FIGURE: Stages to a profitable, sales-enabling Business Value Advisory practice.

Software is an intangible product whose primary benefits are productivity gains for the users, groups, and companies that implement it. This great strength of technology is also a weakness, as it's tricky to define just where and when gains will occur.

For salespeople, it's challenging to build the business case for a software purchase that will impact several areas throughout the client's company, has many stakeholders with disparate agendas, and aims to facilitate a complex mix of visionary goals and operational returns.

To tackle this problem, many software companies develop strategic consulting practices that work with salespeople and clients to analyze strategy, assess operations, align technology, and measure the value of deploying software. This is a difficult endeavor that most companies never fully accomplish. For those that do, however, rewards include revenue growth, expanded total contract values, increased repeat sales, and expedited sales cycles.