Why You Must Align a Prospect’s Business Drivers with Your Solutions

Knowing the company’s problems, initiatives and opportunities before starting a conversation with a new prospect is extremely important. Using their latest earnings call transcript, you can determine the company’s business goals for the short-term and the long-term. You must align your solution and value proposition with their business drivers so the decision makers can better understand your solution’s long-term ROI. CSO Insights’ 2009 survey found that sales reps that align their solutions with the company’s business drivers are far more successful. Account planning and forecasting are the two best things you can do before you start the conversation with a prospect. However, they are two of the most difficult things for a sales rep to do. Both must address what is driving their business now and in the future.

Source: http://www.ciber.com/blog/article.cfm?articleid=2010011934601

If you do your homework and determine the business drivers, you’ll start seeing if your solution really fits at the company you’re targeting. The information you find can enable you to ask the right questions at the right time, and to demonstrate that you’re very knowledgeable about the company and aren’t just trying to make a quick sale. You’ll most likely close the deal faster and exceed the client’s expectations. The following are some examples of real business drivers at Fortune 1000 companies that you may be able align an IT solution with:

• Boeing has been working to consolidate their data centers. They began the project with about 60 data centers and are down to six as of December 2009. Their final goal is to have three, which will create significant cost reductions in the power drain.
• Hertz has expanded company-wide efficiency initiatives utilizing the Hertz Improvement Process; their own version of Lean/Six Sigma. They are eliminating wasted time and resources from car and equipment rental operations and administrative functions, and cascading “best practices” throughout their global organization.
• A Morgan Stanley IT project in 2010 is to grow their grid-computing environment, which includes the engines that the firm uses to conduct risk and analytic computations. CIO of Enterprise Infrastructure Dave Reilly said, “We set ourselves a goal of being able to provide 18,000 to 20,000 grid servers at a remote computing site that will dramatically reduce our server cost.”

Business drivers are the groundwork for starting a sale. Once you know what they are, you can determine if you should go after that account or move on to the next one. Don’t try to force your solution upon a company. You probably won’t get the sale. Even worse, if you do close the sale, the solution might not live up to their standards and won’t provide the ROI they were expecting.

The best approach is to ask the right questions so you can better understand your prospect’s business drivers and get a clear picture of what they’re trying to accomplish before wasting any more of their (and YOUR) valuable time.

- Mark Kilens
mark . kilens@salesquest.com
978-749-9999 ext. 118