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Selling Technology to Customer Support and Contact Centers…

Quantifying the Benefits of Your Offering with ROI/TCO Analysis

By Noelle MacQueen, Director of Sales and Marketing, Primary Matters, Inc.
November 2005

Introduction

It’s no longer enough to believe in your product or services and spend endless hours prospecting and networking to keep sales at a profitable level. Credibility that was once established by a sales person’s affirmation of value will no longer be considered as valid in your customer’s evaluation and approval process. In order to be a competitive player in technology sales, you need to gain the advantage over the multitude of other players targeting the same group of prospective buyers.

While sales is still definitely a numbers game, the traditional thinking of “the more calls you make… the more meetings you get…the more sales you close” is no longer a simple formula for success. There is a fundamental flaw in that philosophy – it does not quantify the business impact of your offering. As technology has become more sophisticated, so have your competition, your prospects, and their process for analyzing and approving funding for implementations. There was a time when the hardest part of the sales cycle was getting your prospect’s attention. After you had it, all you needed was the right value proposition, along with your adrenaline and charm to seal the deal. Now, the addition of an approval process that goes through every conceivable level of management and a whole lot of red tape has lengthened the sales process exponentially. From one sales person to another, I understand your frustration!

The Sales Challenge

So you are confident that your solution is a “must have” for every customer support organization and contact center. You know that the generic goals of your prospect include increasing agent productivity, decreasing headcount requirements, streamlining operational processes, cutting costs, increasing sales and profitability, and maintaining promised levels of customer service. You claim to have the solution to one or more of these challenges…great. The problem is that so does every other vendor that wins a meeting with the executive decision makers.
Let’s jump ahead and assume that your offering does solve a problem that your prospect is facing, and you have effectively communicated the fit between their pain and your solution. You still have the hardest part ahead of you; the tough questions! Questions like:

What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of your solution?
What is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)?
When will I break-even?

Be honest. Even if you have figures for TCO and ROI, they are more than likely based on a generic scenario and not based on your prospect’s specific organization. If you do analyze the ROI that is specific to each prospect, how many weeks are you willing to dedicate pouring over custom spreadsheets to provide an accurate report; with no guarantee of winning the business?

I am not trying to make you throw your hands up in defeat, only communicating the challenges that face sales teams every day in the pursuit of closing a sale.

Proactive Approach

While I am sure that there are some sales stars out there that have never become a casualty of the “We’ll get back to you in the fourth quarter” blow-off, most of us have experienced that reality. I am not about to claim that I have a secret formula for winning every opportunity, but I am going to share a pro-active approach that not only shortens the sales cycle considerably, but also provides a competitive edge in the decision process.

Imagine a sales meeting in which you can answer all of the questions posed above. Now, imagine you are able to answer them accurately, granularly, and in only minutes. What if you were also able to go a step further and provide information such as:

How your solution will impact your prospect’s technology budget over the next 24 months
How it compares with the total cost of ownership of your main competitor
How it will impact their headcount requirements over the next 3 years
The amount that it will lower their cost per call

Revolutionary Thinking

Activity-based business impact analysis is changing the way that companies buy, and the way that sales teams sell. Smart decision makers are becoming immune to the impressive figures that vendors supply to show the ROI of their offering. They know that a generic report boasting a positive return on investment over an 18 month period does not indicate that they should expect to receive those same results. Activity-based analysis has answered the call of the begrudged executives who did not receive the anticipated return from their last implementation, and the one before that and so on.

Using activity-based analysis, you are able to reveal how your solution will impact each specific client’s organization, including their headcount, budget, and system requirements. Your quantified value statements become metrics to monitor after implementation to ensure the projected ROI is achieved. Your presentation becomes more powerful; your pitch more credible; your projections achievable.

How it Works

To successfully use this approach, you begin by building a baseline to define your prospect’s current operations and technology focusing on the processes that your solution will impact. You must gain an understanding of the activities required to meet their objective, the resources required to perform the activities, and the volume at which those activities are completed. By gaining an understanding of your client’s current environment, you are able to clearly foresee how their organization will look month by month over a specified projection period. You are able to provide an early diagnosis of any increase in personnel requirements, and identify problem areas involving their budget that they aren’t aware of currently.

The Primary Matters Guide® contains data-entry cells that enable sales teams to quickly and easily build a baseline. After the baseline is built, you can run scenario analysis and produce results in only minutes.

When you have created the baseline, which takes only hours of data entry using the right tool, you are able to then run scenario analysis to show how the implementation of your offering will provide the promised result. Because scenario analysis is so quick and accurate, you are also able to compare the impact of alternative implementation dates, compare the ROI/TCO of your offering to your competitors, and provide revolutionary value to your client in giving them a glimpse into the future of their organizational costs.

Activity-based Experiences

This approach has been tried, tested, and proven extremely effective for both technology vendors as well as consultants recruited to provide vendor and technology selection services.

Vendor Experience

Larry Deering, VP of Sales at Echopass Corporation, has successfully implemented the use of activity-based analysis for his sales team in the process of projecting the business impact and ROI of his company’s hosted contact center services. Echopass provides on-demand contact center services including more effective management of telephone, email, chat, fax and self-service applications.

The sales team at Echopass was challenged with the ability to effectively communicate the value of their solutions in tangible detail. They had general information to provide about how their solutions would solve a problem, but were not able to reveal how their prospective customer’s organization would change when their solution was implemented.

Regarding the advantages that activity-based analysis has added to his sales process, Larry states, “Providing our sales team with the ability to reveal to the customer their future costs and productivity level before implementing our solution, as well as to quickly show them how our offering will positively change their current forecast, we are able to re-invent the sales person/client relationship. When you remove the “hype” typically involved in the sales presentation and make the benefits clear and specific with goal metrics the client can measure, the sales cycle is both smoothed and shortened.”

Consultant Experience

Michael Bitter, independent contact center consultant and affiliate of Intervox Group, recently experienced the advantages that activity-based analysis provides in a consulting engagement. Michael was brought in on a project whereby the client had experienced a huge influx of calls to their customer support center, which can happen to any such center as the result of an explosive marketing campaign, product re-call, service interruption, or a number of other reasons. Michael has a vast understanding of contact center technology in addition to his strong background in operations and metrics. He helps his clients to identify potential areas for operational process improvements and to develop and implement technology-based productivity enhancing solutions.

In the past, as most consultants do, he relied on his experience with the technology being considered and its effect on the customer environment to make his recommendations. Some of the challenges he faced included providing an accurate business case to support his recommendation, and quantifying to his customer the scope of the issues they had to overcome. He needed to make his customer see the impact of the problems they were facing in order to justify funding for the solution to these problems.

Using activity-based analysis, Michael was able to show the customer that unless something was done to significantly enhance productivity in their center, they would be faced with consequences including huge increases to the personnel required to handle the extra calls. Because personnel accounts for an average of 70% of the costs in a customer support or contact center, that would mean a huge impact on their budget and loss of profit.

Regarding this engagement, Michael stated, “This project resulted in the development a road-map to fixing their problem, including technology implementations and non-technology related process improvements. Using activity-based analysis, I was able to analyze the options and highlight the technology and process changes that would best solve the problem by defining the ROI of the selections. Thanks to the use of activity-based analysis, I was not only able to overcome the challenges mentioned above, according to the client I was also able to exceed their expectations and position myself as the expert to turn to for future consultations.”

Conclusion

The above testimonials represent many successes for sales teams and consultants using activity-based analysis to quantify and monitor their offerings and recommendations. Selling entails an ever-evolving relationship between vendor and prospect. As a sales professional, you must be forward-thinking and anticipate the future requirements of your prospect. An activity-based sales tool can provide you with the ability to help your prospect become a client and help your client control the future of their organization.

Sales professionals can now view the narrated PPT presentation Using Activity-based ROI to Quantify the Impact of Your Solution

Consultants can view the presentation Consultants! Win with a Primary Matters Partnership

For More Information

Contact Primary Matters, Inc. at (902) 794-7095 or visit our website at www.primarymatters.com. Primary Matters provides software products and services that enable activity-based budgeting, planning and business impact analyses. The company’s solution provides decision support and aids in faster funding approval. Its flagship product, The Primary Matters Guide® is activity-based, content rich software that uncovers underlying costs in contact centers. With The Guide™, business goals are linked to the resource requirements needed to meet these goals.