I believe the inability to prove ROI is the single biggest blocker right now in getting a sale across the line. And there's now evidence to prove this...
TrustRadius just released their 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect Report, which found that 71% of buyers end up purchasing the top option on their short list (ie the list they made before they started doing real research and talking to vendors and peers).
Additionally, 47% of enterprise buyers said they wished it was easier to calculate ROI.
What these two stats together mean to me:
- In this turbulent market where budgets are tight, buyers are understandingly very risk averse - and so they are choosing solutions that are well known (and likely more established and "safer" vendors that their boss/CFO knows), and the sales process isn't really changing their opinion.
- Emerging vendors aren't doing a good job with the content and sales process to change any buyer's minds, and prove that they have something better than the incumbent worth taking a slight risk on. One big part of this is not being able to show relevant, specific, evidence and success stories that they've delivered success in a similar industry, company size, region, use-case, etc.
- Competitive enablement needs to be much more of a focus. While one finding of this report is investing in Brand is important so you make the top of the shortlist -- if you're an emerging vendor - you're not going to outspend the incumbent on Brand - so while important, it's not really an actionable strategy for a lot of smaller companies. What is actionable is harnessing the voice of your happy customers, to get super granular and authentic proof from customers that did switch from these incumbents. Evidence that talks about why you're better/different, what it's like to switch/migrate etc.
- Buyers don't believe your (or your Forrester TEI's) 438% ROI claim. It's too broad, it's unbelievable, it's unsubstantiated, and not specific to your exact business and use-case. We need to break the ROI/value argument up into more realistic and believable sub-components (eg hours saved per week, improvements in win rates, FTE salary deferred, etc) that build into a more credible ROI/value narrative. Also - we can't just make sh*t up and pull numbers out of thin air, and pointing to one hand-curated reference customer isn't sufficient evidence, it's anecdotal at best, and a biased sample at worst. Showing more broad-based, relevant, statistically significant samplings of customer success will earn more trust that you've delivered ROI across lots of customers, not just one.
Anyway check out the report (link in comments) - there's some great insights in there that should make you rethink how you sell and market.