In this interview with the Head of Business Value Consulting for sales performance management firm Xactly, Michael Ketchmere discussed his journey to develop and scale an effective business value program in less than six weeks.
We discussed it all, including the rapid development process, five steps to assure successful launch, sales process integration, adoption, outcomes and evolution.
On some of the challenges faced when he first got going…
“A couple key ones come to mind. I guess the first is just the realities of getting started in formally and from scratch. And so, it’s not the case that I was handed a team of value consultants or given a million dollar plus budget to go hire some ex-McKinsey folks. It was rather a lengthier process of, I call it ‘Putting my best person on the job and wearing a lot of different hats’, right? To really build out those foundational elements that are needed to deliver an effective value engineering function. Some of those pieces included methodology development for value assessments, content development for sales enablement training, ROI tool construction, customer interviews and value realization efforts to gather customer insights and benchmarking and even marketing collateral development to promote the function and its services. I’d say the second key challenge (which I’d say was obvious to me even before I got started) was really the inability to scale the function without proper tooling. So honestly Tom, for my daily use, an XL based ROI model is actually sufficient. because again, I’m using it every day. But there is no way that I could put what I use on a daily basis into the hands of our sellers and expect them to be successful.”
On the importance of a good pilot group…
“The pilot process went a lot more smoothly than I was anticipating. I don’t know about your selling world, but in our selling world, our sellers have a lot of tools to pick up and learn in their bag. And that’s good. They’re leveraging technology across the whole funnel and pursuit lifecycle. But they probably have 10 to 15 different tools they have to learn, so I was concerned about ‘Oh boy here comes yet another tool that you are forcing me to use’. But fortunately, with more modern and easy-to-use intuitive UI, there was very little to no pushback on this because you know I think the user experience was so much better than on so many other tools that they were used to using.
I think what I found throughout the pilot process was that some of the sellers were effective in using tools just by watching the one-hour recording or training that delivered. And there were a few that were even more successful with the tool without even watching the training talk, which is, I think, absolutely stunningly incredible.”
Check out the full interview, here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/711GfeMZNEDUT6cinhjsab
The Pilot Process can be pivotal, peeps!
Keep Evolving, EVOLVERS!
Until next time…
#valueselling #valuestory #ROI #salesenablement #digitalselling
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