Better .. And PreSales ...

I can guarantee that whenever I run one of my Business Discovery For Sales Engineers workshops and examine the results of a "why should people buy your stuff?" exercise .. I will see the word BETTER a half-dozen times. The trouble is that hearing "better" doesn't really help you conduct better discovery!

Some examples:

1. A Business Intelligence / Analytics company promising "better decisions"
2. A Backup/Recovery company promising "better backup times"
3. A Security Company promising "better compliance"

Google will give you over 2.8 bllion hits for "better". These range from the Better Business Bureau to Better Homes and Gardens to A Better Recipe for almost anything. Who defines better?

The three basic reasons (The Three Wise Men) why people buy is to increase revenue, reduce costs and mitigate risk. So when you say your product / service / solution makes something better - it tells me nothing (as I wouldn't expect it to make them worse!!). How am I going to be able to make "better decisions" and what will that yield me in revenue/cost or risk. Maybe I can change my product mix in a store on a weekly basis instead of a month - and capture three extra weeks of selling a hot item. Maybe I run a promotion and can tell within a day that the only people using it are my existing customers (so I'm losing money) and that I'm not gaining any news ones - so I stop the discount.

Better doesn't cut it. Any time you read the word better in one of your slides or some marketing collateral - ask yourself specifically how something is made better, and what the client gains as a result. Otherwise you have a soft and fuzzy benefit with no clear ROI. It's incredibly hard to get controllers to spend money based on those criteria. Remember the grandiously named "Care's First Law Of Business Discovery" which states that "Every business issue ultimately can be reduced to a number. That number is either too small and needs to be made larger, or its too large and needs to be reduced." The art of being a great SE is to find out what that number is, which way it needs to go, who cares about it, and how much its worth.

That's a much better way to look at better!