delay their purchase decision costs them $100,000.
Of course, quantifying your economic value is a challenge for many new products. There are several approaches to making this assessment.
Your Best Guess: Early in the new product development process, it is difficult to validate your economic value. Nevertheless, this is an important part of your customer discovery process. By asking your customer how much time they would save? How many new widgets they would be able to manufacture? How many new hires would be averted? How much customer churn would be reduced? and so on, you can estimate your economic value and confirm you’re solving a meaningful customer problem.
Third-Party Analysis: By partnering with a university to write an academic research paper or engaging a third-party consultant to write a white paper, you can point to an independent source to support your claims.
Customer Pilot: Many customers are comfortable either providing attributed or anonymous testimonials and results in return for a free or low-cost pilot.
The clarity and credibility you can achieve by investing the time and effort in building a solid economic value proposition will help you equip your sales team and grow your sales. This process starts up front, at the customer discovery phase, and continues through the new product introduction process.
If you’re having difficulty quantifying your economic value or making it stick with customers, contact us.
