Make Your Next ROI Conversation Impactful

We all want to run to the logical reason—a customer is going to save money, make money, or mitigate risk—and that’s certainly important. But don’t be in such a rush to put those return on investment (ROI) figures in front of your customers. If you run too quickly to the logical reason of why a customer should buy your solution, your pitch may fall flat.

Why? It’s simple. Customers care about their business, not yours.

Being successful in today’s selling environment requires us as salespeople to tap into our emotional side as well as our logical side. At the end of the day, we need to be storytellers. We need to convey ideas that should frankly “scare the heck” out of customers! Take customers to the dark place, before showing them the light at the end of the tunnel—which is of course a new path forward that leads those customers to value the unique things that make your company and your solution, special.

But where do compelling stories come from? 

Well, here’s a quick thought exercise to get you started. Think about the next customer conversation on your calendar and ask yourself the following questions:

What’s my hypothesis for the business problem this customer is currently facing?
What do I know about this problem that the customer either doesn’t know, or has failed to recognize?
How should the customer go about resolving that challenge?

Now, try answering those questions without including your company’s products, services, or solutions in the response.

Absent of your company’s offerings, the answers to those questions provide the building blocks for a powerful story and help you to introduce new perspectives to customers during your pitch that will capture his/her attention. This will then allow you to build the business case for why that new perspective matters.

That’s the key to building a world-class ROI calculator. Don’t build the business case around the “ROI of buying your stuff”—instead, build the story around the “ROI of solving the problem you just taught the customer they have”.

Another way to think about this is to focus on ROPE versus ROI, where ROPE = Return on Pain Eliminated. What is the expected return a customer can expect if they eliminate the pain that we just taught them about.

SLC Members, learn more about building a commercial teaching pitch.