How do I do an ROI spread sheet to prove my customer should buy from me?

The answer is – you don’t!

Or you don’t unless what you sell is a pure commodity and you are trying to prove that even though your price is higher than a competitor your total cost of ownership is lower.

In that case you want to do an ROI spread sheet, however in over 40 years and thousands of transactions it never works to get a contract.

If the buyer is putting you through this, it is probably to make you go away and no matter what you show them there will be no deal.

“Revenue Science™” tells us there are places where the answer to the question “how do I do BLANK to win the deal” is you are not going to win the deal and if you do somehow get a contract you will be sorry you won, so from this point forward don’t ever be here again.

The reason someone is in this position is they lost control of the process and are willing to do “whatever” to hope they get the deal.

Every selling process has a point where the seller has to determine the suspect has the problem the seller solves as well or better than any other option the buyer has.

If that is true and the suspect wants that problem solved in the short-term all that is left to see if the suspect wants it solved badly enough to invest some resource (normally people time) to explore the sellers best in class solution.

If the suspect will invest time with their team to work with the seller’s team to create a SOW to solve the problem, then we have a qualified prospect.  If not the selling stops and the suspect goes back in the marketing pool and no ROI spread sheet.

There is no place in this process for an ROI spread sheet.  If anybody should be doing ROI calculations it would be the qualified prospects since they control the real data and will be responsible for the outcomes the data shows.