How many value consultants does it take?

As the need for better communicating and quantifying the business value of proposed solutions continues to increase, more and more organizations are setting up and scaling their value consulting teams to support these efforts.

These teams are tasked to create the calculation models, develop value storytelling, engage with prospect and customers to create assessments and deliver the results, and scale the program across the company.

Often we are asked, how many value consultants does it take to get the practice right.
The ratios do depend on the scaling approach the team takes and the solution / customer complexity.

With Spreadsheet-driven programs, where the value consultant uses a spreadsheet to engage with each prospect directly,. we see that a typical Value Consultant typical average eight analysis engagements per quarter. Over a year, we see this amount to anywhere from 25 to 35 assessments per year.

When these teams try to scale the spreadsheet program to specialists and sellers, the adoption results are low, and the consultants wind up being involved in most if not all of the deals. The big challenge today, finding the budget and the qualified resources to scale out a value consulting team.

oday, almost every deal requires a business value assessment and formal financial justification business case. Without this, most deals will be delayed, stalled or worse – lost to the competitor that steps up and delivers, or lost to “do nothing” due to lack of inspiration and motivation that the proper storytelling business case can deliver.

Value assessments need to go beyond just being delivered for he biggest customers and deals.Sellers need to be enabled to self-service assessments and collaborate with most customers directly on business value. Business value needs to be introduced earlier in each engagement, to gain priority right from the start, something not usually available when you have to wait for a value consultant to be available, and prove that the deal is worthy.

For organizations that implement modern interactive ROI / value assessment sales tools and enablement programs, ones which are easy for sellers to learn, adopt and use, we find that organizations can reserve Value Consultants for the largest deals AND get business cases for the smaller deals directly from sales reps collaborating with prospects.

In these organizations, we see sellers on their own and proactively delivering assessments to customers and prospects. A 300 person sales team armed with such a tool are delivering 400+ assessments each month, and supported by a value consulting team of only 5 (who developed and evolve the tool and engage on the largest, most critical assessments directly).

Achieving this kind of scale was impossible with spreadsheet based programs prior. The assessments went from 24 a quarter to over 1,200 with the interactive application and sales enablement.

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