Any Small business needs to keep their pipeline full. This requires the sales reps to have solid prospecting and engagement skills. On top of that, they need to prospect to decision makers, which help keep their sales cycles down, make their deals larger, and will help keep your margins somewhat intact. This is never easy to do. So has does your CFO fit into this equation?
Let’s look at two critical elements, which your CFO can easily help with to knock down doors and make your meetings, from day one to closure, more effective and best of all, give you a competitive advantage. The way that the CFO can best help is to separate the “value” of your products, solutions, services, etc. into “quantitative and qualitative” elements. The first isquantitative, as do we bring, measure and benchmark our worth as a vendor partner? This is measured in value, things that solve problems in a measurable way(free “gifts of Knowledge”), which of course translates into dollars and cents. The CFO can help you to understand how your offering moves the needle and throughefficiency, better processes, new technology, etc., create a better environment for your customer to make money.
Any good CFO can easily look at your solutions and explain to you how the customers will do things faster, better, easier, and more collaboratively, etc. and in essence run a better business. In essence, make more money. Considering the costs of most solutions or services, the costs are relatively small as compared to the thousands or millions the company receives back in value. Over the life of the system or solution, typically measured in 3-5 years, the gains or value can be very substantial. Sales reps need to be able to convey this to decision makers, who ultimately decide if you get the win. Being able to speak their language is a huge differentiator and if the Rep is the first one in, you’re in a great position to win 35% more times.
The second isqualitative. This where your customer receives indirect or difficult to measure gains. Your CFO can help you become versed in things like more efficiencies, more productivity, better teamwork, etc. If your product or solution helps produce these things, it is still of high value, those these gains are very difficult to measure. In essence, you learn from you CFO that business decisions are made on both qualitative and quantitative value deliveries.
For the Sale Reps that have 5-7 years of experience, beyond beginners, they can learn to acquire skills where they can explain in financial terms the value of what they are selling. Most CFO’s will go past a ROI explanation, whether detailed or “lite” as they typically are weak in what we call the “assumptions”. These are the premises on what the ROI is based on. They are typically industry statements but should be customer statements of the value they received from your product or solutions. This is really the case. The better way to go, if the Sales rep can grasp the actual measures that express value in the decision maker’s language. After all, if you sell mono:mono to a decision maker, you receive all the benefits of being seen as a “trusted advisor”.
This language includes how you deliver superior metrics than your competitor. This includes improved cash flow usually over 5 years, higher IRR (measuring the internal rate of return a company gets to assess capital projects) better use of the corporations money or NPV (used in capital budgeting to analyze the profitability of a projected investment or project). Sounds complicated? It is. BUT SDM has worked with dozens of small business where the CFO has been able to get this down to a one-pager and help the Rep present and close using a well laid out but extremely brief tool.
In the end, a startup that lives value, is blessed. One that is compassionate with its Rep’s will build a great company that could get a super valuation and make money for everyone.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.