You want to implement a value enablement program. But not just any program – one that will scale and help drive additional business and growth with new prospects, and especially existing customers.
So, how do you enable value selling the “right way”?
That is a question we posed to the EVOLVERs community, and we compiled responses from some of the top value selling professionals who have been there and done that most successfully.
How Can My Organization Successfully Adopt a Value Selling Approach?
To ensure your revenue teams successfully adopt a value selling approach, you need to enable them to do so. And to create a successful value enablement program (beyond just implementing a value spreadsheet or posting an ROI/TCO calculator), you must take a more comprehensive lifecycle approach. That involves continuously measuring and refining value outcomes throughout your buyer’s journey – both pre and post-sale, and across all of your commercial operations from marketing, sales, and value consulting to customer success, product, and more.
And although you may not be able to accomplish every element of this approach overnight, having a roadmap to help your organization understand the critical capabilities and map out what maturity looks like is key.
That’s why we developed the Value Enablement Lifecycle, designed to help you accelerate your value selling initiative to help you land, retain and expand revenue. Implementing the Value Enablement Lifecycle, we have proven with hundreds of organizations that you can dramatically increase closeable leads, win rates, deal size, retention rates, and expansion up/cross-sell revenue.
What is the Value Enablement Lifecycle?
The Value Enablement Lifecycle is a compilation of the best practice capability and maturity that have led to proven success. It guides positive next steps and evolution to help you scale your value selling program beyond random acts of value enablement and engage your entire organization.
The Value Enablement Lifecycle begins with and is centered around Value Defined. This ensures you have a solid foundation of value messaging, models, and tools to quantify value in a differentiating and trustworthy fashion, capture great success stories more effectively, and drive value into your products. But bear in mind, you must regularly revisit and evolve the value messaging, models, and tools to match changing customer use cases and value trends.
With Value Defined established, the Value Enablement Lifecycle then follows the buyer’s journey, helping to:
1) Inspire and facilitate change, encouraging the buyer to move from business-as-usual/status quo by quantifying the cost of “do nothing” and estimating value outcomes from proposed solutions and services.
Pre-sale, this progresses to:
a) Value Ignited – using better value communication and quantification in marketing efforts, providing customers with the ability to discover their challenges, self-assess value potential, and explore value success stories
b) Value Discovered – leveraging the right discovery and assessment tools to uncover and prioritize prospect improvement opportunities, prescribe the right solutions and services and provide rapid value assessments, to help prospects uncover improvement opportunities and get prospects oriented to value-outcomes earlier in the decision-making process.
c) Value Proposed – developing collaborative value assessments and financial justification business cases for proposed solutions.
2) Confirm and validate the value that has been delivered and realized by the customer from the deployed solutions and services, post-sale. Value Realized is implemented to measure the actual impact of the deployed solution and services on key metrics and the value/ROI derived from these improvements. Comparisons are made to predictions to understand potential deployment, adoption, and practice shortfalls.
3) Expand the value delivered post-success. Value Expanded uses a solid foundation of realized value to help grow the scope of the proposed and deployed solutions and services provided to help deliver additional business outcomes for the customer. Value assessments are performed to address additional business groups, solve additional challenges, and apply additional use cases.
6 Steps to Successfully Transition Your Team to Value Selling
1. Value Defined – Define, develop, evolve and refine the value messaging, quantification models, interactive assessment tools, and success story evidence, while ensuring value program integration and success and that products and services are added and evolved to drive better business value for customers. (Value Consulting, Marketing, Sales, Sales Enablement, Customer Success Managers, Strategic Account Managers, Product)
2. Value Ignited – Deliver dynamic value-focused content, interactive self-service diagnostic and value assessment tools, and value success stories early in the engagement with prospects and customers to generate more closeable opportunities while inspiring buyers to take action to improve capability/maturity and generate business outcomes. (Marketing)
3. Value Discovered – Leverage dynamic value-focused content, interactive diagnostic and value assessment tools, and value success stories to help sellers engage earlier and at higher levels with value, transitioning from pitching products/services and demos to a more inspiring value-centric approach. (SDRs/BDRs, Sales, Partners)
4. Value Proposed – Apply dynamic value-focused content, interactive value assessment tools, and value success stories in later sales stages to provide financial justification and value-proof points in order to garner decision maker consensus, faster executive and committee approvals, and ensure deals don’t end in “do nothing” or competitive losses. (Sales, Partners and Value Consultants)
5. Value Realized – Leverage interactive diagnostic and value assessment tools to quantify advances in capability/maturity and realized ROI. (Customer Success Managers, Strategic Account Managers, Value Consultants)
6. Value Expanded – Leverage capability and maturity gap analysis and realized ROI results from Value Realized and apply dynamic value-focused content, interactive value assessment tools, and value success stories to help existing customers understand the value of expansion in up/cross sell use cases. (Growth Sales / Strategic Account Managers, Customer Success Managers, Value Consultants)
Key Challenges
For each of the steps in the Value Enablement Lifecycle, here the key challenges addressed:
| Value Enablement Lifecycle Challenges | Challenges to Address |
|---|---|
| Value Defined | Develop a solid initial foundation for all aspects of the Value Enablement program especially developing the initial value messaging and storytelling. (leverage CLOSE, quantification models and tools)
Develop the plans, requirements and designs to address the steps of the Value Enablement Lifecycle across the people, process, tools, integration and intelligence capabilities/maturities needed for success. Understand the value being realized and reported, changes in customer challenges, use cases and expected outcomes. Shape evolutionary changes to the value messaging, models, and tools used in prospect and customer engagements. Define the workflow, workspaces, and education/readiness needed to scale Value Enablement across all commercial organizations for both direct and indirect sales. Define the integrations and data models needed to leverage intelligence of customers to automatically generate benchmarks, Customer Value Success Stories, and optimized customer value outcomes. Inform changes in your products and services to help prioritize the planned offerings, features, and services that drive tangible outcomes. Track and measure Value Enablement program success and advance the organization through the Value Enablement Lifecycle steps and capability improvements. |
| Value Ignited | Attract new prospects, especially higher-level/executive roles.
Leverage new value-focused tools and content to power better outreach, social, and advertising campaigns. Generate more, high-quality, closeable opportunities. Personalize content to speak directly to each prospect’s unique opportunities and value perspectives. Inspire change from business as usual and the status quo. Leverage the discovery, proposed, and realized value data from across the Value Enablement Lifecycle to automatically develop and leverage Customer Value Success Stories. |
| Value Discovered | Differentiate reach-outs and initial selling engagements by SDRs/BDRs, sellers and partners, leveraging value added tools and content as the inspiration for prospects to engage (versus typical show-up-and-throw-up presentations and demos).
Prospect in a value-added manner to get more, higher level meetings. Do better and more consistent discovery of prospects’ challenges and needs, helping your prospects uncover and prioritize challenges that are “business value worthy”. Qualify and prioritize prospects properly, so that more precious selling time is spent on those that match closeable profiles. Inspire prospects to take the next meeting and next step in the buying process. |
| Value Proposed | Get credible financial justification business cases in the hands of prospects and buying committees/executives on all significant deals
Differentiate your engagements and proposals. Opening the proposal up for debate will fail to create a business case. Deliver financial justification to avoid “do nothing”, competitive losses, or approval delays. Do not rely exclusively on value consultants to build and present critical financial justification business cases on significant deals. Get pre-sales specialists and sellers more comfortable and capable at effectively communicating and quantifying value with prospects and collaborating with prospects on business cases. Empower partners to engage with value and deliver financial justification, not just direct sellers and specialists. |
| Value Realized | Expand beyond measuring and reporting on adoption and usage to report on and optimize value delivery for clients.
More easily quantify the value realized/realized ROI for all customers and scale this realized value assessment capability to make it easy to apply and adopt for all customer success reps or account managers. (not just for value consultants / specialists) Validate proposed value, if a business case was provided pre-sale, to ensure what was promised has been delivered. Leverage a capability and maturity framework to measure and progress customers through a set of best practice improvements versus just selling them on the latest release or additional products or services. Provide executive reports on realized value/ROI and improved capability/maturity at each QBR, tracking progress in realized value/maturity and versus actual predictions over time. Automate the tally of realized value so that good customer success is documented in tangible Value Customer Success Stories. |
| Value Expanded | Elevate account executive capabilities and existing customer engagements.
Leverage value delivered to prove that expanding the relationship could deliver even better outcomes. Understand the additional challenges and use cases that could be applied to improve customer capabilities/maturity and generate additional tangible business value results. Migrate from pitching additional products and services to selling additional capability/maturity and especially positive and tangible business value outcomes. Better financially justify up-sell and cross-sell proposals. |
Best Practices
The Value Enablement Lifecycle model outlines the best practices for improving capability and maturity across the following five capabilities of success:
1. People
2. Process
3. Tools
4. Integrations
5. Intelligence
| Value Enablement Lifecycle Capabilities | People | Process | Tools | Integrations | Intelligence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value Defined | Value Consulting
Marketing Sales Sales Enablement Customer Success Strategic Account Managers Product |
Value messaging and model workshop and collaboration
Value enablement roadmap and workspace definitions Value education and training roadmap Value Driven Products On-going Value Enablement Evolution |
Value Messaging (leveraging CLOSE)
Value Quantification Models Capability and Maturity Model Define Interactive Tool requirements and design, development, delivery and updates/evolution Define the design and requirements for the Dynamic Value Storytelling Content Customer Value Success Stories requirements and design |
Marketing, Sales and Customer Success Integration definition and on-going evolution | Value data definitions and on-going evolution
Value enablement success measures |
| Value Ignited | Marketing | Outreach, social, advertising with value | Marketing Diagnostic Assessment Tool
Value Marketing Assessment Tool Dynamic Value Storytelling Content Customer Value Success Stories (publishing from value metrics, sharing with prospects) Value Hub |
Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) – Lead capture profile – Campaign ID / tracking – Key metrics & results – Link to report |
Value-driven lead capture/opportunities
Customer capability/maturity and value metrics |
| Value Discovered | SDRs/BDRs
Sales Partners |
Value Discovery Workspace
Value Discovery Education and Training Shared/Collaborative Value Discovery Workspaces w/ Prospects |
Interactive Diagnostic Assessment Tool
Value Assessment Tool Dynamic Value Storytelling content Customer Value Success Stories |
CRM – account and opportunity information in – tool usage out – key challenge/discovery metrics and assessment results out |
Customer engagement on shared assessments and content
Customer capability/maturity and value metrics |
| Value Proposed | Sales
Partners Value Consultants (largest deals, support) |
Value Proposed Workspace
Value Selling Education and Training Shared/Collaborative Value Proposed Workspaces w/ Prospects |
Interactive Capability and Maturity Assessment
Interactive Value Assessment Tool Dynamic Value Storytelling content Customer Value Success Stories |
CRM – account and opportunity information in – tool usage out – key challenge/value metrics and assessment results out |
Customer engagement on shared assessments and content
Customer capability/maturity and value metrics |
| Value Realized | Customer Success Managers
Strategic Account Executives Value Consultants (largest deals, support) |
Value Realized Workspace
Value Realization Education and Training Shared / collaborative QBR Workspace w/ Customers |
Interactive Capability and Maturity Assessment (on-going tracking of improvements and gaps)
Interactive Realized Value Assessment Tool Realized Value Dashboard (tracking over time, multiple analyses) |
CSM Platform (ie. Gainsight) – account and licensing information in – goals and challenges profile – value realized metrics out) |
Customer engagement on shared assessments and content
Customer capability/maturity progression and realized value/ ROI metrics |
| Value Expanded | Strategic Account Managers
Value Consultants (largest deals, support) Customer Success Managers |
Value Expanded Workspace
Value Expanded Education and Training Shared/collaborative Expanded Value Workspace w/ Customers |
Interactive Capability and Maturity Assessment (on-going tracking of improvements and gaps)
Interactive Value Assessment (new up/cross sell use cases) |
CRM – account and opportunity information in – tool usage out – key challenge/value metrics and assessment results out |
Customer engagement on shared assessments and content
Customer capability/maturity and value metrics |
By role, here are the important elements of the Value Enablement Lifecycle relevant to each:
| Value Enablement Lifecycle by Role | Value Defined | Value Ignited | Value Discovered | Value Proposed | Value Realized | Value Expanded |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value Consulting | Creating and collaborating | Creating and collaborating | Creating and collaborating
Leveraging (largest opps) |
Creating and collaborating
Leveraging (largest opps) |
Creating and collaborating
Leveraging (largest opps) |
Creating and collaborating
Leveraging (largest opps) |
| Marketing | Creating and collaborating | Creating and collaborating
Leveraging |
– | – | – | – |
| SDRs / BDRs | – | – | Leveraging | – | – | – |
| Sales | Contributing | – | Leveraging | Leveraging | – | – |
| Partners | – | – | Leveraging | Leveraging | – | – |
| Sales Enablement | Creating and collaborating | – | – | Leveraging | – | – |
| Customer Success Managers | Contributing | – | – | – | Leveraging | Leveraging |
| Strategic Account Executives / Managers | Contributing | – | – | – | Leveraging | Leveraging |
| Product | Leveraging | – | – | – | – | – |
Learn more about the Value Enablement Lifecycle.
Comments are closed.