When you engage a prospective buyer, what’s one of the first things they want to know? It’s often the cost.
But just throwing a price at them with no context can create problems. The goal should be to price to value, which is impossible unless you’ve sold them on the value. Buyers who do not understand the importance of your solution and its ability to deliver an ROI won’t want to pay for it.
The more money, the more stakeholders, the more the amplified the risk to your champion.
Using Demos To Instigate ROI Conversations
Just like any other part of the buying process, you can’t have a compelling ROI discussion if you do not know what is driving the interest of your prospects.
Normal discovery calls are a great place to find out this information. That can take time, though, and stretches out engagements.
Interactive video demos can deliver this same information…instantly. 50% of automated demos are viewed the same day they’re sent. Imagine this experience: (Buyer) “I want a demo.” (Rep) “No problem, check your inbox.”
They also give you the power to continue promoting the value of your solution even while you’re not around. 13% are viewed after business hours.
These on-demand demos provide analytics to indicate what role the prospect is in at the company, what is driving their purchase interest, and which sections of the demo or content downloads they consumed—all of which is valuable information to fine-tune your discovery and initial calls.
But just as critical, they’re shareable. The intra-viral nature of intelligent demo automation is that it creates a surge of engagement, essentially automating the process of discovery, engaging, and then winning stakeholders over.
With Consensus demos, everything is tracked automatically, so you can look at any person who has interacted with the demo and what topics are driving their interests. We call these “demolytics”.
This kind of insight is crucial for choosing value buckets you will be discussing with those stakeholders in your ROI tool. In your interactive sales demos, you can identify the problems the buyer is encountering and demonstrate how your product will help solve those problems.
You can include a sample ROI in your demo, but don’t expect the customer to take that at face value. When you get in the call with your customer, you’ll want to walk through the ROI calculations with them in real time so your buyer can really see the value of your solution.
While buyers are considering if a purchase is worth it, they privately want to know the flat rate. You need to help them connect the dots and prove the value of your solution.
The Final Factor In ROI Calculations
Even though you have helped your prospects understand how you will help them make money or save money, there might be some lingering subconscious blockers that hinder the sale. These factors go past the logical reasons for purchasing a solution and are more personal and emotional in nature. When overcoming these potential objections, you need to establish how the emotional benefits outweigh the emotional risks.
Implementing a new solution poses several emotional risks. Buying your solution could threaten:
- Predictability and stability for the champion and stakeholders.
- The reputation of those who want to bring the new solution onboard if it doesn’t produce the promised value.
- Current projects and future workload since it takes time to purchase and implement a solution.
- Work-life balance since implementation means more hours of onboarding.
Your champion has to have full emotional buy-in to sell your solution.
Using Your ROI Calculator To Address Emotions
As a seller, you need to be mindful of the fact that your buyers are calculating their emotional ROI all the time. You can help the prospects tabulate this by again using the value buckets in your tool.
Take “saving time” as an example. Saving time can be equated to financial gain, but often it has an enormous emotional component. A case in point: at Consensus we show our prospects how every presales rep can save 10 hours a week by using intelligent demo automation to automate repetitive demos. We illustrate with actual numbers: 17 hours to build the automated demos, but saving 492 hours over the year. Using an upward counterfactual, we ask them, “What would your sales engineering team have done with 492 hours per rep over the course of the last year if you had implemented this a year ago?”
Beyond the financial implications, they are almost always equating it to increased morale because of better work-life balance and improved job satisfaction which leads to less attrition among the ranks. (If you’re not convinced that sales engineers are overworked, check out the Sales Engineering Compensation and Workload Report.)
Equip Your Champion
Remember, you won’t be party to every internal conversation your prospects have about ROI. You have to equip and enable your champion to sell your solution internally, especially when it comes to the importance of building a financial case.
By taking the time to construct this case with them, you are helping them help you. You want to address your ROI analysis’ critical financial and emotional aspects. For example, you can prepare a step-by-step guide for implementing your solution to help the stakeholders understand what is involved. Then quantify the number of hours each step will take and specify which team members are involved.
Utilizing a demo automation tool will help facilitate more effective ROI conversations so that buyers can see the value of your solution and take the pressure off your champion having to remember all the talking points themselves. Using tools like ROI calculators to have more effective financial discussions enables buyers to make more valuable purchase decisions. Combining these technologies can put you in the conversation even when you are not there; this is a crucial goal and strategy for adapting to how buyers are purchasing today, especially in b2b sales.
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