Over the last three weeks (here, here and here), I’ve talked about some key benefits to look for when building a business case for a potential social media solution. This week I’ll finish up with a few thoughts about what makes a business case successful.
Although the numbers are indeed important, never forget that the business case is about believability and confidence: your audience (the people with the money that you are trying to convince) need to believe the information you provide and need to have confidence that your social media solution is worth investing in.
Let’s talk first about believability. Let’s say I’ve built a business case and I intend to show you the benefits. I present you with a link to a web page where you can enter all kinds of metrics: how many customers you have, what the average purchase size is, how long customers stay with you, and so on. I sit down with you and collect a handful of metrics in 5 minutes, and then generate a 20 page business case with detailed charts, references, spreadsheets, etc. that show that if you invest $100,000 with me, in five years you will have saved $2,304,201.32. What’s your reaction? Do you believe the numbers and write me a check on the spot? (If so, please give me a call…I have a web site I’d like to walk through with you.) If you are like most people, you look at the business case with a healthy amount of skepticism: any methodology, no matter how sophisticated, cannot possibly be that accurate with such little input. What if I spend the next two hours going over the business case with you to show you *why* the numbers are accurate: we look at dozens of research papers published by organizations you trust (or maybe even belong to), we look at the comparison of your numbers with your close competitors and show you what savings/revenue improvements they have been able to achieve with the same solution, and so on. How do you feel about the business case now? Better?
When modern surveyors first measured the height of Mt. Everest with modern equipment (well, modern at the time) they calculated that it was *exactly* 29,000 feet high. Rather than have people assume that the 29,000 number was an estimate only accurate to a few hundred feet, they decided to publish the surveyed height as 29,001 feet. It turns out that when measuring mountains and building business cases, credibility is more important than accuracy. Your numbers can be accurate to a fault, but if you haven’t given the buyer reason to be confident that your numbers are believable, your business case will not be successful.
One more point I’d like to make. There’s an old saying in sales that “When you’ve made the sale, stop selling.” If you prepare a business case that presents four or five big benefits and 100 little ones, you are wasting time and effort. If you can make the four or five big benefits believable (and reasonably accurate), there is no point in quantifying or attempting to justify 100 additional little ones. In fact, you may be giving the buyer reason to suspect that your four or five big ones might be iffy, since you felt compelled to attempt to justify so many other benefits that, in comparison, really don’t matter much.
Finally in an act of shameless self promotion: if you want to read more about building business cases in general, I’d recommend that you look into an Executive Report on the subject I did for the Cutter Consortium. I’m sure they would appreciate it (as would I).
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