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B2B Approaches for Different Economic Cycles 135

involve these people from the beginning of the process. In
essence, you are building their human bias into the numbers
as well as their support of the numbers. In doing this, when
the formal business case is presented, it will have already
been agreed to and sanctioned by the people who carry the
most weight in terms of their internal trust factor or unbiased
nature as subject matter experts.

When a vendor presents “their” numbers, the trust factor
is typically around 20% based on extrapolations of the
Edelman Trust Index. When the number is tied to an inter-
nally trusted, unbiased individual, the trust factor ranges
anywhere from 60 to 90% depending on the strengths of the
following two factors:

1. Perception of being unbiased
2. Perception of degree of expertise.

These internally trusted subject matter experts (SMEs)
should be the ones that the funding person/s regards as
the de facto expert with no particular bias or vested inter-
est in the decision to buy or not to buy. An effective way
to achieve this is to create a business case “committee”.
This committee not only includes the decision-makers but
also the trusted, independent SMEs. The very process of
them being a part of the committee is your chance to
subtly sell them and build their biases into the “numbers”.
As the business case committee works to prepare the busi-
ness case, you are transparently and subtly selling them as
well as understanding their beliefs and biases toward the
potential impact of your product or solution on their
business.

Creativity is the key – traditional versus
nontraditional business case approaches

Once the committee is established, and you understand how
money flows in this economic environment, you must choose