into a quantifiable business case. This kind of "ROI diagnostic" as a selling tool gives you three advantages: It aligns and maps your product's capabilities, operational benefits, and financial value with the company's key strategic initiatives. This helps your enterprise­wide proposal compete for capital with all the other proposed initiatives, programs, and projects. It improves visibility into the current operations environment, by providing a snapshot of operational inefficiencies and challenges. Besides showing the company that you get what matters to them, this approach helps insulate you from pricing pressure. It ensures that the plan for implementing your solution delivers on the most important business objectives first, which in turn ensures a shorter time to value. If landing bigger customers is new to your business, you’ll have to staff up with more customer­facing resources than you expected or wanted — professional services, customer support, etc. Investing in these kinds of roles and people pays off in securing and expanding these customers – and in getting the best marketing resource there is: happy customer references. Don’t obsess so much on getting new customers that you forget to invest in current ones. Including turning them into unassailable external references and advocates. Because good products – and even many great ones – don’t sell themselves. You need champions who will help sell them for you.