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Company Profile
Shark Finesse Ltd was founded in 2001 to respond to the increasing demands on suppliers to provide business cases to customers. These business cases are required to help buyers secure scarce funding inside their own organizations by using key economic language to describe the benefits in the supplier solution.
Historically, customers and suppliers have relied upon expensive external consultants or the scarce resource of internal specialists limiting the approach to extremely large deals. However, the tighter economic climate has opened up the requirement for the addition of financial value (ROI) based business cases to the majority of sales proposals.
Sales teams can often be reluctant to expose valuable client relationships to the traditional arrogance or cost of consultancy firms. What they really need are need tools and processes to conduct this activity themselves; operating higher in the client organization and adding more value.
Shark Finesse have built ROI software 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 organization. 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 and yet is expected to sponsor this to decision-makers and deliver the savings claimed by the experts.
Shark tools are easy to operate, sit on the notebook, and do not rely upon intimidating spreadsheets so mistrusted and disliked 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.
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- The Beginning
- Implementation
- Results
what prompted the development of this innovative ROI tool?
The story begins in 2001, when we realized that sales people were having problems producing financially justified business cases for proposals. Martin Southern, one of the founders was UK Managing Director of a NASDAQ listed Telcom corporation. Tasked by the parent company to find a solution to the quandary, it quickly became apparent that a suitable solution did not exist in the marketplace.
At this same time, a massive slow down in the Telcom marketplace took place and funding for customer projects was switched to those proposals that could provide a rapid economic return. The sales teams were highly skilled engineers who had never experienced a market slowdown. Many did not possess the skills to produce economic business case justifications.
A team was established to identify the sales teams' requirements and assist in the production of the business cases. The Sales Help And Resource Knowledgebase project or S.H.A.R.K. was conceived. A software concept was proposed, a prototype built with testing on actual customer situations. In December 2001, this prototype was used to produce a business case to win a tough $3 Million software proposal.
The demand for (and budget to complete) the software grew - yet it was not the parent company’s core business. The three founders agreed to leave, fund the software build, acquire all the Intellectual property rights (IPR), and contracted to supply the parent company’s EMEA sales force as the first users.
The Shark ROI tool was designed and built from the lessons of successful (and failed) sales bids, and the never ending requests from customers to provide a business case that would help them secure the necessary budget.
Sales people didn't have the necessary skills to build business cases and found the financial terminology associated with this unexciting and difficult to internalize. So Shark gave them permanent access to common sense explanations of business terms.
The sales people were good at questioning techniques and often followed structured sales methodologies (Miller Heiman, TAS, Huthwaite, etc) - all of which suggested a review of the economic buyer. Interestingly, none of these programs provided, and still do not provide, the tools for the job.
Both clients and sales mistrust and hatred of Excel, we automated the calculations to be hidden and error proof. The software design was continually modified to accommodate all the suggestions from the sales teams. This brought changes to the final output document, choices of front end arguments, foreign language terminology definitions, rental deals, 15 year business cases for the European Union, avoiding open tender, importing TCO spreadsheets, and many more.
Next: What challenges have you faced during the implementation? >>
Shark Finesse has a unique product with a proven track record in many large and small organizations that is now used worldwide by newly enabled sales teams. Continued focus on the requirements of sales, customization by industry, new industry verticals, and heavily modified training and software usage techniques makes Shark ROI a clear leader.
We also understand and deliver customer value through improved conversion rates, faster deal cycles, better understanding of client value generation and a real reason to engage the executive team inside the customer. It's the sales team talking about the customer's business, with the customer value at the front of the engagement.
This is also now being used by end user decision-makers too. Value delivery is needed by everyone, so we shouldn't be surprised at this development. Businesses must make sure to equip their team so they can operate effectively in this changing environment.
"I believe the value in this tool is not only in showing the financial benefits of going with our system, but is invaluable in getting the prospect engaged in the process."
Jim Flyn,
Real Solutions, US
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