Shark Finesse Ltd was founded in 2001 to respond to the increasing number of demands on suppliers to provide business cases for proposed solutions to customers. This enables technical buyers to use necessary financial arguments to secure scarce funding inside their own organisations.

Historically these activities were conducted by external consultants (and "old ROI suppliers"), limited to extremely large deals, but the tighter economic climate has opened this up to the majority of sales proposals. Sales teams can be reluctant to expose valuable client relationships to the traditional arrogance or cost of consultancy firms and really need tools and processes to conduct this activity themselves - operating higher in the organisation and adding more value.

Shark Finesse have built ROI process and education tools that allow the client to co-sponsor the input to an impressive ROI proposal which finds "enough" economic benefit to meet the minimum criteria inside their own organisation. In comparison, traditionally produced ROI proposals from consultants are usually 65 page monsters submitted to the technical buyer who has no chance of understanding where it came from, why its so intimidating, and yet he is expected to sponsor this to his Board colleagues and deliver the savings (and even redundancies) claimed by the experts !

Shark tools are easy to operate, sit on the desktop, and do not rely upon spreadsheets so mistrusted by customers. The focus of Shark Finesse is to provide tools that reduce and eliminate the dependence upon consultants, by up-skilling sales teams with language and processes to develop the higher value added relationships that they all strive for.

Next: What prompted the development of this innovative ROI tool?