Where's the beef?

This term made famous by Wendy’s Hamburgers, is a common question in ECM. Many times senior management will ask you what is the value in your proposed ECM environment or where’s the beef? They want to know how it will bring benefit to the organization as a whole. If they are going to invest time and money, what will they gain?

 

Our typical response is to point our greater efficiency, decreased storage space, less paper or a myriad of other things like that but those are only the condiments, where’s the beef? Here is an example. At one point in my career I had the good fortune to work for a firm that focused on the transportation industry and more specifically the trucking industry. My approach was as described above, pointing out the condiments rather than the beef. As one owner put it to me, “son, my business is to keep these trucks rolling and my investments are in fuel, oil, maintenance, tires and drivers. Unless you can figure out how your ‘solution’ will bring in money I am not interested.” That message to me was a challenge and I knew he was right so now I had to come up with a way to prove we had the beef.

 

I took an approach that if I were him, what would catch my attention. I cannot help with keeping the trucks rolling and he is not concerned about paper clogging his office operations so that wouldn’t work. Then it hit me, what if we could leverage ECM to increase his cash flow. If we could position ECM in a way that he could invoice faster and get paid sooner he would surely buy into what we offer. When I returned to talk with him, he said it would need to be a quick meeting since he already knew what my product was, “toss the buns and condiments and show me the beef.” So I explained that if he were to implement distributed capture using scanners in his various locations around the country, his drivers could drop their paperwork with the terminal manager as always but now it would be scanned and entered into the system from there. At that point, accounting can work on it within hours and invoice since they had all of the paperwork they needed, available to them. Instead of waiting weeks to invoice they could now do this in days. Our meeting lasted several hours as we brainstormed how it would play out and we signed a deal shortly thereafter.

 

In my view, all ECM implementations face this challenge whether you are a sales person for a solution provider or the project manager inside your company you have to show your sponsors how it will benefit the organization. When they ask” where’s the beef”, look at it from their view and show them, then finish it off with the condiments. Take time to assess how it would impact business and bring about change that will really make a difference. Just like the trucking company, their focus is moving materials around the country so their investment is in their trucks not in the office unless it can bring them money. Cash flow is money and in this case, increasing cash flow by decreasing the number of days they wait for payment made a significant difference in their operations.

 

What say you? How do you position projects and solutions to get support? Do you have a story to tell? I want to hear from you.

 

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Bob Larrivee – AIIM blarrivee@aiim.org

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Comments

[www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkKhwDKxRm5Y06wY0W_XB_LN7w0Q5x6oBc]

Bob - great example of a business case to sell ECM to upper management. You are right on track that we have to put it in terms the business understands and that was a great example.

Doug Schultz

[Steve Weissman]

Yes indeedy! Great tale, speaking directly to my favorite cut-to-the-chase advice, for buyers and sellers alike: "Forget what it's called, forget what it does, forget how it does it. Focus instead on what business problem it solves!"

Kudos to your customer for taking this view, and to you too for meeting him where he lives. THIS is how business is done!