How to be Justification Ready with Bruce Scheer and Darrin Fleming

Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show, where value pros get value ready. In this episode of the ValuePros Show, I'm joined by my fellow cofounder, Darrin Fleming, to explore how to be justification ready, a key capability for becoming a true value professional in sales. We dive into why having a solid business case is crucial for facilitating the buyer journey in closing more deals. We also break down the 5 essential keys to justification readiness. Darrin and I share insights on aligning with strategic goals, developing data driven business cases, quantifying ROI, leveraging industry benchmarks, and addressing both tangible and intangible benefits. Whether you're new to value selling or looking to sharpen your skills, this episode provides actionable advice to help you become justification ready and improve your win rate. Well, Darrin, gosh, welcome to this episode. I'm so excited for this.

Bruce Scheer: This episode that we're doing today is on being justification ready. And it's part of our overall value ready assessment and approach for helping value pros be value ready. So, just to give you a little bit of context on this, Darrin, myself, one of our other cofounders, and some of our key affiliates, we put our heads together, all of our experience to frame up what we see is a value ready assessment. And how can you as a ValuePros Show up value ready for your buyers? And what we concluded is there's 4 key phases in doing this. The first case is building trust. And to be value ready and building trust, there's 3 key dimensions, being credibility ready, client ready, and then also narrative ready, having a story to tell. Then you move into phase number 2, which is understand needs. And that's where you need to show up buyer ready, because, of course, we all know there's multiple stakeholders in the buying process.

Bruce Scheer: And then also discovery ready, making sure you're asking the right questions, questions they're gonna appreciate, and questions they are gonna let you find out where that value lies. Then we move into the deliver insights phase where you wanna demonstrate value and your solution. And most importantly, you need to be justification ready to get all those different buying stakeholders and approvers on the bus so they can make the right decision with you and your solution. And then you move into phase number 4, driving execution, which includes being approval ready, making sure everybody's gotta say, signs off on the dotted line, you're ready to roll. You have the negotiations you need to have, making sure you're negotiation ready, and then making sure you're impact ready, that you deliver on that promise and your client is actually achieving the value that you promised for them. And there's a lot of discipline around being impact ready. So So if you missed the other episodes, oh my, check out the podcast. You're gonna see the other episodes as they drop weekly.

Bruce Scheer: And then also on our YouTube channel, you'll see those there. But, again, today, we're talking about being justification ready. And Darrin is our leading expert in that area. And, Darrin, go ahead and tell us why is this so important? And you personally, what's this mean for you?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. Thanks. I'm really glad to be participating today. Thanks, Bruce. Actually, if you go back, obviously, we've known each other for a lot of years, but go back even before we met early in my career being an engineer in manufacturing, I actually became a trained economic evaluator. So as an engineer, that was kind of a little bit not my comfort zone, but and what I was actually doing within the plant was evaluating all the projects that were either capital or operational improvement projects to say, are which ones are the best ones? Which ones should we really invest in? And if you don't know it, your customers are doing something like that, most likely evaluating and ranking and deciding of all the investments they can make, what are the ones that they're going to make? So I was doing that from the inside and then went out and started consulting and doing more and more consulting over time and started a global consulting organization within a large industrial company. And while I was doing that, what I realized over time was I was spending most of my time and my team were spending a lot of their time building business cases and building the justification for why they should move forward and doing that justification ready steps. So it became just core to a lot of what I was doing as going through that.

Darrin Fleming: And it's a crucial step in the entire process to make sure that you've got the justification to move forward.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely, Darrin. Gosh. I'll date us both, but I even remember, Darrin, you getting your job where you need to put together your whole business case and make sure it was justification ready just so you could stand up the whole professional services practice. And you did that as a consultant, then you did such a great job that became a full time position, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

Darrin Fleming: Yep. Yep. Exactly.

Bruce Scheer: You sold the organization on that whole path forward, which was awesome. So, anyways, yeah, there's so many different reasons for being justification ready. I'd like to just state that most sellers don't do this step all that well. I'd say probably 1 out of 10 even gets into the ballpark of shaping up a proper justification. And when that doesn't happen, then you're expecting your internal buyers to do it because Right. Somebody's gotta do it, especially if it's a high consideration decision, or big ticket type of decision or a bet the business type of decision, strategic. Somebody's got to put together the justification to make sure that deal can go forward. Most sellers don't.

Bruce Scheer: And then you're relying on the internal buyers. They don't understand the solution domain, the potential impacts that they're missing the mark. So why do 6 out of 10 deals fail? They don't move forward. This step is is really missing. But back to the big why, if you as a value professional salesperson can facilitate that buying journey, help your buyer shape that justification proposal, the business case, if you would, man, oh, man, are you standing apart from all the competitors, the competitive pack? You're standing apart as a star to help your client really lead the charge and help everybody connect the dots, see the value. So you're standing apart from the norm from the get go as a value professional in doing this. And when it's done well, you know, you're gonna close more deals more often. You increase your win rate.

Bruce Scheer: Everybody wins, and the customer wins because they don't stumble and take months to buy. They can get to a decision a little bit faster or sometimes quite a bit faster when the business case is there and the imperative is very well laid out. It can dramatically influence that buying cycle, the sales cycle associated with that, and that win rate most importantly. So so many dimensions of why in my mind, Darrin.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. Absolutely. And I'm gonna talk some more as we go through this about some of those stats and some of the data around how it does improve all the things you just talked about, so there's no question. And actually, you made a really good point, that having been on the inside doing the evaluation, I can guarantee I didn't know all of the potential benefits. If the partner vendor hadn't helped me understand, I was going based on just an internal analysis and not looking at the whole picture. In many cases, probably missing some value dimensions that I didn't recognize or understand.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yeah. So this is where you're really encapsulating all that value and helping to make that very clear, very compelling. I might even say catalyzing in terms of getting people to take action based on the justification you bring forward. So but let's do get into the stats, Darrin, a little bit. Yeah. Do you wanna explain this for us a bit?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. So these are kinda the ugly truths of why deals aren't won in all too many cases. So as you already said, the 60% number, 60% is the no decision number. 60% of deals die in the pipeline, and you may even still be trying to chase it, spending a lot of effort trying to close it. But more often than not, those deals that never get to a decision, a yes or no decision, is because there wasn't a business case. There wasn't a financial justification to say, let's move forward so that they could never gain approvals. Per this Forrester Research stat, 60% are lost. And not even lost, it's even worse than just losing.

Darrin Fleming: In many cases, it's just stuck in the cycle, and you're still chasing it, still thinking you've got a chance of winning, and you're never gonna win. So that's all too often. The next one is of those deals that are lost, 56% of them, the 56 is the percent of deals that are lost because or stick in that no decision because it's not believable. There's not a believable business case. So over half of the deals that never get to close or never make a decision are stuck because they don't have the confidence in the solution, and especially the economic buyer, the approvers, don't have that belief that, yes, this is real. This is something we should invest in. And then the 51% are of the deals that are won. So of the 40% of deals that are won, those go to most like or over half the time go to companies with an excellent business case that actually have proven the economic value, have demonstrated the economic value, and built that justification for the client.

Darrin Fleming: So working together with the buyers to help justify. So you win on both sides. You win on reducing the percentage time chasing the 60%. You reduce on increasing, getting lowering that 56% of the 60%. So reducing the 60% because you're building that business case. And then you also win because of the times when they are gonna move forward and make a decision, you win more of those deals.

Bruce Scheer: Perfect. And let me just do a quick flyover recap on this too, Darrin. These numbers are so critical, but the 60% of deals are lost to no decision, or sometimes people frame that as indecision, as you mentioned, might be sitting there in your sales pipe line, and it just slips quarter by quarter, and everybody loses because of that time lag of just getting the decision or not. And what a horrible stat. 6 out of 10 deals dead on her. And we've got other data, value pros that typically people are only closing 1.5 out of 10 deals, so the competition's winning as well. Gosh. If we could cut down on the 60%, oh my god.

Bruce Scheer: That goes straight to the bottom line. Next, the 56% that you talked about of no decision losses are are due to this lack of confidence in the solution. And, Darrin, just to highlight that, you got that stat from Matt Dixon out of the the book, the jolt of facts, which has a bunch of data behind it, which is really powerful. But, yeah, a lot of that decision making is uncomfortable, and 56% don't make the decision because of that lack of confidence. And then the 51% that you highlighted came from CIO Insights, that 51% of 1 deals go to companies with an excellent business case. And, again, that's all an excellent business case does set up that justification in the proper way. So many reasons to get this right. Thanks for doing that homework for us, Darrin, and getting these stats, these key numbers that everybody should be thinking about, which really illustrate a huge opportunity in getting your justification straight, forming that into a business case, and closing more deals more often is really the bottom line.

Bruce Scheer: So back to the benefits, stand out like a star. Unlike other reps, you will be a value pro by getting your justification ready, and then get into your buyer's mind, helping them connect the dot. Then thirdly, when this is done right, it encapsulates a lot of value that they didn't see, you didn't see, you kinda co create this together with your champion and sponsor, making sure it's encapsulating as much value as possible, then that gets chopped around internally so you can close the deals. So so perfect.

Darrin Fleming: Absolutely. Yep. Then as you said, the middle part you talked about the mindshare, becoming the trusted adviser, becoming the trusted partner, kinda the whole consultative selling process, helping them really frame up, okay. What's the problem? How are we solving it? What's it worth to solve it? And then on the results side, there's some pretty powerful stats around that as well. If you do this well, you can increase your win rates by almost 50%, 48% on average. You can increase your deal sizes by 35%. So you can increase the size of the deals by not negotiating for discounts, adding more options, showing them why adding different things makes sense. And you can actually reduce your sales cycle by 25% for multiple reasons.

Darrin Fleming: One is you've got the business case, so it gets approved faster. 2nd is you can focus your effort on the deals that are gonna close, then reducing your time spent on the 60% that aren't gonna close, if the one part of the 60% that aren't gonna close. You know, so it's kinda reduces your time and effort. And part of that trusted adviser, the right answer might be for a client that doesn't make sense. And helping them get to that and doing the financial analysis and saying, you know what? This isn't a good fit. This isn't the right thing to do. That increases the trusted advisor, the trusted partner thing, and that's part of the financial analysis. And the justification ready step is making sure that the justification does exist, not making it up.

Darrin Fleming: You're not trying to pretend. You're trying to be real about it.

Bruce Scheer: Oh, gosh, Darrin. You remind me of a a story of me working with Avaya. I I've told you this before, but I was working with the product manager there. And he was trying to help his sellers get justification ready to sell this Avaya solution into account, And he asked me for help on how to do get everything justification ready, and what we determined was they were offering their clients a negative ROI. Right. Yep. And and being justification ready, and he was so grateful because that helped everybody redo the pricing on that particular offering to make sure the client was gonna get that economic value, the financial value associated with deploying that solution. And so that's what we're doing in being justification ready.

Bruce Scheer: It's not all about the numbers. There's emotional reasons, strategic reasons to make change, but all which you'll talk about for sure, Darrin, as we move into this how land, but it's also getting get getting the financial straight as well so everybody wins as part of this. And when that's done, you're the trust adviser and you get all the benefits that Darrin just highlighted, the bigger deals, the cross selling opportunities, and then the way shortened sales cycle, which by 25% that you mentioned, which is really powerful. Well, let's now turn the corner, Darrin, and and talk a little bit about how to be justification ready. I know there's a lot to this, and this is just an episode, but we're gonna give the high points for sure. And, Darrin, on this one, this kind of maps back to our value assessment. And I'll share that for the team here in being justification ready. What's it mean if you're a novice or you're a master? And we created this really cool assessment that's off our website at valuepros.ioforward/resources, you'll see a drop down there where you can get into our tools.

Bruce Scheer: And one of them that we're providing for free is a value ready assessment. So as an individual contributor, you can go into that and rate yourself across the different value ready dimensions, or you could even think about your team if you're a revenue leader and and where do they need help in being value ready. So on the justification paradigm, we have with that dimension, we've got it what it means to be a novice all the way up to what it means to be a master in here. So I would recommend definitely take advantage of that as you dig in because Darrin and I are just giving the high points today. But, Darrin, why don't you go ahead and talk about what it means to be a novice as a justification readiness?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. And it's as we said, this is probably more the norm than the exception is that most sellers and I think one of the critical things here is most sellers spend too much time focused on their product and the features and the things about them and their what they're doing, as opposed to focusing on the client and the outcomes that the client is trying to achieve and helping them understand how this is gonna change their business, how this is going to make their operations better, whatever that might be. So a novice is someone who spends too much time talking about the product, too much time focusing on themselves and what they do, not enough time focusing on what's the justification, what's the compelling reason why they should do something. And if they do get into any financial analysis, it's based on shoddy assumptions, it's based on things that really don't matter to the client, it's not tied to strategic objectives, it's not tied to what the company's trying to do or what they're trying to achieve. They don't get client buy in. They don't get their sponsor, the person they're working with, or the person they're working with to become a sponsor, to become the person who's actually gonna take it in front of the CFO and say, yes, I wanna do this, and here's why, and here's why I believe we need to do this, and why it fits with the overall objectives of the business. So they're kinda missing so many core elements, and unfortunately, like I said, it's, I think, the norm, not the exception.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Thank you, Darrin. So as you described the novice in our tool, I'll just speak to some of the language here. The the novice, they lack the skill to develop a compelling business case. They're often presenting weak justifications based on assumptions rather than real data. They struggle to connect the solution to the client's strategic objectives, so they're missing that alignment opportunity, and that leads to a failure in securing buy in from decision makers. So some of my summary points around this would be the novice they're not displaying business acumen in a way that's client centric, where the client can say, hey. Why does this make real good business sense? And that's just completely being missed, and it's probably more product oriented or solution oriented, more self focused than other focused, and, hence, hard to get that buy in.

Bruce Scheer: The justification is just not there. So that's the score number 1 in our assessment, novice. And let's talk next, Darrin, about what good looks like. You go ahead and lead us off.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. Absolutely. So the master is when you really do become a business partner. You really do understand their business. You become a student of your customer. You understand how it's gonna impact them, and you lead them through the economic analysis. You lead them through what's the problem, how big is the problem, how much is it worth to solve the problem, help them build the business case, the financial business case, and the rest of the business case, how it ties to the strategic objectives, what the message should be when they're going to get approval to tie it to make sure that if the company has 5 strategic objectives this year, that you're tying at least to 1 or 2 of those to make sure that it's going to excite the senior leaders who are measured based on that. And it's got data to support it.

Darrin Fleming: It's got benchmark data. It's got case studies, client manuals, things that that make it real. And as I said, a master is willing to say, you know what? This isn't a good fit. We shouldn't do this. You should focus your efforts other places. I'll focus my efforts other places because it isn't the right answer for you. A master is willing to walk away from deals because it isn't the best deal for the customer and really focusing on helping the customer improve their business. I like to say that in b two b selling, what you're selling is money.

Darrin Fleming: You have to understand that you're helping your customer's business make more money in some way. And if you always focus on, and masters do focus on how we're going to help our client, their business operate better, perform better, reduce their costs, increase their sales, increase their throughput, increase their productivity, whatever it may be, finding how you're going to impact their business so that they can perform better. Because if your customer can perform better, they're gonna be willing to pay you for your solution.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. A good point on that. And from the assessment, again, that you can reference off of the resources section of our website valuepros.io, the master definition I'll just read that for everybody. It's masterfully crafts this value pro masterfully crafts a strategic business case that aligns the solution with the client's long term vision and priorities. This person provides robust data driven justifications that quantify value and financial terms, addressing risk, which is really important, and positioning the solution as an indispensable asset to the client success. So that's what mastery looks like.

Bruce Scheer: Or as Darrin said, hey. If that's not true, then walk away or do what needs to happen to make it right that this justification that's what mastery in this domain is all about, working with that client to make sure they've got a solid justification that they can take action on. So, yeah, perfect, Darrin. Now we've got kind of the both pillars, the novice to the master. Why don't we next talk about the keys to being justification ready? How do we move to being a master here? What needs to happen? So there's 5 keys here, Darrin, and do you wanna just roll through each one?

Darrin Fleming: Okay. Great. So, yeah, the first area is aligning with their strategic goals. So as we've talked about earlier with the value ready assessment, a value pro spends the time upfront understanding the company's objectives, understanding, you know, what they're trying to achieve beyond the individual person you're selling to. Because they've got their role, they've got their department, they've got their business, they've got whatever it is that they're doing, but you wanna make sure you're helping them align with the overall business strategic goals so that then you can get alignment and gain approval more readily as you move forward. So that's a critical part is tying that into your justification ready step as what you've learned earlier in the process.

Bruce Scheer: So the first step is to align with strategic goals. Totally agree on that. There's a couple of value ready dimensions that sellers should be thinking about to do that. Remember if you've already seen the episode of being client ready, where you're doing your homework, you're looking at the annual report, the quarterly earnings, the 10 k, what the analysts are saying. You're trying to figure out what those strategic goals are. What's the CEO talking about, if you would, and seeing those things. And then also in terms of being buyer ready, looking at the different stakeholders, what are their goals in their particular area? That's what we're trying to align to with aligning to the strategic goals of the business, both from that overarching company perspective and kind of those buying domains of who you're selling to, what are they trying to achieve in that particular area in order to frame this? Excellent. Okay.

Bruce Scheer: So, Darrin, go ahead and take us into the second step here.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. So next is a data driven business case. So you want it to be based on sound financial data. You want it to be based on reasonable assumptions that the customer buys into. You want it to be tied to benchmark data or case studies that other clients have been able to see, but you want everything to be realistic and everything to be believable, not just by your buyer that is excited about doing something, because hopefully at that point, you've got them excited about doing this, but it's also gotta be believable to the CFO whose job is to be the steward of the money or whoever the financial decision maker's gonna be. And if you don't have a strong, reasonable business case that's based on real data that you can show evidence, it's gonna be hard to gain that approval from the financial decision maker, the financial approver, so to speak.

Bruce Scheer: Perfect. So you're bringing numbers forward, numbers that they need to believe in. I learned this a long time ago, Darrin, but the numbers that the customer's gonna own, not you as the seller, but they become their numbers, and they fully believe in them. But you're, of course, helping them either figure those numbers out or serving them up with what you said, some of that benchmark data and some of that customer reference data that you have to bring, how other customers were able to improve their environment and different metrics, bringing that forward. But, again, in a way that they're gonna believe and own those numbers, really critical in developing a data driven business case.

Darrin Fleming: Yep. Absolutely. And I wanna add to that. Reminded me of a story or a a situation from years ago that I was assisting in a sales process with a client. And we were going through the analysis and the client was saying, yeah, this is all good. This all makes sense. And then we got to the end of the meeting and the client said, okay, well, we need to scale some of these back. And the account manager was like, wait a minute, we just agreed on all this.

Darrin Fleming: And he said, yeah, but I gotta stand up in front of the CFO and now go justify this. And he said in particular, one of the numbers was his budget and how it was gonna reduce his cost by $2,000,000. And we said, do well, you do believe that it's gonna reduce your cost by $2,000,000? He says, yeah. I believe that. But he said, I know the CFO, and when we put $2,000,000 in front of him, he's gonna say, okay. Great. I'm gonna reduce your budget next year by $2,000,000. And he said, I've gotta be ready to say, yes.

Darrin Fleming: That's okay. And he said, if we reduce it to a million, it's still cost justified. It still makes sense. But now he reduces my budget by a $1,000,000. I'm confident I can make that number, And it's based on a believable set of numbers that the CFO is gonna say, okay. If you believe it and you're gonna willing to stand behind it, I'm gonna reduce your budget by a $1,000,000. And if you're good with that, let's go. Again, based on numbers that the client can believe, as you said, Bruce, it's their business case. It's not yours.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. And so you you need to fine tune with them and to highlight so they own those numbers and you're confident around them. So that's perfect.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. So the, next thing is to make sure that you're quantifying ROI. And when we say ROI, that's just one metric. But quantifying the financial terms, quantifying the financial metrics that are gonna be needed to approve, so it includes several different things. So you don't wanna just go in and say, well, it's gonna improve throughput or it's gonna improve productivity or it's gonna improve quality or you wanna put that again using the metrics, the data that you've gathered in the previous thing we talked about, and put it into a financial model that actually says, okay. What's the return on investment? What's the net present value? What's the payback period? Maybe what's the IRR? Some clients might wanna see IRR. What's the impact on cash flow? What are those critical metrics that the client's really gonna care about, the approvers are really gonna care about?

Bruce Scheer: Well, Darrin, you make some really good points about quantifying ROI, taking some of those operational improvements or other impacts of the solution, but then translating that into some of the financial metrics, especially that a CFO would care about. And you talked about payback. You talked about net present value, some internal rate of return. What are some of those key metrics that need to be framed up as you quantify ROI? So, Darrin, I think you've got some examples to talk about in terms of how to quantify ROI and getting that sitting right from that financial perspective.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. Absolutely. So this is just an example showing a tool that can be used to build your business case, do the quantification in particular, do the financial metrics. And if you look here, you know, it's got different groupings of categories of types of benefits that you talk through with the client. Again, they have to buy into them, so you work through each of these operating costs, department labor, product revenue, or, you know, whatever those specific benefit dimensions are, working with each individual thing together with the client to build that out, but then rolling it up into the overall financial metrics like net present value, like return on investment, like payback period, like cost of action. And cost of action is a pretty powerful one because that's really starting to say, okay. Here's how much it's costing you by not doing this. And in this case, this cost of an action is a monthly number that is saying that every month you don't move forward with this solution, it's costing your business almost $200,000.

Darrin Fleming: You know? So you've got a real incentive that you should be starting to think about moving forward because it's costing you real money every month. So it could kind of that's one of the ways you can try to or, work to shorten the sales cycle is if that cost of an action is a big enough number, if it's real and big enough, that actually spurs a sense of urgency to to, make the decision and move forward more quickly.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. So, yeah, just to summarize, Darrin, you you're laying out you know, you got your core metrics that the CFO needs to see to believe are all all the different business minded stakeholders. You know? Hey. What's the the business value true business value moving forward from a financial perspective? And then what underpins those key metrics? You know, what's driving them? And then so you kind of explode that out a little bit as you do the ROI analysis for those business stakeholders. And then just to anchor on the importance of once they see that value, what's it costing them for, you know, per month very often to to not take advantage of that? And so that's the cost of inaction that can create some tension. And I've seen that done so well where you do talk about, hey. If you don't move forward, here's what you're leaving on the table monthly. And sometime if that's a big number, that that can that can hurt.

Bruce Scheer: You know, that and people don't wanna wait to make the decision when they see something like that.

Darrin Fleming: Right. Yep. Absolutely.

Bruce Scheer: Alright. Well, let's head into the next key thing that people should be doing to be justification ready.

Darrin Fleming: And this kinda goes hand in hand a little bit with the data driven, but leverage benchmark, leverage industry trends, leverage industry information, and success stories. We talked about that earlier. To say, well, here's how much improvement customer xyz has seen in their business, and their business is very similar to yours. So here's an example. So provide evidence that leverage industry benchmarks is a lot of it is providing evidence and making it very real, very grounded in something that makes sense to them in their terms and based on how they're doing against their peers. There's nothing that gets executives more excited about doing something than showing them that they're behind some of their peers in business. So if you can show them that there's room for improvement and that they could improve to a higher quartile in their industry by making the improvements you're talking about, that's gonna get an executive excited about justifying it and moving forward and approving it.

Bruce Scheer: Perfect. Yeah. Cash, one of my friends and one of the original pioneers of SAP's value engineering practice used this so well in helping executives understand where they were against a peer group on certain benchmarks, and where were they better, where were they at benchmark, or where they were woefully behind. And and they would really push into that, of course, to help in that justification proposal to help everybody move forward going, hey. This ain't gonna work. Our competitors are eating our lunch in this particular dimension. We absolutely have to up our game. Very powerful element of that justification, that outside in, how are we doing against the world?

Darrin Fleming: Absolutely. I mean, this is just an example of showing how you tie in those benchmarks. And, you know, you wanna show where they came from. You want them to be real numbers. So show the sources of where those benchmarks came from, or the default values, or the values that you're working on, and by industry or by region, geography, whatever it may be, whatever the best cut is, and then show them, where did you get the data? Where does this come from? So then it helps to, again, make it believable, make it real because it's in their terms, in their industry, in their numbers that actually match or at least in the ballpark of where they probably are.

Bruce Scheer: Perfect. Perfect. Yeah. Well, I don't have much to say on that, but, yeah, let's go ahead and move on the the 5th key to being justification ready.

Darrin Fleming: Yep. Absolutely. And this is where it goes from the financial and all a numbers based thing to you can't quantify everything. Ideally, it'd be great to quantify everything, but sometimes there are things that are intangible, strategic, that you just can't put a number on sometimes. And you can take risk as an example. You can quantify risk to some extent, but there's always gonna be an element of risk that you can't totally quantify because it's all based on whether or not it's really gonna happen. So it's more of a actuarial exercise to say, what's the probability of it happening? But you wanna highlight those things that do introduce risk that are intangible things that it might be and this is where you can start to tie in the strategic objectives of the business and say, and here's how this aligns with your strategic objectives. So it might be not a tangible thing tying it to these strategic objectives, but this is an enabler enabling you to be able to achieve your strategic objectives.

Darrin Fleming: And that's where you can tie in these less tangible or intangible benefits and tie them to the strategic objectives of the business, even if you can't get them into financial terms in your overall analysis. So it's an additional layer of your business case that's not the quantified part of it, but the emotional and tying it to other parts of the overall business objectives.

Bruce Scheer: I think you laid that out really well. So the tangible that you can quantify and then the intangible that might be in the emotional dimension, which is so critical, very often undervalued, but there is an emotional quotient there. And then also you talked about risk a little bit, and then you talked about strategy and linking the solution and this change in that customer environment to how that might impact those strategic goals that are in play and making that direct causation between the 2. Or, Darrin, I know that one of our other cofounders, David, was telling me that for some work that we were doing for Verizon that you guys were doing, gosh, having that network in place in this corporate scenario creates possibilities, some strategic ideas or potential that customer can take advantage of by having the solution in place. So that's what you're talking about in terms of framing up some of that intangible. Hey. This could happen, or you're gonna achieve the strategic objective and be in this new place. What's the quantification of that? Well, we necessarily have the detail around that, but this is that possibility that's presented in those intangible benefit.

Darrin Fleming: Absolutely. And that's a perfect example of in the Verizon case, they're providing an infrastructure that enables things to be done. They're not providing the applications necessarily to make the improvement. But without that infrastructure and without the edge computing and the reduced latency and reduced time and everything, you wouldn't be able to do some of the things that other business objectives you're trying to achieve. So they're tied to other projects and tied to the achievement of benefit in other projects. So you can't necessarily say it's all this solution is providing the entire benefit, but you can say without this solution, you can't get that benefit.

Bruce Scheer: That's right. Yeah. And I just love the intertwineness of that you're creating in your justification proposals. Just letting them know, hey. Here's all that potential value that you're going to be realizing in the domain of the intangible benefits as you highlight here in addressing tangible and intangible benefits. And then I think you wanted to speak a little bit about some other ways to think about this, Darrin. Go ahead.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. It's and again, these are just if you've got areas that you weren't able to 100% quantify or you wanna really highlight like, take, sustainability. Sometimes it's hard to quantify sustainability, but most companies have a sustainability goals that they're trying to achieve. And so how is your offering going to help them achieve these, strategic initiatives like sustainability or reduce IT burden? Again, you may not reduce your IT staff, but if you can enable them to do other things because you're freeing up their time to work on other things or support productivity. You may not, again, see a direct reduction in headcount or reduction in workforce, but if you can improve the productivity of them, there's upside to be achieved with that. So these are just other things where an example of showing some of those strategic or intangible benefits and tying them to the extent possible, the overall corporate strategies and strategic initiatives that they're trying to achieve.

Bruce Scheer: Excellent work. Well, I wanna just to take the audience back to our value ready assessment off of our website. But everything Darrin and I have been talking about, we've got summarized recommendations in that value ready assessment, Where Darrin just walked us through the keys for making improvement in this area would be aligned with strategic goals, develop a data driven business case, quantify ROI, leverage your industry to benchmarks, and then address the tangible and intangible benefits. So this is a great summary. Please definitely take advantage of that. I know we've covered so much, but you do have a great reference point if you head over to our website. That'll summarize that everything and get it set in just perfectly for your review. And then, Darrin, one of the final things that we could talk about is just the importance of the business case.

Bruce Scheer: We talk about being justification ready, which has those 5 keys that we just went through. But one of the key deliverables of being justification ready is a business case. Do you wanna walk us through that a little bit, Darrin?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. And there are lots of things out there that you can go Google or search or go to your favorite GPT and come up with what are the elements of a business case. But the critical thing is most of the time you want it to be short, sweet, and concise. So what are those critical elements that you need to make sure you cover, not in a 20 page document, but ideally in a 1 or 2 page kind of almost executive summary, that then if you want more detail, you can go into other parts of it, but what's the core elements that you wanna have? 1st is, what's the problem you're solving? The problem statement clearly defined. This is the problem we're solving. This is what we're helping you improve. Next is the solution narrative. How are we gonna solve it? Why is our solution different? How are we gonna be able to help you improve and reduce that problem or eliminate that problem from your business.

Darrin Fleming: Next, we've already talked about the financial analysis, a critical part of it, making sure that you're covering all the critical financial pieces of ROI and that present value, payback period, all those metrics that are gonna be used to decide whether or not this is a good investment for the business, whether or not this is really what they want to achieve. And then the risk assessment, as we said, one of the reasons that deals don't close is that the customer didn't believe in the analysis. They didn't believe that it was going to be true. And part of that might have been there was risk associated with it. They decided, what? There's too much risk. We don't know how we can do it. So part of the risk assessment is to show evidence of how others have done it and to reduce that fear of risk, but then also to give them options and say, here are some options, here are some off ramps, here's how to handle this whole thing. And I'd be front and center, address the risk straight on to say, okay, one of the risks is, say for instance, that you don't get take up of your team and you don't have the right training and everything in place.

Darrin Fleming: So in order to mitigate that risk, you should make sure you have a good training plan in place, which leads into the execution plan of then, how are we gonna roll this out? What's it gonna look like over time? What are the critical steps? And what are we gonna do to mitigate that risk and achieve the financial results that we're promising to solve the problem with our solution as you go through that? So if you just cover those things, there's lots of other things that a business case will often talk about having. But if you can cover those five things, you've got a pretty strong powerful business case just by covering those things.

Bruce Scheer: Well, Darrin, thanks for laying out the business case and the 5 key components of a great business case, the problem statement, the solution narrative, the financial analysis, the risk assessment, and the execution plan. So, Darrin, why don't we next just think about anything we wanna conclude on with this particular episode? You first.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. It's I just appreciate. I've really had a lot of fun talking about this. It actually caused me to go back and think about a lot of things from the past, which has been kind of fun. And I just hope that this has been helpful to some of our listeners and viewers that they take a few things away from it and do go out and take that assessment and come away with some things, and we'll take any feedback, any comments that you might have, but we're hoping to make all of you better and all of you value pros. That's our goal is to make the whole selling community value pros is our goal over time.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yeah. So and, also, just to conclude, thanks everybody for checking out this episode, and and we've got many more across the whole value ready assessment and all those 10 dimensions that are critical. And and, hopefully, everybody can see that how these, dimensions build upon one another. But the justification ready, this one is just so critical so you can move forward and get the approvals you need, do the negotiations you need to have to get the deal over the goal line, and then also making sure everything's impact ready. And you can catch those other dimensions and all the dimensions in our value ready assessment, and then also the other episodes on our YouTube channel and then also on your favorite podcast player. So thanks everybody for tuning in. Darrin, awesome job.

Bruce Scheer: Thank you.

Darrin Fleming: Alright. Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

Bruce Scheer: Thanks for tuning in to the ValuePros Show. If you found this episode on being justification ready helpful, be sure to check out our other episodes covering all aspects of becoming a value professional. You can find us on your favorite podcast app or on our YouTube channel at ValuePros Show. And don't forget to visit valuepros.io to take our free value ready assessment and access more resources to level up your value selling skills. This is Bruce Scheer, and until next time, keep striving to become value ready. 1x 00:00:00 00:42:49