Mark Margolis

To build on my previous article about Business Value, it is crucial to have a clear, consistent, and agreed-upon financial basis for technology projects to ensure positive customer outcomes. Here are some further tips and practical steps on how to achieve this.

I cover all this in detail in my Sales Training Sessions “Delivering customer value through the sales process (sales & pre-sales primer)”. New dates TBA soon or contact me directly for more information.

The first step is to have a clear understanding of the potential opportunity. The following is an amalgamation of many deal qualification templates, sales process and over 20 years experience in the industry. It serves as a reminder on every deal of the basics that all parties (the customer, the vendor, the partner) all need to align on.

• Budget / Funding
  • What confirmation do you have that the customer will fund this project?
  • How has the customer managed similar projects in the past?
  • Is there a business case in place?
• Business Issue
  • What business issue(s), problem or opportunity, is motivating the customer to take action?
  • What happens as a result of the pain?
  • What has the client already tried to resolve the pain?
  • Why has this not resolved it?
  • What options does the client believe it has for solving the pain? 
  • What are the timescales for resolving the pain and why?
  • What is the compelling event?
  • If there is no compelling event what is your plan to create one?
  • Who ultimately owns the pain?
  • Who else is impacted by this pain?
• Business Case
  • What is the potential business value ($) or consequences of acting or not acting on the business issue(s)?
  • What timescales does the value have to be achieved in and why?
• BDM Alignment Power
  • Who in the organisation has done most to guide you through the evaluation process?
  • What significant actions have influential contacts taken on your behalf?
  • Has the BDM unit met with our competitors?
  • Does anyone in the BDM unit have a relationship with our competitors, if so describe?
  • Has the customer agreed to our evaluation plan? If yes who has signed on behalf of the customer?
• Our Portfolio& relationship landscape:
  • Describe the ‘One Company” approach
  • Describe current client investment in our offerings
  • Which BDM’s regularly engage with us?
  • Describe 2 & 3 above for our competitors
• Risk
  • What is the customer’s ‘do nothing’ risk?
  • What other internal projects could compete with the budget and what are the plans to mitigate?
  • What are you doing to mitigate the competitive threats?
  • What are you doing to mitigate the “non believers” within the sphere of influence?
  • How do you plan to mitigate the need for negotiation?
  • How are you managing the client’s sign off process?
  • How are we mitigating the risk involved with implementation (if any?)
  • Are there any additional risks for last minute delays or loss?
• Value Prop
  • Which of the customers key selection criteria favour our solution?
  • Which criteria represent risk?
  • Describe the Microsoft value proposition that solves the customer problem and is unique to Microsoft
  • Has the BDM unit accepted our value proposition and value case?
  • What is the competitors value proposition?
  • How does the BDM unit believe our value prop compares to our competitors?
• Partner
  • Which Partner organisations has relationship with the BDM unit?
  • How are we aligning ourselves with these organisations?
  • Do they have people on the bench for us or our competitor?
  • What is their win, do they influence directly or indirectly?

As we build a clear pathway to a potential commitment its important to also build focus on the sales experience and some of the activities that we will employee to bring the customer on the journey with us. I’ve built the following template to help define these activities:

• Discovery
  • Business Pain Points: What are they key business issues we are trying to overcome
  • Persona’s: Who are the persona’s and what are their individual pain points and objectives
  • Walk the floor: What first hand experiences / observations do we want to undertake. E.g. CC visit, walk the floor, store visit
  • Transformation: What can be automated, what will they no longer need to do, what new things are possible
  • Q&A: What are the difficult questions and our consensus responses
• Design
  • Business Value: What key business value metrics (Business drivers, Business outcomes, KPI’s) do we intend to land
  • Future Business Vision: What is the future vision / state we want to land
  • Story: What is the outline story we intend to tell (day in the life)
  • Persona’s: What personas will take part in the story
  • User Journeys: Describe the user journeys that we need to demonstrate
  • Industry: What industry examples / POV do we intend to share
  • Case Studies: What case studies will we use to give confidence in the solution
• Showcase
  • Wow Factors: What wow factors will we include
  • Compete landmines: What compete landmines do we intend to land and what do we want to defend against
  • Take Aways: What will we leave the customer with (Screenshots, Click Through presentation, Reprise, Video)
  • Personalisation: How will we personalise the session to create an amazing unique experience (Branded leaflets, mocked up Trustpilot, Glassdoor, Exec Video
  • Pricing: Are we clear on what the solution will cost? What is included, what they need to buy, what existing capability they can leverage. Deployment, maintenance costs etc
• Deployment & Adoption
  • Deployment: Describe the reference architecture we purpose and how this will fit into the current to desired state
  • Risk: How will the solution maximise the opportunity for increase ROI whilst minimising deployment, adoption challenges
  • Skills: What skills will they need and what is the plan to upskill / cross train
  • Future: How will the solution provide a foundational basis to grow their business in the future
  • Wheel of value: What does our entire Org value look like (Support, Deployment Services, CAB, Partner, etc)

I hope this is helpful, there are plenty of other articles on my website related to discovery, value engineering and many other practical ways to deliver customer value.