The Business Case Advantage

Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show where ValuePros get value ready. Hi, my name is Bruce Scheer, the host of the ValuePros Show. In this webinar we are talking with Todd Snelgrove, a globally recognized authority on value selling and the former global head of value at skf. Todd has spent over two decades helping companies shift from competing on many measurable, defensible value, working with Fortune 1000 organizations to build business cases that win over procurement and finance leaders. He's also co author of the best selling book Value First, Then Price and creator of the frameworks like Total Profit Added used across industries to justify premium pricing in risk averse markets. He's also one of our affiliates at ValuePros.io. So the focus of this webinar is how to win executive buy in without cutting your price. Using a powerful business case that speaks procurement's language, Todd breaks down exactly how sales teams can collaborate with buyers to frame value early, overcome price objections and close deals with higher margins, even in a tough economy.

Bruce Scheer: He's then joined by me, Dean Edwards, former head of procurement at Levi Strauss, Singer Micro and Yahoo. And then Darrin Fleming, who introduces our sexy new AI powered value navigator tool to help business stakeholders with their business cases. Welcome to this webinar and we're really excited for you to be here with us. The focus on this overall series is revenue mastery in 2025. And we've been thrown so far so many curveballs in 2025 with tariffs and other types of economic influences that we weren' expecting and it's going to make our selling climate and it already has much harder. So that was kind of the genesis for us to create this webinar series, Revenue Mastery 2025 outsell in an Uncertain Economy. We started off with that with our absolute procurement expert, Dean Edwards. And he'll do an introduction just in a minute.

Bruce Scheer: But we focused on inside the buyer's minds, what drives decisions in an uncertain economy. And that particular episode can be watched off of the ValuePros website. If you just go to ValuePros.io and then once you're in there, just go to show and then you'll see Dean talking about with us about, gosh, how do we partner with procurement in these economic uncertain times? So that was the first webinar. The second one here is with Todd Snelgrove and this one is the business Case Advantage, how to win executive buy in without price cuts. You know, how do we get to. Yes, you know, through the power of a business case. Todd will do a beautiful job in talking about that and then our third webinar series just coming up next week. Third webinar in the series is where I'll lead off, but it'll be a full panel of us talking about how do we elevate the buying experience.

Bruce Scheer: And we all saw a statistic at the end of 2024, 59% of the influence on a bold buying decision, you know, with a high consideration solution is influenced by the buying experience. Not the solution, but the experience. And we'll all talk about how do we drive a better buying experience so you can improve your deal performance toward, you know, as. As we move deeper into 2025. So that's kind of our format. Why don't we do just a quick round of introductions and then Todd will let you get rolling on that. I'm Bruce Scheer. I'm co founders at ValuePros.io.

Bruce Scheer: Lately I've been calling myself the Value Vitalizer. You'll see that on my LinkedIn profile. And then, David, do you want to introduce yourself?

David Spiegel: Yeah, sure. I'm a stakeholder at ValuePros and my primary goal is to help clients identify the value drivers for their solutions and then translate that in meaningful ways, in personal ways to each customer's status quo environments and KPIs.

Bruce Scheer: Dean Awesome.

Dean Edwards: Dean Edwards. I've got decades of experience in procurement, Fortune 500 size organizations such as Kaiser Permanente, Levi's, Yahoo, Ingram Micro. And now I run a company working with sales teams, teaching them how to engage more effectively with procurement to drive better results.

Bruce Scheer: Thank you, Dean. And then Todd.

Todd Snelgrove: So I spent 20 something plus years in the B2B market, industrial market. But most of those years was as the first, to my knowledge, as a VP of value. And it was because the company said we spend all this money and time and effort creating something that is of value. But the technical buyer was starting to have to involve the financial buyer. Procurement and finance was saying, I'm not willing to pay that much for that. Is it really worth that? What is the value? So the CEO said, guess what? We really need to equip our teams with a business case. The confidence and all these other things we'll talk about today so they can get to the market and have a value conversation, not a price or discount discussion. I consult on this area right now.

Todd Snelgrove: I'll close with that. Some of the examples will come from this book. What I like about it, you know, we should always talk about the value first because then price becomes part of that. But if you ever lead with price, they're never going to hear the word value, they're always going to be anchored on that number. What I think is interesting about this book is I think it was 12 companies in the B2B marketplace that wrote about their best practices. They all come back to a thesis that you need a good business case and a bunch of other things. But there were four or five procurement people that also wrote saying, I'm willing to pay more if there's a business case that's clear, concise, believable, maybe even guaranteed. But it's, you know, not this here's how we should sell versus this is how we should buy.

Todd Snelgrove: So with that, just to give you a flavor, you know, a lot of capital equipment, industrial, but you'll see things in there of MedTech, the total cost of care, the term renewable energy, you know, levelized cost of energy. The terms might change by industry, but the logic is the same. If you're selling something that's not the lowest price, you better have a business case. And it's our job to put that together for the customer. I start with a variation of this slide with my own team, but also with customers to make sure we're using the right term. I mean price, cost, value. They're all five letter terms. I believe everybody that's watching is North America.

Todd Snelgrove: But you know, they mean completely different things. And the sales team needs to be confident when the customer uses a term to challenge them. And I don't mean be arrogant, but to challenge them. So if a customer says your price is too high, I'd say might be higher, but my costs are lower. Well, how would you measure that? What are those costs? Where have you done it before? Do I believe you? I mean procurement people. I spend 15, 20% of my time at procurement events and they say it's funny. We'll send out the annual email. You know, we need to get our costs under control.

Todd Snelgrove: It's 2025. These are the reasons. It depends who you talk to. But they say, you know, a lot of suppliers will come back with price cuts or terms that are associated with that they don't come back with. We're going to come in with an efficiency program. We're going to walk the line. We're going to enumerate 10 problem areas. We can reduce other costs and values on the upside.

Todd Snelgrove: And when I mean value, I mean there's the emotional value, but you can also put some numbers on value. I don't have the slide here, but I use a term called total profit added. I want my clients to be more profitable. Cost reductions is only one side of that. You know, the shipping, the receiving, the, you know, the operating cost, the energy, the water, the downtime. But if I could help a customer get to market faster in some industries that's worth a lot. I think you get a patent for 10 years if you spend six months trying to get it to market because of the mark, whatever reason that's lost revenue. In the high tech industry, technology, I mean, you've got a short window of differentiation.

Todd Snelgrove: You know, if I could help that client get to market faster, it's worth something. And variations of my signature have basically said I can be the highest price but the lowest cost or, and, or the best value and then really have a structured methodology, a tool to say, let me show you how. Here are the 400 drivers we have, here are the impacts. We'll get to that stuff. But again, hopefully most sales teams are equipped and have role played that let me put this in because I think it's an interesting piece of research with a professor that's done value management for 30 years, Professor Jim Anderson. And he said what I find a lot of people doing saying I'm just going to create a value based sales tool. I'll put somebody in a corner and I'll say grab Excel and make up a model and then we go to market and it doesn't work. We'll talk to you later.

Todd Snelgrove: Why Excel or ad hoc homegrown systems don't work. I just got ton examples of things I've seen and I'm talking from Fortune 100 companies. But real quickly you're going to get snippets of this as we go through. If anybody wants a chapter or two, just send me a note. But you know, if you put the value methodology and mindset when you create a new product or service, if you challenge, what will this be worth for the customer in this industry versus the alternatives? Because a lot of companies get to the end, they launch it and they go, why aren't people buying it? Is it part of your selling process or is it just okay, we put the offer into the customer. We didn't do proper discovery, we didn't find the value drivers, but they're pushing back. The price is too high. Hey Todd, create a case and hit send.

Todd Snelgrove: Probably too late. You need to frame it early. Has the team been trained on how to sell value, how to talk financial, how to challenge, how to use these terminologies? Is it ongoing? So he says that's the ability to sell. What I find a lot though is companies don't Spend any time on getting the sales team to want to sell. So sales compensation, you know, I was just at a school and a professor was talking about quality of sales and my old CEO would say we probably have 400 ways to discount. But you know, publicly traded company, this gross margins are all these nice numbers. But if I cut 5%, that's half the profit. But the sales team would laugh.

Todd Snelgrove: I could cut the 5% today, be at the golf course this afternoon, and it barely would affect any sort of compensation for me. So look at your compensation. Is it driving the behaviors you want? Are you giving customers value buying options? I have created a bunch of performance or outcome based contracts. They're not near as confusing or risky as people think. It doesn't need to be 100% at risk. But you want to know what? I'm higher priced in the alternative. Let me guarantee you that you're going to get value. We just got to agree on what is value, how would we measure it, how do we define it, how do we implement it? But I signed 180 of those agreements with Fortune somethings around the world.

Todd Snelgrove: But you know, if you're saying you're more expensive, maybe you should put some money where your mouth is. And again, what's funny is a lot of companies will say, again, I make up numbers as examples. You know, the threshold for that level Is to cut 10%. If you can cut the price 10%, how come you can't guarantee 10% value and not cut the price? My job was then to get the customer to nod and go, you're right, 10% value is better than 10% price, more internal. Do you have the right business culture? I mentioned I was very lucky to get to a CEO that said we've got to do something. The world is commoditizing what we do. There's a lack of differentiation, there's new competitors popping up every day if we're not better and really getting this message out there. But it can't be just, you know, for the moment, it has to be commitment.

Todd Snelgrove: And then I spend a lot of time on customer culture. And what I mean by that is getting to the market and getting people to rethink. When I buy this, should I spend a time, effort or energy to really even think anything besides lowest price that's landed cost, it's a bearing, it's a this, it's a that. So I would spend a lot of time on stage articles, this type of stuff going, you know, there's a lot of money to be found or made by really rethinking how you buy this type of stuff. Because if the perception is it's a commodity, there's a bunch of suppliers, it'll be leverage price. The purpose of the business case is amazing in that it allows the customer to change how they buy. So I'm not a pricing expert, but there's two pricing terms I'll share with you very quickly. ATP, the ability to pay.

Todd Snelgrove: So whatever year it is, I'm in front of the boss and he goes, you know, market's really bad. I mean we had all these really value added solutions. And he goes, that portfolio is really, you know, it's doing better than the rest of the business. But you know, they said, boss, nobody has money to pay. And he looked at me, he was Scottish, so he had a little bit of an accent. But he said, yes, they do. I will change my ability to pay based on a business case because I can understand my sales team saying the customer doesn't have the money. He goes, yeah, if there's the right business case, they will find the money.

Todd Snelgrove: They will move it from another budget over right away we thought we were going to do this. We thought we'd cut these costs here, there and everywhere. Wait, there's a business case that shows me if I do this within this year, this budget, I'm going to save that and it's believable. I'll find the money, I'll go to the bank and get the money if I have to. So their ability to change changes. I mean, someone came to my door right now and said, I want to sell you something for a thousand dollars. I probably had a thousand dollars lying around. If there was a believable business case, I would take it from another account, I would borrow them, I would do something, I would find the money.

Todd Snelgrove: Similar but different is the willingness to pay. And I thought, this is hilarious. And I think somebody stole this example. But it's a true story. You know, companies will line up their major goals for the year. Their focus is we're going to buy this system or that we're going to upgrade here. And I did a consulting three day workshop for a medical company. Make the big MRI or CAT scan machines.

Todd Snelgrove: I always confuse those two. And they talked about a deal they had in Australia. It was done, they got the deal and do a follow up a few weeks later. And the vice president of Asian sales or whatever says, well, guess what, we didn't get the deal. And I'm like, what happened? Great. We just spent three days. And he goes, you Want to know what we thought? We had the deal, so we didn't write the business case. The technical buyer says, you got it, you're better.

Todd Snelgrove: Whatever. The better was like, so what happened? We lost to a parking lot. Pardon? Yeah. Well, somehow the board looked at and said, incremental revenue for a parking lot. It's newer revenue, it's better, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Sweat the assets on the existing machines. So the takeaway from his was, I think I'm number one on the company's priority. That changes based on my competitor.

Todd Snelgrove: My competitor is not the other medical machine company. It could be something completely different. So a business case allows people to find the money and prioritize the money. You have to have some marketing that helps the customer rethink. I love the price perg because everybody can say, yeah, I see the price, it's whatever percent. But all those things, it's different by every industry, the terminology. But I'll show you, I think one slide with some numbers on it. It's amazing how the bottom stuff is bigger than the top stuff.

Todd Snelgrove: But it's our job to bring that information that's reasonable, researched, has some background to it and say, you know, I don't care where the price is. I used to say, you want a smaller price per. That's how you'll be more profitable. So it's amazing how much research you can find and you'll see later when we play with this tool how much better it is today than it used to be. But finding these numbers, one, you could ask your people internally, but there's research out there. So if somebody had the money and want to go buy an airplane from Boeing tomorrow, that would. And they wrote the check for whatever 100 million that would represent 8% of the total cost of that airplane over its life. The depreciation, the tires, the maintenance, the fuel, the labor on it, these, the upgrades, ETC.

Todd Snelgrove: Class 8 trucks, for those that are interested are like the big 18 wheelers. You see, industrial equipment is 12%. So everybody's focusing on that little red line and they're missing the big gold color. So I was involved in our procurement team eventually because the boss said, you know, we have a structured methodology in our sales side. Maybe we should take that and just do it with our suppliers. Value is value, whether it's on the buy side of the sell side. But he goes, I don't think we have a good structure when we're buying. So we were involved and we had three companies come to us.

Todd Snelgrove: It was capital equipment, machinery, very important to the business and the vice president of procurement said to me, well, which one do you think we should choose? I said, well, I like that one. Yeah, of course. Imagine that you're choosing one that's 10% more expensive. And we were buying a bunch of these. It was a big dollar amount. Yeah. But he showed us how he's going to save 2% on the operating cost. And Bo inga, we're now friends, good friends actually said, I don't know what math they taught you in Canada, but 10% is better than 2%.

Todd Snelgrove: I said, no, it's not. You need the denominator. 10% of 12 is 1.2, but 2% of 88 is 1.76. It's about 40 to 50% more impactful. The problem is nobody thinks for these or we thought they were all the same. They're all going to use the same energy, they're all going to have the same cost to repair them. They're all going to fail the same. That's a lot of.

Todd Snelgrove: If one supplier did a good job of showing why their stuff could be different. But you can find the stuff out there. I was in the UK years ago. Huthwaite International is a sales company, spin selling. But this lady who used to be the head of procurement for the R d business for AstraZeneca Pharma, who was just becoming the Chartered Institute of Procurement CEO, said this on stage. We were together. Suppliers don't come to us with a business gates. Sell your value using our numbers.

Todd Snelgrove: You don't need their numbers, but you need to put a number out that's reasonable. Not a billion. But you know, in this industry we think downtime is this. Well that's for that type. We're more 8 or 12 or something. But my favorite line, because most, not most, a lot of companies will say we can't quantify our value. And her point was, if you can't quantify, don't expect me to do your job. I'm in the middle of buying companies, setting up new plants and you want me to sit down and do a value analysis on that? That's your full time job company.

Todd Snelgrove: You better bring it to me. It better be believable. I think this is really interesting. A procurement gentleman put this together. I do some work with Rob McGuire in the bottom left there. But we were somewhere. He goes, you salespeople better learn the buying process. And I laugh because you know, we've all got our CRM systems and we have our sales process.

Todd Snelgrove: He goes, this is how people buy and how companies buy, how people buy in general for considered purchases with his thinking is very similar. And because we all come from different industries, let's assume we're going to buy a car and walk through the logic and then afterwards, insert office supplies, insert electrical motors. It's the same process. A need has been identified. The business has said, we need this at home. I need a new car. The lease has gone out, the kids got older, the other one got in an accident. I don't know.

Todd Snelgrove: I need a car. Now you can change need, but I want a car. I need a car that I will sit back in general, establish the specifications. So based on my assumption, my knowledge at that point in time, I want a gas car, I want a four door car. Okay, doesn't mean that's logical. But I've sat home and said, I don't want electric and I don't want diesel. Dad had a diesel car, my mom and dad had one a hundred years ago in Canada. It was a little more work than a normal car.

Todd Snelgrove: So I made some assumptions. So with that, Tesla's out, it's electric. And so I kind of narrowed down a little bit. And then I say, you want to know what? I've had bad experience with that company. I don't trust that company and I don't like that one. But I like these three or four. In my old rule, it was always three to four bids. So I list whoever those four people would be that make what I'm looking for.

Todd Snelgrove: And now I'm going to chop around rfq, rfi, and then, you know, who's got this vehicle? What's your, you know, value proposition? What's your delivery? You know, they're going to do some work and give me a price negotiation, delivery type of number. We might do some negotiation. Then I eventually will buy a car from one person. What you need to understand is your ability to get me to focus on value versus lowest cost that meets the minimum criteria dramatically changes over time. So a lot of this stuff needs to be early in the sales cycle, even before the sales or the buying cycle starts. You know, this is what I was saying about the thought leadership. Ooh, the next time I buy, I should think about this. I should think about.

Todd Snelgrove: I didn't know that. Oh, okay. I'm framing it earlier. Everyone says, you know, help the customer write their RFQ better is to get them to even think of it on their own and then help them. So the piece of research that follows this, and there's so many pieces of research, but they all Are close enough to call it even. So this is gartner Group from B2B buying interviews of 750. The question was, where do you spend your time in this buying cycle? 27% is researching independently. Show me car companies.

Todd Snelgrove: Who is the best supplier. Tell me, you know, that type of stuff. Or trade associations, maybe, I don't know. Only 22% is with an internal group. The people that will probably use the product or service. 18 is researching independently offline. That's where I'm thinking. Colleagues, other people with an industry, you know, thought leadership groups that they're involved with.

Todd Snelgrove: Hey, we got to buy an ERP system. What works? What doesn't work? Who should we be careful of? What should I know? You know, I'll buy you dinner and tell me something. 16% is other and 17% is spent with the suppliers. If there are four suppliers, you're getting less than 5% of their time, 5% of their time. To try to get them to say, oh, we shouldn't care about price. It's all about value is very tough. And I used to get that from colleagues. We're at the RFQ stage.

Todd Snelgrove: Get in a plane and come here and help us get it worked. I'm just suggesting you really need to have value in the messaging, in the framing very early to have higher success rates. Now, some things I see some companies do when they become to try to get paid for value that actually cause more problems. So it's called the jam study. And they gave customers two choices. We'll say Whole Foods as an example. You know, people love choice. So you come in, there's different sizes, mixtures, flavors.

Todd Snelgrove: And what the study found is giving customers too much choice actually causes them to buy less. It confuses them. Buyer's remorse sets in right away. And they can also unbundle. This is where procurement will say, well, if the strawberry is this and the blueberries that and the strawberry blueberries is, I can start figuring out cost structures and unbundling structures and the like. So my old team was notorious for sending you offers that had 20 tabs at the bottom showing how smart they were. We can bundle this and bundle that. The point here is give customers options, limit options.

Todd Snelgrove: And it turns out, based on research, you should give customers three options. So with that, I was talking to the team at ValuePros, and it's amazing how many people, I mean, you know, starting the value journey by just trying to write down value drivers is great. We think we can affect this here and here. But a lot of people then End up with an Excel tool. And I'm quickly just going to go through, you know, what to be careful for for anybody that does do that. Inaccurate formulas. And I'm talking Fortune 100 companies going that's wrong or it was a mistake. One person had a currency table that wasn't working properly.

Todd Snelgrove: One person, you know, fat fingered a number somewhere. So, you know, if everybody's creating their own tool and putting on a database somewhere that they're downloading and then modifying, you get a lot of mistakes. Right. Formulas. I see. You know, technically inaccurate formulas. Some companies are notorious for taking cash flow and calling it free cash. I was just saying to Bruce, if I don't pay my Visa bill this month for $1,000, I don't have $1,000.

Todd Snelgrove: I just pushed off paying it. So it's time value of money I still owe. It depends on the customer. Customer's right. But if you try to claim increased revenue as 100% cash, most customers will say that's not how it works. Most of the time I'll be able to get customers to agree. The contribution margin. You've been running your business this way.

Todd Snelgrove: The CEO's being paid, the buildings have been paid. You know, every widget you, you sell has variable costs. If I help, you know, increase this so it's a more accurate formula, you know, a lot of these one off tools don't have any impact ranges. They just say, if I could do this by 1% or 10%, it's not where have we done this before? Here's some industry research. Here's a link to a report from somewhere that says, here's best practice, here's where you are. It's just a bunch of what if? Most customers are saying, you know, I've heard somebody what ifs, I don't believe them anymore. The idea of I just do this, it'd be worth that, you know. And again, because I started before tools existed.

Todd Snelgrove: I mean, spelling mistakes, currency mistakes, units, you know, is it number of tons of papers or number of feet of papers? Number. I mean you need to have disclaimers. It's not a legal thing. The output, you know, it's important to have output in the way the customer thinks. And that's different by industry. Sometimes you need more high level irr, npv. Sometimes you're confusing the customer. You know, for that level of purchase, they don't need to overcomplicate it.

Todd Snelgrove: And my favorite calculation is this minimum improvement. I mean it'd be great if we could get to here, but I Only need to get that much improvement to pay for all this. Some references or links to justifications, whether those are internal success stories, benchmark data, third party, I don't care. But some meat around it. Not somebody sat at home and just did their we think. I was amazed at this because I'm probably more of a math person than a visual. But graphs make management happy. They love the waterfall graphs, they love the break even graphs.

Todd Snelgrove: That business case is going to get passed around from your contact to their boss or other people and the visualization makes a difference. The professionalization and visualization, you know, smarter companies have said excuse me, I really need to have different stages of case. And I'm not saying these terms are the right terms but you know, I'm going to test the calculation that I'm going to propose it to a customer. Then we're going to banter back and forth about the numbers of believability. We change that if the customer buys the solution or service it became accepted. They've accepted some of the logic. Then we actually had a system in place for the bigger customers to go back and verify what actually happened. Eventually we got to the point where we could sit in front of an industry and say We've done this 800 times in your industry around the world, the min, the max and the mean have been this.

Todd Snelgrove: On the improvement, we had more data than the customer had. So again, if it's a one off spreadsheet that just get bounced around and there's no follow up. So although it's gonna mean clear and easy to understand and I think the last thing in pricing that really screws people up for value is giving away free stuff. And the research shows that, you know, if you're given two choices, you're gonna go to Whole Foods this weekend and there's a free Hershey's Kiss or there's a 13 cent chocolate, more people will take something for free. There's no downside. I'll just take it. If I told you that the average Hershey Kiss costs I think 6 cents, 5 or 6 cents depending on the volume and the average Lindor chocolate is 55 cents. And I say, well okay, you want to know what I want you to realize? You're getting more free value.

Todd Snelgrove: I'm asking you to pay 13 cents to get something that's we'll just say 53, that's a 40%, 40 cent value surplus. I gave you something for free that cost me 5 cents. That's less value by trying to tell you how it's better doesn't work. If I say, you want to know what? I'm going to charge you $0.01 for the Hershey's Kiss, it changed almost the exact opposite. It changed which one people chose. Because now you're going, I'm doing math and subconsciously maybe, but I'm starting to think so giving away free stuff screws people up. Small numbers associated with it makes them think of what's better and they're always structuring the offering for the customers. I mean the joke I have, I think we've all been to trade shows and stuff.

Todd Snelgrove: How many people buy, grab stuff off somebody's booth at a trade show, then they throw it out before they even get to the hotel. You know, if you, if you're not willing to pay $0.01 to get the Koozie cup, you're not going to probably ever use that thing. Make a donation to the children's foundation or something. And you see that the percentage of people that chose neither option didn't dramatically change by putting $0.01. But it's really interesting how free stuff screws people up. So with this, a takeaway more is to take all the services you offer and structure them into a very low price, $0.01 offering and 1 that somebody might pay for. So this is some research from a professor that I've done some work with. But you know, let's get rid of the services that cost us money that the customers don't value and then let's put together an offering that says, okay, here's the low price or the free version.

Todd Snelgrove: Just think of Amazon Shipping as an example. You know, you, you want engineering design? Yes. Within one week I'll tell you yes or no, that's maybe free part of doing business. Oh, for $1,000 I'll return the answer within two days and I'll give you five things to be concerned about. Training. Is training free? Todd not an engineer, drops in, spends 30 minutes for lunch, shows you three new features, that's free. A three day training, that's for a fee. So again, confusing customers going, what's free, what's not free and therefore what's of value.

Todd Snelgrove: All the stuff I covered has been researched a lot from academic groups. I think is interesting is these are procurement people around the world that have had me on stage having almost the same conversation. I mean National Institute of Government Procurement, that was Asia, that's American, the Arizona University. So it's not just a sales thing. Procurement gets it. They say make it reasonable, make it hard, bring us the business case and I won't go through all this, but from probably one of the seminal books ever started Value Merchants. I mentioned one of the authors before. This is a recent article from last summer that I was involved in.

Todd Snelgrove: But my favorite stat companies have priced for value, which means they've quantified it and sold it, are 24% more profitable than the industry average and 36% more profitable than those who will make it up in volume, market share, reduced discounting, bigger order size, higher customer satisfaction, 80% higher win rate 25%. The ones with little asterisks are based on the MIT Sloan article. That's the reason why those are there. So we talked about this. Those that were able to join Deans, I throw this in, I will not go through it all. But companies that buy based on the same way, based on true value are more profitable. So the top left is an association called Mapping Manufacturers Alliance. So big industrial machineries, people that measured all these variables and made decisions based on them were 35% more profitable than companies that did not.

Todd Snelgrove: And again, you could see there's a bunch of people saying we need to buy this way. We know it's better for us, we know it's best practice. How come more sales organizations aren't bringing us this data so we can make a. An informed decision? So gives you a flavor on what I focus on value. You know, we've got the tool right here, which you'll see in a moment. Again, the marketing and the training and the selling and some pricing stuff around it with that. Bruce, time for questions or do you want to take a quick dive through the tool?

Bruce Scheer: Todd, thank you for taking us through that and just looking at, you know, the case for change and how we can support our buyers, especially procurement. Dean, as you know, how can we improve the ability to sh. Shape that value proposition? And Todd, you make the case that it makes you way more profitable if you're able to do that, especially when most vendors are not doing that. So that's wonderful. Dean, did you have any observations though? Just curious based on your Tyler saying

Dean Edwards: tied in with something I've been saying before, but the power of the business case and working with procurement to be able to present that value into the organization is huge because something procurement really struggles with is getting recognition for its efforts. And the simplest metric that finance uses is the price and the cost, not the value. So the kind of tools that Todd's talking about and the example he gave from AstraZeneca are absolutely spot on. You have to be able to present the business case, then educate procurement in how to present that on your behalf because the likelihood is you're not in the room when that final discussion is taking place as a salesperson. So you need to empower the procurement guys to be really effective at transmitting that message. Would that resonate with your experience, Todd?

Todd Snelgrove: Very much so. And that's a reason also the tool, the calculation, the reports need to be clear, concise so that your agent, the procurement general. And again, I live with this tool. I know this tool inside and out. That's my industry terminology. That's how I speak. No, no, that's not how you speak. That's not how your boss speaks. So instead of trying to overcomplicate it, which some people like to do, you know that the visualization, the clear, concise, the summary numbers up front and then of course you can have all the reports afterwards of calculations and the like for sure.

Dean Edwards: And I loved your point about the visuals because that's so true. I worked for one company where if you couldn't get your entire argument on one piece of paper, the execs wouldn't even look at it. You could have a ton of support material, but you had to be able to capsulate that key value argument in one slide.

Bruce Scheer: And Todd, did you invent the price Berg?

Todd Snelgrove: I did something years ago. People, again, I'm sure other people, because I've had procurement conferences, we never use the term priceberg, but we understood the idea. So yeah.

Bruce Scheer: So I love it. You know, if you guys remember Todd's visual, the price burg, it's this, you know, tip of the iceberg out of the water, underneath the waters. So, so, so much more. And Todd, you made that very real with that visualization of, you know, the, the, the price of that offering and then the total cost over time. You know how that price was like, you know, 8 to 12%, but the, but the, the total cost was like 88% over time. And the price work can take the weight off the price discussion, put it more on the total cost of ownership and how you're going to improve that for the buyer to get more value and hence, you know, not, not have that discounting pressure. So I, I, I love it.

Todd Snelgrove: I think I have always gone through a, I wouldn't call it a process, but the price burg, most people will nod and then I get through a model which is different by industry because of the terminology. And then, then they're like, okay, now, now show me. So it's kind of like educate them to realize, okay, yeah, yeah, that's a pretty slide, Todd. Now, now show me some numbers, examples and measurements you would do. So that HBR or MIT Sloan says if you go right to just trying to use the numbers without the education that there's more there, people won't listen to the numbers. That's one of the major takeaways. But okay, you show me that there's all these other elements. You show me that there's a ratio of this to that.

Todd Snelgrove: Now I want to hear those numbers to me. But I used to probably go in and go, look, I'm asking you to spend this. It's going to give you this. Maybe try to close too early. I mean I got to get you wanting to even talk to me to think differently. So that's why some of those I call marketing slides get people warmed up to have the discussion interested. Okay.

Bruce Scheer: By the way, wonderful. Hey Darrin, I think what we'll do next is, you know, so Todd's talking about shaping the business case and how can you do that, you know, simply and visually. And I've invited Darrin, one of the co founders at ValuePros. Darrin, if you want to do a quick introduction to yourself and then please do talk about Value Navigator and how that might help people.

Darrin Fleming: Yep, absolutely. Thanks Bruce. And thanks guys. Todd, great stuff. Todd and Dean both, yeah. So I'm Darrin Fleming, partner with ValuePros, as Bruce said, and also president of ROI Selling. And ValuePros and ROI Selling have worked together to come up with Value Navigator which is a self service tool to be able to be able to build a business case on the fly for any solution, for any customer leveraging AI to be able to do that. And so I'm going to show you just quickly and by the way, all of you will get access.

Darrin Fleming: There's a 30 day free trial that Bruce will be sending you a link to that you can actually try this out on Your own for 30 days for free to just kick the tires. But I'm going to show you the same solution. It's actually called Neutral Host. Not going to get into the details of the solution for two different customers. So it's the same solution being sold to two different customers, one being say Dow Chemical, one being Cleveland Clinic, a healthcare facility, and show you the power of being able to discover the benefits and quantify the value for that solution. So I'll start with Dao. This is, you know, so this is the customer. Here's the solution.

Darrin Fleming: Neutral host for the plant. I'm going to go in here. This was the information that was provided to the platform. So it was the name of the solution, a description, the link to the solution, the name of the customer, the customer's website and just the scope of what it is. I've already created this so I don't have to go through and create it. But this came back with the benefit dimensions, some cost reducing revenue, enhancing productivity, enhancing benefits. And you'll start looking at the, the benefits. So like operational data collection efficiency, enhanced production monitoring efficiency, enhanced predictive maintenance capabilities.

Darrin Fleming: So it's very specific to, in this case, a chemical plant leveraging a telecommunications solution to improve the efficiency of their, of their operations. You can go in and then put the investment in, you can see across here it kind of builds up the, the key financial metrics that a customer would care about. You can change the length of the analysis for what the customer wants to see. Go look at some charts of what it looks like over time. This is all built in a matter of minutes based on putting in the target target customer, the scope of what you're selling to them and the target solution. And it'll help build this up in a matter of minutes. So that was an example for Dow Chemical. Now I'm going to go over to this, which is Cleveland Clinic, you know, so this, in this case, it's a health care network.

Darrin Fleming: So same product, same solution. And if I look at the description here, it just says it's now targeted at Cleveland Clinic. So it's a different target customer. So now it's talking about improve patient experience revenue, accelerated telehealth adoption, enhanced patient experience revenue, enhanced medical device connectivity, you know, so enhanced research collaboration efficiency. So things that are very specific to, in this case, a research hospital network with the exact same product. So it helped fine tune and bring together what are the benefits that a customer will get in this specific situation for this specific customer with your solution. And then you can go in and refine any of these numbers, adjust them again, go talk about the investment, review what it looks like, look at a chart view of it, what it looks like over time, where the benefits come down and then generate a report that then you can use to attach to your proposal to cost justify the overall solution. So just showing you the power of two very different customers in very different industries and within minutes being able to build the quantified cost justification or the same solution in two very different industries.

Darrin Fleming: So love to have you kick the tires, take a look and provide any feedback you have on it and see what you think.

Bruce Scheer: Awesome, Darrin. Yeah, and I know we've all seen it but gosh, just the benefits of that I think are fairly profound where, you know, you can leverage the power of AI with it.

Dean Edwards: Bruce, I love the fact that it even does your PowerPoint slides for you. I mean, to talk about empowering the buyer to go forward with a value argument, it's just phenomenal.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah, yeah, awesome. And Todd, I know you played with it as well, et cetera. It's hot off the press, everybody, and it's only going to get better. But as you can see right now, oh my God, you know, just version 1.0, you know, you can have your financial analysis within seconds, you know, based on the work that that tool does for you as you collaborate with your buyer to shape that analysis. So really, really powerful.

Todd Snelgrove: One thing that Darrin didn't hit upon that I think is just as powerful, maybe the way to say it is each one of those formulas have references of where the data came from. It wasn't, you know, their annual revenue is a billion and we think we can improve it by 10%. It was a link to a report whether they're owned. There was some meat behind those numbers, if you remember.

Darrin Fleming: Yep, yep, yeah. Here I'll, I'll dig into one of those to show what Todd's talking about. Just let me go into one to. Ah, of course.

Todd Snelgrove: Was it scrolled at the very bottom? Was it at the very bottom where the little.

Bruce Scheer: Again, as you're hunting around, I'll describe it too, Darrin. But what, what happens is the tool, once it comes up with a example calculation, it'll go, you know, through AI, it'll go out and do the research for you and find, you know, is there a reference benchmark or a study that could be cited that'll add a little bit of gravitas and evidence to that calculation. So just building more social proof into the formula. So you know that that financial buyer who wants to have a little bit more confidence can see that something is study backed.

Darrin Fleming: Here's, here's an example. It's, you know this. I was showing some analyses that were built with previous versions. So the. But here's one that actually average number of unplanned plan chiller related downtime events per year. So obviously very specific to an industrial setting with chillers in a refinery. And here's a report from McKinsey Company. Reducing unplanned refinery outages. Reduce downtime chiller or downtime costs and refinery and petrochemical plants. I can click on that and that pulls up the reference study that actually helps to support what that Value is.

Todd Snelgrove: And most people will never go read all those reports. They just want to see that there's something behind it. Or they'll say, talk to Bob. Bob knows that number for our own company.

Dean Edwards: But

Bruce Scheer: yep.

Dean Edwards: I also like the fact that you can adjust it based on your own sense of what reality is for you or you can take a conservative view if you want to and see what it does to the numbers.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah, absolutely. Like, here's an example of emergency, reduced emergency repair labor costs, you know, $750,000. You can change that if you don't believe that number. And then that's how much you're spending today. And we're going to reduce it by 40%. You say, well, I don't think it's going to reduce it by 20%. Okay, great, change it to 20%. You know, so you can refine it on the fly as you're talking to the customer.

Darrin Fleming: Or if the customer says, you know what, I just don't believe this reduced labor or lost revenue, you can just exclude it and it still shows up in your report. Now in this case, it went negative because, you know, the investment was bigger than the benefit now, but you know, you can include or exclude, delete them wholesale, add new benefits. I can just create a new one and describe what the benefit is. I can let AI do the whole, the whole thing for me. Lots of different ways to slice and dice to get a quantified cost justification to go along with your business case and your proposal.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. Awesome. Well, good enough, you guys. Well, everybody, thanks so much for attending this webinar. We'll get the recording out to you. It's also out there on LinkedIn Live right now. Now, which I'm really delighted with. And so for everyone, next week on June 4th, same time, we'll be focused on the buying experience.

Bruce Scheer: That webinar is the buying experience edge, how to stand out and close more deals in a risk averse market. And so we'll bring us all together. I'll introduce, you know, the framework around how to drive a more compelling buying experience. We're calling that the total value experience. And there's key phases in how to do that and different dimensions. We've done a bunch of research to figure out what are those causal dimensions that drive the better buying experience. So I'll introduce that. We'll have a panel discussion about that next week on June 4th.

Bruce Scheer: So thanks everybody for attending. Thanks Todd, for all that wisdom that you shared. Best practice and how to shape the the business case. Thanks Dean, for weighing in and making sure this is all real. Darrin, thank you also for introducing Value Navigator and David, thanks for being the voice of reason as always. So everyone thanks so much and we'll see you next week. What a powerful session with Todd Snelgrove and the rest of the team at ValuePros.io. We explored how top performing teams avoid the discount trap by building believable buyer ready business cases.

Bruce Scheer: Todd gave us a practical roadmap showing how to shift from cost conversations to total value discussions that actually resonate with executive decision makers. What really stood out for me was the insight that the supplier who co builds the business case with the buyer wins 80% of the time. And then Darrin showed you how you can harness the power of AI to quickly shape a business case with our brand new Value Navigator tool. The exciting thing is this is just version 1.0 of value navigator. Strap in for more value in this tool as we evolve it in helping buyers buy. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the ValuePros Show. And if you're feeling kind, leave us a review so others can find and enjoy it too. Wishing you successful value selling.