THE COMPELLING REASON TO BUY: PART I, THE CURRENT BUSINESS ISSUE

Whether you’re battling other solution suppliers for your unfair share of discretionary budgets or your company is striving to cross the chasm to the larger market of mainstream adopters, knowing how to articulate a compelling reason to buy your solution is a critical skill. Most sizable orders are scrutinized by multiple people with a penchant for asking questions in a
quest to stop the purchase before it happens. As we kick off the fourth quarter, let’s review some basic concepts for articulating the compelling reasons to buy your solution.

In the Enterprise Selling methodology, we identify three components that make up the compelling reason to buy: the Current Business Issue (CBI), the underlying people/process/technology Challenges that are impeding the CBI, and the Impact of not resolving the CBI. This article will be dedicated to the CBI, with two more on the Challenges and Impact topics to follow.

The CBI is defined as the most important business issue that is currently on the radar of the contact. This inherently means that there may be more than one CBI if there are multiple stakeholders involved with the purchase of your solution. For example, while the CEO may be reeling from a board meeting where s/he was chastised for letting expenses get out of control,
the CSO is still held accountable for hitting the revenue numbers on a quarterly basis and the VP of Engineering is still under pressure to make the committed product release schedule, among other issues for other stakeholders in the organization.  The more CBI’s we can address and the higher the level of CBI connection we can obtain will help our articulation of the compelling reason to buy our solution above other alternative uses of funds.

Let’s say you’re selling a Social Collaboration Platform for Enterprise customers. Given the example above, the vendor that is able to validate their solution will improve time to market by increasing collaboration in engineering, enhance the average contract value of new purchases by sharing best practices amongst the sales organization, and reduce expenses by capturing expert knowledge (instead of flying the waterwalkers to multiple meetings) is more likely to get approval than another vendor that simply articulates their solution as an interesting set of capabilities: “we can handle twice the Database size”, or “our code is certified by three independent industry coalitions”.

So how do we uncover the CBI’s? The first step is to do some basic research on the target prospect. It takes two minutes to look up a 10Q on the internet and scan for poor performance in a number of categories. It’s also a couple of mouse clicks to google “<Customer Name> News” producing a list of articles on recent news coming out of the organization. There are lots
of industry analysts, press reporters and bloggers doing this work for you. You simply need to find them. I also advocate googling the name of the contact to see if they have been quoted recently on any relevant topic.

The second approach is to ask. You could start by saying, “I noticed on your 10Q filing that expenses were up very high compared to last year. Is that a current sore spot?” Or
you could leave it wide open, “Before we begin, I would like to shape our conversation about the issue that you care about most, how would you describe the most important business issue on your agenda?” And finally, you could take an educated guess based on the contact’s
role, industry, or other profiling factor, “I talk to a lot of VP’s of Marketing who tell me that measuring the outcome of specific marketing campaigns is the most important issue on their agenda, is that the same for you?” (This is also an example of leveraging the bowling alley analogy in Crossing the Chasm. Leverage the knowledge about why others bought your solution.)

But don’t stop with the first contact. This conversation needs to be repeated with every stakeholder to uncover the constellation of business issues that they care about, and finding as many as we can that we can address to increase the compelling nature of our value proposition.

Last point! When you find one or more CBI’s, use them! Every conversation, presentation, proposal or other communication should include a recap of your understanding of the CBI’s. “Today’s presentation is targeted at how we can address your company’s need to reduce
expenses, get your product to market faster, and sell larger transactions.
Before we begin, are there any other business issues I should know about?”  The more you reconfirm the CBI’s the more likely the prospect will hear the compelling reason to buy your solution, and the more likely they will repeat your message to other stakeholders that you
don’t have access to.

In summary, the first leg of the compelling reason triangle is the CBI. Next time, I’ll examine the role that underlying Challenges play in the articulation of the compelling reason to buy your solution.

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