Communicating Value in Demos

Far too often vendors tell customers, “With our solution you’ll save $1 million dollars each year…!”

What’s wrong with this? 

Two sets of problems:

1.     The vendor’s numbers are simply not believable.

2.     The vendor is out of alignment with the customer, in terms of units.

Let’s explore…

With respect to believability of value information, consider the following:

1.     The best value numbers are the customer’s actual numbers – information that came from the customer’s lips.

2.     Next best are numbers from other, similar customers.

3.     After that are “industry” numbers, e.g. from Gartner.

4.     Lowest on the list (and far below!) are numbers from the vendor.

Next, let’s talk about alignment.  Let’s say the customer has the following people in the demo meeting:  a couple of middle managers, a handful of staffers, and a system admin. 

So, when the vendor says, “With our solution you’ll save $1 million dollars each year…!” who resonates with this statement, given the customer team above?  No one!

Why?  Because only executive care (mostly) about money.   Here’s one way to map value in alignment with your customers’ organizational levels:

-        Executives – care (mostly) about money saved, gained, or loss avoidance.

-        Middle Managers – care (mostly) about human resources gained, saved or redeployed to other more valuable tasks.

-        Staffers – care (mostly) about saving time in their day-to-day and week-by-week work.

-        System Admins – also care (mostly) about saving or minimizing the time spent in the administration of the software.

So, in our example above, the vendor would have had much more success with the following statements:

“So, if I recall correctly, you (managers) are looking to redeploy 4 FTE’s to other, more valuable tasks…” and “you (staffers) would like to each save about 1.5 days each week…” and “you (system admin) hope to reduce set-up from 30 days to a few hours…”, followed by “Is my understanding all correct?”

Here, the value is

(1) in alignment with how each level perceives value and

(2) the value information all came from the customer. 

Delightful!