Alinean Business Value Sales Tools

Turning opportunities into results at every stage of the customer buying lifecycle. Alinean's B2B sales and marketing tools target frugal buyers' skepticism, speed prospect decision making, and streamline the sales cycle.

Applying the Alinean Tools to match buyer lifecycle stages is proven to drive greater sales and marketing effectiveness. Focus on your customer's goals, opportunities, unique value and savings opportunities to help drive prospect awareness and decision making.

The Customer Buying Lifecycle defined:

The Alinean tools help your customers understand the value of your solutions at each step in the Customer Buying Lifecycle:

Defining and Managing Goals - In the initial step of customer buying lifecycle, the customer executive team defines and manages business and IT goals. To support this process, customer executives appreciate insight and guidance on how they compare to their competition against key business and IT performance metrics as well as what strategies peers are deploying to improve. By understanding the customer's strategic goals, IT vendors and solution providers can use tools like Peer Comparison benchmarking tools to provide insight into performance or spending issues, comparing to named competitors, industry averages, and industry leaders. The tools also provide an intelligent opportunity review and consultative advice on improvement strategies which map to a customers value objectives and goals. Engaging with customer executives at this level of this discussion offers a significant competitive advantage. Not only will an IT vendor or solution provider identify potential areas to do a deeper dive, they will build a trusted advisor relationship at the highest levels in the customer organization.

Discovering Opportunities - Once goals are defined and competitive performance levels are understood, the customer stakeholders need to uncover specific opportunities and priorities for improvement to meet these goals and to improve or maintain their competitive position. Assessment tools with gap analysis and capability and maturity models can help benchmark current people, process and technology against industry best practice as well as to industry average and leading peers. The resultant reports highlight priorities, gaps, and a clear roadmap to drive quantifiable savings or business value improvements. The roadmap provides clear analysis of why improving is a competitive imperative, and an overview of the projects that should be a part of the priority plan. Supporting the customer with this step can provide an IT vendor or solution provider a roadmap of what proposed solutions to pursue with the customer.

Making the Business Case - After identifying and prioritizing potential solution projects, the customer stakeholders should examine solution projects for which will deliver the biggest bang for the buck. Customer stakeholders are keenly aware that without a business case for change, their executives can elect to continue doing business as usual and not invest precious resources and dollars in new projects. In many cases, the customer stakeholders do not have the tools, resources or skills to develop a impactful business case. IT vendors and service providers can accelerate this buying cycle and significantly increase the chance of a potential project being funded by using return on investment (ROI) analysis tools to quantify the investment and value of specific proposed projects Analyses include ROI, payback period, net present value savings and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to help prioritize and justify project investments. Supporting the customer with this step will accelerate the sales cycle and may avoid having the customer perform a competitive analysis.

Comparing and Selecting Solution - Once the case for change is made, the customer stakeholders identify and compare alternative solutions to select the best value. At this step, IT vendors and solution providers can use TCO comparison tools make the competitive justification as to why a specific solution is economically a better choice. Pricing and Configurator tools help to make sure the proposed solution meets customer demands and is specified correctly. Product Comparison tools help to compare features and functions head to head to illustrate competitive advantage. Supporting the customer with this step will ensure an IT vendor's or solution provider's solution is put in the best possible position.

Leveraging Success - After selected solutions are implemented, customer executives want to understand the value delivered. Customer stakeholders can leverage their success to gain credibility within their organization and better position for the next project. By ensuring that customer stakeholders track their results using the Alinean tool reporting capabilities, IT vendors and solution providers can similarly leverage their quantifiable and demonstrable success of implemented solutions both within this customer account as well as other prospects. These proof points will encourage a trusted advisor relationship and open future sales opportunities. And this includes an assessment of goals accomplished and a rediscovery of new goals via a repeat of the lifecycle.

At each stage of the buying lifecycle, Alinean tools empower marketing, sales, partner and consulting professionals to prove the business and economic impact of proposed solutions - leading to faster purchasing decisions, larger deal size, reduced discounting and improved competitive advantage. Customized online tools allow prospects to perform their own quick self assessments to identify opportunities for improvement and value proof points rapidly. As the buyer moves through the sales process, more detailed tool empower sales professionals to deliver CFO ready assessments and business cases .

The Alinean Business Value Sales Tools are different than any other offering in that:

• They are designed on a single scalable EnterpriseROI™ sales tool platform

• Can port existing spreadsheet based sales tool content directly into an enterprise business value sales tool application in three easy steps, not requiring any software customization or programming, leading to faster time to campaign launch and easy updates / maintenance as programs evolve, including easy self maintenance enablement.

• Deliver compelling and credible third-party validated results to skeptical buyers, including the incorporation of IDC business value and ROI or WiPro PSA TCO research.

• Customized for 600 different analysis and assessment sales tool programs for over 100 leading IT solution providers

• Endorsed as a best practice by many leading IT vendors including Microsoft, HP, IBM, EMC, CA, Cisco, Intel and Unisys, as well as innovative leaders such as VMware, BlueCoat and Citrix.

• Created by ex-Gartner ROI / TCO research and analysis tools experts and IT content experts from Major IT Vendor and Solution Providers such as HP, IBM, Sun, SAS and CSC.

• Endorsed by leading analysts and consultancies including IDC and WiPro PSA

• Available via software as a service (SaaS) licensing, providing for frequent and no-charge advancement of the platform features and functions, support and maintenance.

Implementing an Alinean Business Value Sales Tool program has been proven to help sales and marketing teams refocus efforts from traditional product feature-function-price based approaches, to messages and deliverables which resonate with frugal economic buyers and executive decision makers - quantifying the unique value of the opportunity and solution. The business value sales tools and lifecycle-based methodology have proven effective and invaluable in helping vendors connect better with prospects, gain priority, drive faster decisions and competitively win approvals:

• Driving 10% or more in additional revenue opportunities

• Reducing discounting and increasing deal size by 20% or more

• Accelerating sales cycles by 20-30%

• Generating more qualified leads and improving lead conversion rates by 40% or more

• Increasing the competitive success rate of proposals by over 60%

• Improving channel sales loyalty and capability

• Driving competitive advantage.

A few of the results for those who have standardized on Alinean's EnterpriseROI™ business value sales tool solutions:

• Major solutions provider uses Alinean PeerComparison™ tools online so CIOs can do top-level benchmark assessments, as well as with sales professionals, who use the more detailed version to create compelling executive briefing reports to discuss strategic goals and opportunities with Cx-level/VP decision makers.

• Major computer vendor launches new enterprise simplification program using an Alinean IT Assessment Calculator™ to successfully creating new positioning with IT executives and generating 100+ leads per day

• Large enterprise software vendor quantifies a 20% decrease in discounting as a result of Alinean's ROI Analyst™ solutions turning traditional product feature-function-price sales pitches into compelling value selling presentations

• Leading enterprise server and storage solution provider quantifies $300 million in incremental sales attributable to Alinean's ROI Calculator™ - helping to generate more qualified leads; and Alinean ROI Analyst™ - helping sales teams better quantify the value of proposed solutions in consultative workshops.

• Prominent IT management software provider attributes $15M per quarter in incremental revenue as a result of Alinean's ROI Analyst™ solutions - helping sales and consulting professionals quantify the value of change, and the competitive cost savings of proposed solutions.

• VoIP solutions provider uses Alinean's ROI Calculator™ and ROI Analyst™in concert, to drive 20% additional sales in new competitive vertical segments