Turning product capabilities into commercial value

Context

Can your sales team show a customer, in dollars, what your product is worth? Without that, every deal is harder to close.

We sell recurring data subscriptions to suppliers. Paid features such as inventory visibility and out-of-stock detection help suppliers sell more. A supplier deciding whether to subscribe wants to know one thing: when will this pay for itself?

I worked with sales to build an ROI calculator that translates product capabilities into the financial benefits a supplier can expect.

Challenge

Every month, 30 to 40 people across sales and business development spent a large share of their time pulling product information by hand and building pitch decks.

Each team told the value story its own way. There was no consistent method to show the financial return of the subscription, so the message changed from deck to deck.

Customers needed to see how paid features, such as inventory visibility and out-of-stock detection, could help them recover what they spent on the subscription. The manual process made that slower and harder to show.

Approach & Execution

Started with the sales teams

I worked directly with sales teams to understand how they pitch and what they needed. Those conversations became the requirements.

Translated features into financial benefits

I mapped each product capability to a benefit a supplier can measure in money, such as the sales recovered when inventory visibility and out-of-stock detection catch empty shelves.

Built the calculator

I defined the requirements for the ROI calculator and worked with analysts to develop it.

Rolled it out

I led the implementation, trained sales team members and introduced the calculator across the sales organization. I helped teams use it in customer conversations to show how quickly the investment could pay back, and to introduce customers to the rest of the product portfolio.

Outcome

• More than 95% of sales team members adopted the calculator.
• The highest-performing sales teams used it consistently across their accounts.
• Improved sales team efficiency by 24%, with less time spent preparing collateral by hand.
• After the rollout, the sales cycle went from 90 days to under 60.

Takeaway

A product manager’s impact does not stop at the product. When you understand how sales talks to customers and translate what your product does into financial outcomes, you help the business sell.