SaaS sellers often pitch time savings as ROI, but executives care about revenue impact. Translate hours saved into concrete outcomes like faster product launches and measurable business results to close more deals.
A mistake many sellers make is thinking that soft costs are extremely convincing for their buyers. A soft cost is usually something around time savings. Something like, our solution will save your team five hours a week, or whatever the metric might be. Not too long ago, I was on a call with a Chief Product officer and their engineering team, along with Rae, his manager, and myself, and we were walking through a business case for a pretty decent size, decent sized deal. The AE was walking them through the ROI projections, right where we were. We had pretty heavily leaned on the soft costs around time savings for engineers, right? Our entire value proposition was built around the idea that while your engineers will be spending less time working on database maintenance, which is going to be a cost savings for you because it's time savings. So the AE walked through the business case quite well. And then he asked the question, does this make sense? Right? And the Chief Product Officer said, yeah, makes sense. I could tell that something was off with how he responded. And so as the AE went into the next slide, I jumped in, cut him off. I know, rude VP of sales right there, But I cut him off and said, okay, so it's, it makes sense, but do you believe it? And the Chief Product Officer kind of chuckled and said, no, sure, but it doesn't really matter because I'm paying this team their salary. They're making that money whether they are doing this maintenance work or not. And so it doesn't save me any money off my budget if they save that time, right? So our entire value proposition was if we can save you five hours a week, that's $500,000 a year of savings, which is two and a half times more than the solution costs. The executive is thinking, look, I'm already paying that salary, that $500,000 a year. That's still paid out of my budget. Now I'm paying them that $500,000 a year, plus I'm paying $200,000 for a new product. So now I'm, I'm over, I'm over a budget, right? And so what we had to do is completely shift the conversation for the business case. The soft cost of time savings wasn't valuable because the actual issue was more around hard costs, fixed budget, right? And more often than not, soft costs don't actually impact the firm budget that has to be met by executives. And so as an example of where we could, we could go and make this a lot more effective, right? Is taking those soft costs, that time savings and turning them in to firmer costs tied to the opportunity of what they could be doing. And so in a really good example, instead of saying, hey, we can save your firm five hours a week, which if we look at your engineer salary, that's 500k a year, let's go figure out what we can do with that time. If they had it back. And so if we were able to go build a business case where we Learned from the VP of Engineering that if engineering had an extra 5 hours per week to focus on a new product, then they'd be able to launch one month early. Okay, so here we go. So now we have five hours a week saved, means this product launches one month early. Then let's add that to revenue. Your VP of product estimates the revenue impact of an early launch to be $2 million. So all of a sudden our business case is no longer you're going to save five hours a week, that's $500,000 a year. Instead it's you are going to save five hours per week. That's going to enable the team to ship this product one month earlier. And the revenue impact of shipping that product one month earlier is X amount of money. Right? And so when you have your soft cost will save your team time, which in the world of SaaS is really common, right? We're all about ease of use, automation, making things faster. We've got to go from we'll save your team time to you'll accomplish X and generate Y revenue with that time saved and your win rate is going to increase. So back to the story. We were able to go and find a business case that made the investment make sense. We were able to win the deal, but had we just stuck to the original your engineers will save this time we would have lost because it didn't actually address metrics that the Chief Product Officer cared about. Right? Those soft costs were not in their immediate priorities and things that are not immediate priorities do not get solved. So I hope this is a helpful illustration of how to think about soft costs like ease of use, which save time, make things more efficient, and a way to go little bit deeper into your conversations to figure out, well, with that time saved, what are they actually going to do and what is going to be the impact of that for them. If you found this video helpful, let me know. 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