ALINEAN, INC.
CHICAGO, IL

– research and best practices to help you sell better in the 21st century Twenty years ago Tom Pisello was a product line manager in a position similar to yours, with many of the same challenges – he was responsible for launching a new solution and making it a success. The product was a new data storage management suite that required a re-tooled and re-trained sales team to transcend from traditional product feature/price focused technical selling to a more challenging conversation articulating the business value of information lifecycle management to executives … easier said than done! To meet this challenge Tom developed one of the first ROI/TCO tools for IT, designed to diagnose and quantify potential sales opportunities and financially justify the new solution with a professional business case. Feedback from customers was immediate and highly positive. Tom knew he was on to something with this new selling approach and soon left to form Interpose, the first company dedicated to the development of ROI/TCO based financial justification tools. Over several years Tom gained the nickname “the ROI Guy”, and with a dedicated group of software developers and analysts created the industry standard for IT financial analysis. The success led to the company becoming part of Gartner, and the team playing a key role in the development of many value selling tools and practices still in use today. In the late 90’s the technology bubble burst followed by the 9/11 recession, and the impact these events had on budgets turned buyers more frugal, dramatically increasing the need for financial justification – a condition Tom coined “Frugalnomics” in his publications. This inspired members of Tom’s original development team to regroup, and Alinean was formed with a singular mission to empower B2B sales and marketing to better communicate and quantify value to prospects and customers. From its founding in 2001 Tom’s insight, thought leadership and passion have spurred Alinean growth and brand recognition. The team continues to grow, pioneering the development of exciting new innovative methodologies and tools to help B2B solution providers better Survive Frugalnomics. SiriusDecisions Review of Alinean A unique combination of value selling & value marketing expertise, financial modeling and software development, to deliver more effective, credible value messaging tools. Codify your solution’s unique business value with Alinean, collaborating with your team to uncover and deliver provocative insights, differentiating value messaging and credible value calculations. Generate more qualified leads and motivate purchases with Alinean, delivering customized online interactive content, enabling prospects to self-assess challenges, benchmark against peers, quantify the cost of “do nothing” and tally the value of your solutions. Activate better customer engagements with Alinean customized on-line and tablet installed Value Sales Tools, for use by sales reps, partners and consultants to collaboratively help uncover prospect challenges, assess & benchmark issues, and communicate & quantify the value of proposed solutions. In our case, we chose to work with Alinean, as they really understand value marketing and selling. It’s all they do. The Alinean partnership was a critical success factor, allowing our sales teams to engage earlier, delivering over 1,500 business cases last year, and generating $120M in incremental annual revenue.”