A field report from daily sales practice
In sales, it is often said that the added value or value of the product must be brought closer to the customer. Most sales departments have heard the terms ROI, payback and value selling more than once.
However, profitability calculations have rarely been used in the daily sales routine to date.
Why is that?
In addition to the lack of time and often also the lack of know-how, a major reason for this is the wrong tool for creating such calculations. When you think of calculation, you first think of Excel. But Excel is the wrong tool for creating and communicating business cases.
Customers do not respond to Excel
Excel tables are not very appealing and difficult to understand. They overload the viewer and distract from the topic with too many buttons and functions. In addition, Excel spreadsheets contain invisible formulas that are rarely comprehensible at first glance.
This lack of transparency tires the viewer and makes it difficult to trust the calculation results.
Sellers shy away from the effort
Creating entire business cases with Excel is time-consuming. Even if business logic and calculation approaches are repeated, they cannot simply be copied into a new case. This results in incorrect references to the cells and inconsistent calculation results in the end. After a transfer of cells and calculations, the creator is often occupied with testing for longer than if the business case is created from scratch.
These sources of error unsettle the preparer and make it difficult to present the key financial figures with confidence. The lowest denominator of the valuable ROI calculation is often a less detailed and therefore less meaningful value estimate.
Excel quickly grows into chaos
Even if you manage to create a business case correctly and reasonably clearly in Excel, it becomes problematic when it goes into practice. The file is often copied, adapted, expanded or passed on to various colleagues and customers. This quickly leads to errors – formulas get lost, links break or incorrect assumptions end up in the spreadsheet and remain undetected. As Excel has no built-in versioning or user rights, it is easy to lose track of which version is the latest. The business case becomes confusing and chaotic. Such a tool cannot be scaled sensibly for use with multiple users or even customers. What began as a solid calculation often ends up as an error-prone, barely comprehensible construct that creates more confusion than clarity.
Other tools are needed to create business cases
With suitable tools, business cases can be created more easily, presented more clearly and, at the end of the day, communicated more convincingly. The Impact Discovery Platform is the better solution for recording and calculating key process indicators and leads to meaningful business cases.
Impact Discovery Platform vs. Excel
The advantages of the Impact Discovery Platform over Excel are:
- Intuitive operation
The platform is designed for user-friendly operation. Business cases can be stored as templates and easily customized. The clearly structured interface serves as a guide for users. It contains no hidden formulas and displays the results immediately when parameters are changed.
- Transparence
All entries and calculations are visible to customers. The platform makes references visible and provides additional explanatory information on the input fields. All participants in the value assessment immediately recognize how the values are calculated.
- Interactivity
The Impact Discovery platform promotes interactive exchange with the customer. It adapts inputs and changes in real time. Customers actively contribute to the creation of the business case and immediately recognize the impact of their input.
- Automation
The platform automatically generates result reports in PDF format. Users can decide on the scope of the report themselves and use it for their internal presentation of results.
- Security
Every user is given a secure user account for the Impact Discovery Platform. Open and possibly confidential questions can be shared with the right expert via a secure, internal communication channel. When using the platform, there is no need to send file attachments with macros, which pose a significant security risk. The system therefore also meets the strict security guidelines of sensitive company areas.
- Consistency
A central platform for the creation, storage and tracking of business cases enables reusability for comparable cases. This creates a standardization that promotes the comparability of sales projects. Consistent and comparable calculation results are created across different versions.
