Today’s customers have to work hard to get the funds and resources to get an approval to make investments. They must demonstrate positive investment calculations (ROI). Before the customer

is ready to take a decision, the economy and risks have to be con- sidered carefully. Being too many deals have been dismissed as too expensive and because the seller failed to demonstrate the value of the investment.

"Show me the money," said Tom Cruise in the movie Jerry Maguire. It is not only in the movie world that this happens. An example of this was when a financial manager asked me why our training was so expensive. Before I could answer, his sales manager opened his Excel calculator and pointed to first-year expected ROI, Return On Investment, on the sales training. From the start there was no room for investment. But the sales manager and CEO had calculated that the sales force could increase its sales by SEK 300 million by using the Solution Selling methodology. The project's cost of 2 million was then easy to defend. The value of the solution should be calculated together with the customers' decision-makers. Then they will trust the numbers. If you make an ROI calculation yourself, it's only a selling argument that does not mean anything because the customer thinks you are angling the numbers to your advantage.

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