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.

When detailing the value of software for a prospect, I often run up against the objection: "That's not hard value. We don't count soft dollars."

We've identified how software could enable savings, but the prospect doesn't believe the benefits equate to clear changes in operating costs. They can't justify the investment.

Over the last decade, value-added selling techniques in technology sales have changed significantly with the business landscape.

As a software implementation becomes broader- and more expensive- it gets more challenging to pin down the business benefits produced. It's a battle to quantify “hard” benefits that can be counted as straightforwardly as manufacturing statistics.

Thousands of software projects aren't attempted and opportunities for astounding returns are lost because the value isn't compelling to decision makers. A weak business case is often the culprit.