In earlier blogs, we’ve established that IT is equipped to speak the business side about their goals. We’ve also explained why linking your products and services to business goals is so important. Now let’s turn to value and why you must quantify the value. As businesses articulate their desired business outcomes, it is increasingly important that there is a dollar figure associated with those outcomes. If not, why would an organization invest in certain products or services? It’s your job to quantify that value.
Digital transformation today has three touchstones:
- One: increasing agility. Doing things faster than your competition should lead to increased revenue. Automation, which is one of the elements of increasing agility, may also lower operating costs as well.
- Two: customer experience. And by customer, we mean anyone using an application to do work, to make buying decisions, to purchase, or to get information. Essentially, the application becomes the driver of business transformation, in that it generates new business and creates differentiating customer experiences. When it comes to customer experiences, we all must be consumer-focused. Think about customers like ourselves – we want to products and services designed specifically for us and we want to enjoy purchasing and using them. Think of your customers in the same way.
- And three: CEOs always talk about innovation – they praise the idea of doing new things, or doing familiar things better. Pursuing innovation requires using digital transformation to create new business models. These new models should enable organizations to move up and down the supply chain, offer different products, transition from a product sell to an as-a-services sell.
Put a Price on Performance
In effect, companies must pursue all the different kinds of initiatives that create new revenue sources and new business models. The new models enabled by digital transformation can deliver better business outcomes which in turn drive business performance – results that can be demonstrated when they are quantified. This is how your company proves its value. Show how – by adopting your solution – your customer can increase speed to market, say by 48%, which could deliver $1 million in additional revenue. This is just the kind of compelling statement that quantifies the value of your solution.
By the way, don’t forget to build an ROI case as well. Business people make decisions based on return on investment. Business buyers understand the need for investment; they understand that their obligation to the owners of the business is to show a return. That’s why it’s so important to quantify in dollars what improving business outcomes is going to do for the business. And by putting together the whole picture, you can help your customer understand that investing in your solution is going to deliver a return.
