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Do you have a systematic approach for selling to executives and demonstrating how your outsourcing services create value?

Buyers must progress through a sequence of attitudes or states of mind before they make an investment:  Awareness, Interest and Conviction.  “Awareness” is created through marketing efforts.  Leads are generated from those who are aware.  Lead generation is the segue from “awareness” to “interest”.  Lead-generating activities, such as trade shows, cold calls, referrals, networking, and others create the first level of interest.  From this point forward, the rest is up to the sales professional!

Creating interest and converting interest to conviction requires a clear approach to demonstrating how you create value.  Key to the success of value assessment is embracing the importance of building a business case and working at the executive level to endorse it.

Value assessment for outsourcing has 5 principle phases that lead you to the business case for outsourcing.  They are:

1. Profiling
2. Executive Introduction
3. Discovery
4. The Executive Feedback Session
5. Final Business Case Proposal

Profiling is the research step that prepares you for engaging the prospect.  Key areas to research include their experience with outsourcing, key industry conditions that effect their business decisions and more.  Sound research will payoff immediately; the next step is introducing yourself to the executive team.

Executive Introduction is the first proactive step with the prospect.  The purpose is to initiate executive relationships, create interest in your services and establish credibility for you and your company.  Two important objectives of this step are:  gaining support to work with the organization to develop a preliminary business case (Discovery), and obtaining a follow-up meeting (the Executive feedback Session) with the executive(s) to share the findings.

Discovery includes all activities required to build your preliminary business case.  This step is characterized by explorations (of business impact), collaboration (with the customer), evaluation and agreement (on findings).  Building the preliminary business case means validating tangible and intangible benefits, developing a set of assumptions, doing return-on-investment and more.

The Executive Feedback Session is a discussion and presentation of the preliminary business case with the executive(s).  The objective is convert interest to conviction.  This meeting is not a persuasive closing meeting.  It is a time to share findings while validating assumptions and results.  The sales team must be very ask-oriented in order to confirm the executives’ feelings.  The next step may be to go back to Discovery and refine the business case, or it may be the final business case presentation.

The Final Business Case Proposal is the last step.  Once the customer has a strong conviction that value will be created, you can present your final proposal along with the final business case.  This meeting must include the executive sponsors as well as all stakeholders.

Value assessment is not optional today.  Outsourcing, for all its successes, has experienced plenty of failures.  In addition, if you consider the organizational commitment and change required, you can understand why buyers must have a clear sense of business value before they make a decision.

ÓCopyright 2003 Pretium Partners, Inc.

Published:  January 17, 2003

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