The Only Value is Business Value
“We’re never going to sell to a CEO,” said one founder of an enterprise data management company when I suggested focusing on the business value of their offering.
This is not an uncommon feeling. The founders of this company are technical, their product is technical, initial users are technical and they’ve had sales traction with technical counterparts. It’s more comfortable and emotionally safer to focus on and nerd out with those who already understand (Sellers are emotional too!).
Yet as Sellers seek to scale beyond early adopters and insiders, the most important thing they can do is develop a coherent story about their business impact. Why?
The only value is business value. The technical value of your offering is relevant only to the extent it directly or indirectly creates business value, because the primary purpose of any company is to create business value.
How does Seller’s offering help generate or sustain revenue? How does it help the Buyer gain and retain its customers? How does it help Buyer achieve its business priorities?
Seller’s technical value and outcomes matter, of course, but every cost at a company must be justified, directly or indirectly, by its perceived business value.
Who’s Responsible for Explaining your Business Value?
Avoiding making a business argument doesn’t escape its importance, even if your users are technical. Instead, it simply means someone at your Buyer organization must infer it on Seller’s behalf.
The business is always involved in technical purchasing decisions, including:
Initial Purchase
Renewal
Expansion
Cost Cutting Targets
New Executive Priorities/Changes
Setting Technical Budgets
At many of these decision-points, often outside the presence of the Seller, the business will ask - “what is the business impact of this solution?”
Are you comfortable relying on your Buyer to understand and explain your business value on your behalf?
Seller’s website, marketing materials and outreach messages are the easiest way to control the narrative around business value. Buyers will lean on this message and parrot it as they internally sell – but only if Seller communicates it.
Churn and lost sales (you thought were closed) are often painful because they are unexpected. While there is usually strong alignment on technical value, they occur because Buyer is unable to make a compelling argument for the relevance and urgency of Seller’s offering.
In those cases, the most immediate way to create business value is by removing or avoiding the cost of Seller’s product.
The “So What” Process
Technical value indirectly creates business value. The “so what” process enables Sellers to develop a coherent story of how their product’s technical value creates business value.
Starting with Seller’s immediate outcomes, keep asking “So what”, continually pushing how it changes or affects your Buyer’s business until you reach revenue (or other prioritized business outcome). Here’s an example:
[Technical Value] XYZ enables data engineering teams to process data requests 10x faster – So what?
Currently, data engineering teams cannot meet all data requests of the business → So what?
~75% of employees cannot rely on data to make business decisions → So what?
A majority of employees are still relying on manual decision-making despite having the requisite data and analytics tools to make data-driven business decisions → So what?
Buyer CEO has said publicly that “digital transformation” is the organization's greatest opportunity to create sustainable competitive advantage → So what?
Achieving the CEO’s goals are impossible unless every employee has the right data, at the right time, and in the right format
[Business Value] Ensuring every employee has the right data, in the right format, when they need it.
You may not be selling directly to the CEO, but every Seller should be able to articulate its business impact and value. It’s what your Buyers really care about.
