How to Get the Information to Build a Perfect Business Case

In last week’s post, Build the Perfect Business Case, I shared how including a business case in your proposals creates the sense of urgency you need to get prospects and customers to sign right now. Many sales reps avoid doing it because they’re concerned that their customers won’t give them the information.

If you think about it, though, you owe it to your customers to provide them a business case that will help them make a more informed decision. And, creating a business case isn't as hard as you might think if you know what information you need and what questions to ask.

What Info to Get

Whenever customers make a buying decision, they're trying to accomplish something in their business. They may want to solve a particular problem, grow their business, reduce costs, improve productivity or more. Your goal is to find out not only what they want to accomplish, but why. What’s happening in their business that they want to change?

There are three key areas to pay attention to as you discuss their needs:

1. Scope: How to many people, departments or organizations are affected within the company.
2. Severity: How critical the need is to those people, departments or organizations.
3. Value: The financial impact of the need on the organization.

What Questions to Ask

Scope, severity and value information is the foundation of your financial business case and uncovering it can start as early as your first prospecting call. As your prospects and customers are pouring their hearts out describing their challenge or sharing their visions, start asking questions to identify the impact of it on the organization. What happens if they accomplish their objective? What if they don’t?

As you start identifying their needs in more depth, get specific to uncover the precise financial data you require. Don’t worry. Your prospects will answer these questions. Why? Because they want your help! They want to accomplish their vision or solve that problem. Asking these questions actually helps them solidify the business case in their own mind.

In determining the scope, you may ask your prospect how many employees are impacted by the current situation. Is the entire company affected or only a small group of people? Are customers and vendors impacted, too?

As they’re answering, they may share the severity of the situation. But if not, expand your questioning. Let's say your customer is stressing a need to keep its data secure. Perhaps it's being regulated, and if it was to be audited it might face a stiff fine. How would this affect the company’s ability to do business as usual? Would customers find out? Would its reputation be impacted? Getting down to the details is essential here.

You can see how easy it would be to move from asking about the severity to uncovering the value. How much is a typical fine? If the company's customers found out, what would their response be? If it lost even one customer, what would that mean in lost revenue? What would the company have to spend to fix the violations? How long would that take? How would it impact the company's costs? What about its revenue?

Once you get started, it’s hard to stop. The questions just keep coming because you—and the prospect—suddenly see not just what the business case is, but also what the solution must accomplish to address the real issue. Before you know it, not only have you financially justified the solution, but you’ve probably expanded it, too. Your prospect can’t wait to get your proposal with everything documented. All because you wanted to fully understand the business situation so you could build the perfect business case.

Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert, author of the newly released book, “The Sales Magnet,” and the award winning book, “Selling Against the Goal,” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment.