What are the maths on paying for software? Should you select it based on price or impact?
Some people look at the cost of business software and it puts them off. Unfortunately, these days there are so many $20 per month options that muddy the water saying they offer this or that, but they never customised to your business or your customer. Instead you end up having to change your business to fit this software. This means that you are not able to create a competitive advantage by doing things differently.
Rather than Software as a Service, we like to think of the impact of the Software as opposed to the time cost of staff, the time saved, the risks mitigated and the ease of scaling or adaptation.
So, working on that logic we have done some maths:
If you were to pay a salesperson to make two contacts per week with your clients (all of them), send them some information, follow up on setting up meetings have them spend time writing communications to them and so on as well as attending meetings, incurring travel expenses, wages, sick days etc. You would expect to pay them anywhere from $80 - $100K+ per year depending on industry, cost of doing business, insurance, workcover and the like.
The right software could pretty much do 50% of their role, which is a $40-$50k saving or more. More likely you would not have to replace the sales person but have them do more of the sales work face to face or on the phone rather than provide all the information, remember where everyone is up to in the customer journey, follow up with everyone and deal with the flood of qualified leads.
If you don’t already have a sales person, it could be a good first step. If you are comparing software costs with other cheaper alternatives then it is hard to make a comparison at face value, cobbling together multiple software tools is clunky and costlier in the long run. The cost of the software is likely only to be 10-20% of what you would pay for a salesperson. It doesn’t forget to send that email to that person about that thing.
The next thing to look at in the equation is the Return On Investment (ROI). Customers that are nurtured through the buying process make 47% larger purchases, are 62% less likely to kick the tyres and haggle. It also reduces the risk of having a less skilled salesperson forget to send the info or follow up, not to mention having a salesperson that is totally ineffective or is disengaged. Particularly, if it takes 12 contacts to get a client to buy and your sales person maxes out at 3 then you are hardly getting ROI on that employee and training new ones is difficult because the knowledge walks out the door with them.
Having a system prevents this.