Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals

Chapter 15

Business Case Whiteboards

Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.

—Albert Einstein

As it relates to sales, Einstein's quote is instructive in two ways:

1. If you want to use metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) as part of making a business case for your products or services, they had better be ones that matter to your prospects and that are highly relevant to their strategic goals and objectives.

2. Business value derived from a product or service cannot be measured solely in a qualitative fashion; quantitative benefits are also important considerations.

When it comes to the quantitative counting, at some point in the sales process (usually in the later stages), your prospect will need to justify the purchase of your product, solution, or service to the bean counters, who may include the CFO, controller, or other members of upper management who control the purse strings. In many cases, providing this data is merely a formality; your buyer needs to check a box that you have provided some sort of ROI or TCO (total cost of ownership) data to back up the decision. This is just more ammunition your champion needs when freeing up budgets controlled by others.

As it relates to our fictional prospect—Foody's Fresh Foods—we know their upper management and Board of Directors have a number of strategic goals and objectives. The key is to count the value of Cool Road Trucking's benefits in a way that maps directly to these ...