In keeping with yesterday’s blog about how overwhelming it can be to have too many options, today we’ll explore how you might reduce decision-making stress by offering a small number of project bundles.
Suppose your prospect is gung-ho about making his building more energy efficient, and he’s even committed to allocating some time and money to pursue that goal. Should you present him with a dozen efficiency measures that would work with his situation and ask him to choose the ones he wants to do? Or should you package those measures in logical bundles and present just a few options from which to choose? If you were in your prospect’s shoes, I bet you’d prefer the latter. The bundling approach not only reduces the stress of having too many options to consider, but also saves your prospect the time and effort of crunching the numbers from various project combinations to derive their respective financial returns.
In the case of Non-Mutually-Exclusive projects, presenting a bundle of options in a financial summary is very simple. You just insert an extra row into the spreadsheet for each additional offering and stack the cash flows. Rather than having just one first-cost-out, one rebate-in, one first-year-savings-in, one second-year-savings-in, and so forth, you’ll have multiple figures for each. You then run the same metrics as usual on the combined cash flow streams to come up with a blended series of metrics.
The projects you choose to bundle together should be logical and should be chosen based on your prospect’s particular situation. Be careful to consider interactions between the measures on either the cost or savings lines. For example, packaging two measures might reduce their total installation cost by allowing you to install both using the same contractor and a single visit to the property. On the other hand, one measure may cannibalize the projected savings of another. So, take the time to evaluate carefully what combining certain measures might do to collective costs or savings. Ideally, each one of these bundles you present will be more compelling in combined form than any individual project would have been on its own.
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