STEP THREE:
Making the
commercial case

Linking your software proposal to your firm’s objectives

Explaining how your solution helps the wider practice

This next stage makes your case even more compelling because it shows how your proposal benefits everyone in the firm.

This requires stepping beyond your team and explaining how digital transformation can improve things from a practice-wide perspective.

If your firm has clear objectives, then this will be fairly easy. All you have to do is relate the proposed solution to those objectives.

Example: relating a solution to company goals

Let’s imagine you’re looking at accounting software that makes life easier for your staff when it comes to compliance. Historically, there have been a lot of bottlenecks. As jobs progress, your team has been retyping a lot of data from one digital solution into another. Thankfully, you have found software that can help.

In Step Two, you wrote down how it will make things better for your team. Now you need to look at how this solution can help the wider business.

But how? You reflect on the firm's goals. The senior team decided at the start of the year that, overall, it wants to increase the number of new clients paying for advisory by 10%.

You map the time you think you’ll save using the new compliance solution to this firm-wide objective (you’ll fix any gaps in the numbers during Step Four: Gathering information and evidence).

Accordingly, your proposal will suggest some of the time the software saves could be spent prospecting for new, advisory-focused clients.

But what if your firm doesn’t have stated goals? Read on, because we have an answer for that, too.

Addressing the needs of a firm beyond targets and goals

Sometimes a firm doesn’t have stated annual goals beyond profit. That’s okay, you can still look at the practice’s broader needs and explain how your new solution will help.

Here’s how you do this: broadly speaking, an accounting firm has five key business pillars underpinning day-to-day operations. Every change to your system should benefit at least one of them.

Profit. Does the solution make the firm more efficient, for example?
Staff. Does the change mean a happier workforce that wants to stay, and can this new system help attract talent (by enabling home working, for instance)?
Customer focus. Does this change help your firm serve clients better, and make them want to stay?
Competition and sales. Does this change help your firm stand out from the pack, or close a gap with direct rivals?
Growth and innovation. Does this change support the firm's wider direction of travel? This might be moving clients to the cloud, for example, or merging digital systems if you’ve made an acquisition.

Key business pillars:

If you can answer yes to some of these, and explain how, you've got a strategic case.