Lesson 38 - Convince the Economic Buyer

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Winning over the economic buyer requires a tailored business case presentation that aligns to key business initiatives, proves ROI, and includes relevant case studies. In this lesson, you’ll learn strategies to present your solution’s value effectively to this critical stakeholder. Your assignment will involve drafting a full business case tailored to an economic buyer’s priorities. 

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to convince the economic buyer at your target organization that your solution is the right one for them by presenting a compelling business case. Now, if you've never created a business case before, don't worry. We're going to walk you through it step by step. But the reason that this needs to be so compelling is that economic buyers are entrusted with the company budget for a reason. Normally, they are very diligent in making purchasing decisions, and they want to make sure that all of their i's are dotted, their T's are crossed, before they make that decision. So let's talk about how we can break down a business case, the first thing you need to do is write down the high level strategic objectives that your solution is solving for this customer. So this should be something that you learned during your discovery with different stakeholders. And if you don't have that information yet, you're probably not ready to present a business case. You need to normally pick like, two or three high level objectives, and these need to be very strategic. We're not looking for feature by feature breakdowns here. Economic buyers don't care about stuff like that. They want to see at the solution level what problems you're solving and make sure that for each one in a short and easy to understand explanation. Write out how your solution addresses them. Next you're going to prove it. We've talked about proof points throughout this entire course. They are so important, especially when you're talking to an economic buyer. So you want to make sure that you are presenting proof on how you are going to solve these high level challenges, and you can do this in a couple of ways. If they're a new prospect, you can use external testimonials, so case studies that highlight how similar companies have successfully implemented your solution and achieved results. This also kind of creates some FOMO like some fear of missing out by showing that their competitors are gaining an advantage by using your solution, and they're not an example of this might be, you know, we helped trendy threads increase their social media engagement by 40% and reduce their customer acquisition cost by 20% I'd love to explore how we can achieve similar results for your team, or I'm confident we can achieve similar results for your team. If you have quotes or video testimonials from other customers who have solved the same challenge, make sure that you bring those as well. Even better, if you can put the executive or economic buyer in touch with those customers, I realize that's a little harder to do. Use third party validation, use g2 Gartner, Forrester, whatever third party reports your solution is normally found on, make sure that you're using reputable agencies that the customer or prospect would trust, and then use survey data from your customers. So ask your product marketing team or your product team if they've done any case studies to validate the value that your solution is bringing already to your customers. If your prospect is already a customer, maybe you're trying to expand within an existing account. For example, use quotes from their own employees. This is incredibly powerful, right? If interview your internal champions, their power users, get quotes about the value that you're already providing their team, and basically, you're using an internal case study to prove that you can be trusted to bring the value that you're saying you'll bring and then use any internal reporting, adoption, reporting, usage, reporting, growth, reporting, any reports to show current rates or current value that you're bringing this customer can be a big win, because past success predicts future success, and it also helps to alleviate the unknown or the risk or uncertainty of buying your product, if you can show that you're already providing ground swell within their organization. All right? So we've showed the top three challenges that they have and how we're solving them, and we've showed proof points to show that we can solve them in the way that we promise next. You want to get rid of your competition. Don't shy away from the competition. They are evaluating you against somebody, status quo, one of your competitors, etc. So you need to be showing a detailed competitive breakdown that highlights the gaps in the economic buyers current solution, as well as the gaps of any other solution that they're considering. Make sure you clearly show the ways that your product is better than anything else they're looking at. And more importantly, don't just show the features. Don't just show a lot of people put up a checklist that's like, here are the features they have and the features we have, and look how many more checks we have. That's not enough. You need to. Show why those features matter and how those features tie in to their high level business problems that you're trying to solve. So you might say, like our analysis shows that while your current platform covers the basics, it lacks the advanced analytics and integration capabilities that Sprout Social offers. These features are crucial. They will help you stay ahead of the competition by providing deeper insights and more streamlined operations for your team. So just a quick kind of anecdote on why these are better once you've showed the competitive slide, the differentiation next you want to show your long term product vision. You need to let the economic buyer or executive sponsors know that they're partnering with someone that has a long term strategy that is going to keep you ahead of the pack and keep you successful. So if you have a good product roadmap, bring it share a visual or timeline with the prospect economic buyers want to make sure they're investing in a solution that will provide them with a stable, secure future. Yeah, you also want to bring in anything that might help get around any blockers. So if you know that it or procurement might be a big blocker, add a slide or two on your security features, your compliance, your trust team. You know anything, you don't have to do that. But if it's something that you think is going to is going to be an objection, the point in the business case is really that, after you show it, they should have no more objections. There shouldn't be anything else to talk about, right? You've shown you can solve their problems. You've shown you can solve it better than everyone else. You've provided proof. You've gotten rid of objections, and then at the end, you want to show the price of your solution, and arguably more importantly, the ROI that you're going to bring them after they pay that price. You don't just want to put your price up on the board, and especially, you don't want that to be the first time they've ever seen the price, because the sticker shock can ruin anything that you've just said, you need to be bringing them along for the journey with price. You need to be showing ROI every step of the way. By the time you get to the business case, the ROI should be a foregone conclusion, and you should just be putting that up to let them know the ROI calculations that show the true value of your solution. I make sure I haven't missed anything. Oh, yeah, when you're showing the cost, make sure that you include all costs. You don't want to show them the cost, have them agree to it, and then later you provide them with some additional hidden costs. You need to be showing them professional services, integration, onboarding, any other costs that they're going to spend, whether that's upfront or ongoing, it all needs to be laid out on the table once you've built your business case and aligned on it with your pod, internal pod, which is normally your CSM, your SDR, your solution engineer, your mentor, your manager, etc, schedule your business case presentation with the economic buyer. Make sure to include any stakeholders that have yet to sign off on the final purchase. Everybody needs to be there, right? This should be like the big bang at the end of the call or at the end of the sales process, right? Um, as an added bonus, see if you can bring an executive from your own organization to show kind of, the clout, the credibility, the seriousness that you're ready to sign these documents and get this thing moving forward. And then, once you're on the call, present your business case, ensure you touch on any key challenges, our solutions, proof points, competitive analysis, product, vision, financial impact, and at that point, it's time to close the sale and begin finalizing and signing contracts. So don't be afraid to be confident and ask them, hey, if there are no further objections, are we ready to to become partners. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. You are going to build a business case for the economic buyer of one of your top prospective accounts. Your study guide is going to walk you through this, but you're going to cover everything that we just covered, all of the different pieces of it, and the format is really up to you. It could be a Word document, it could be a spreadsheet, it could be a PowerPoint, Google slide, any visual representation, you know, whatever makes sense for your customers, but those are the elements that you want to have on it. Once you've completed your business case, you want to run it by your pod, your mentor, your manager for feedback, and yeah, and then you want to schedule the call and get ready to present your final business case. That is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.