The Benefits of Business Cases in Corporate Sales

For most of my life, I have been a person who measured risk. In my early childhood years I got it wrong a few times and this meant several visits to the hospital to get stitched up. Enough said. From that point on I wanted to do things smarter, faster, better and get paid nicely for my approach to work and I did.

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Throughout my career I would?take risks most people just did not have the stomach to engage. This resulted in my earning outsized commission checks and bonuses. I read business books religiously. I studied management, production, public speaking, negotiation, strategic planning, logic, real estate evaluation, database construction and finally the stock market.?I was building a personal Patrick Tinney Degree in “Elevated Business Studies.”

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This built my hunger for launching products, industry studies, research tools and even industry standard manuals one of which become a national standard. All of this forced me to speed my processes up for launching products to create incremental revenue others in my industry had not yet identified. Bring on business case studies. What I determined was the toughest sale I had to make was internally not externally. This meant that I had to build field tested business cases and sell them to the executive management team. Essentially, I had to prove viability and profitability before anything was sold to a customer. The way to speed all of this up was to do production plant tours to look at machinery I could access at a price that our company did or in many cases did not own. My company production people and distribution people really liked that someone from head office would visit them and ask for their professional opinions on products I wanted to build.

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Over time my cost and production models become so sophisticated that often I would have to present them to senior management a few times for them to understand what I was really talking about. By this time, I realized that I could make what I eventually labelled “Magic Money”. This strategic style of thinking meant that a lot of the executive team wanted to talk to me more and even pull out profit and loss spreadsheet decks for me to analyze and give my professional opinion on for futures and risk.

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I remember the last two big cases I presented at the end of my corporate career. The first one was writing a national free standing Insert (FSI) strategy for all of Canada. In our case about 5.5 million homes. My Senior Vice President of Advertising did not like it because it was too detailed and did not have enough pictures. Just think about that? I was contacted by the Senior Vice President of Distribution for the company and he brought in his most senior manager and I presented the entire strategy for a couple of hours. At the end of my presentation he quietly asked “May I have a complete copy of that strategic plan?” What he realized was, I had actually provided him with a road map that he could repurpose over and over again to make his job a lot easier and de-risked well into the future.

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The second business case took almost a year to complete. It involved visiting our production facilities in critical markets across Canada. It also involved bringing in printers who owned or rented their own press facilities. I built physical size and thickness specifications that would run single sheet paper through almost every insert distribution machine in Canada and even that of our competitors or frenemies. This is where the magic money appears and it mystified my boss the SVP. The product was called “Print, Plan and Distribute”. The short line was that I asked printers to price paper and printing time to fit my cost models. In one case, I asked a printer Drew Harris to raise his rates to fit my model and it “freaked him out” because nobody does this. After about a year of running live insert distribution machinery tests with some machines running at 20,000 pieces per hour, I was ready to present my product to my SVP and all of the other Advertising VP’s from across Canada in one large meeting. This semi-annual meeting was called the Advertising Operations Committee (AOC) Meeting and it was a shark fest. A few ideas were debated and passed and a number of ideas got shot down often for political reasons. It was a brutal test of mental strength.

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After a few pleasantries and announcements I was first up. I presented to the VP’s that I would be using their inserting machinery but that their local?profit was a bonus so it did not matter how profitable I was using machinery they already owned and had paid for by de-amortization. Then I told them that I was marking up printing facility paper products that we did not own and I told them they could keep these “Magic Money” profits. Finally, I shared with them we would be using our Statics Canada Research that we already owned through annual licensing agreements to use as the platform to present targeting research to our major advertisers. In my 22 years with the company it was the only time in my life I saw a senior executive room explode with cheers, applause and the odd “Go gett’em Paddy!!” Once things died down, I just quietly looked at the packed room and said “So I guess we have a deal.” The room exploded again but my SVP boss hushed everyone and said “We must put this to a vote.” The room then became confused and quiet. Then a bunch of shocked sidebar conversations started. My SVP boss did not understand the “Magic Money” concept so I walked over and sat beside him and said “I am going to make us free money with little risk. Do you understand?" Then I said something to the effect of “Do you want to turn down free money in front of your peers?” He nodded slowly. He looked around the room and said something to the effect of “motion passed.” Our Sales Professionals later sold $1,000,000 worth of unbudgeted Print, Plan and Distribute in the first 6 months of launch with a markup of around 50%. Think about that? $500,000 of unbudgeted profit! This is the power of business cases! This is The Bonus Round!! #Sales #ProductDevelopment #BusinessCases #Profit #InternalSelling #Unbudgeted #Incremental #Strategic #Planning #Giddyup !! #MagicMoney #CorporateSales