Understand What is it and is it right for us?
You don't mess with your sales process without a very good reason and without understanding what you're going
to change, why you’re going to change it and what you expect to get back for the risk and cost of the change.
So step 1 enables you to understand the issues, the challenges and the rewards. We have created a
set of Executive Briefings that aim to help you bring into sharper focus the power that is inherent
in your customer value but also explores the right way and the wrong way to implement the
customer value enhancement.
The executive briefings will place you in a position properly to judge whether Value Based
Selling is right for your organisation and, if it is, how safely to enhance your existing sales process.
Insights into Improving Renewal Rates & Sales Productivity
On average our clients increase their deal size by 112% and their sales margin by 13%.
Just another outrageous claim? Well, before you dismiss this one, these are not
our figures - they're our clients'.
You see, our clients all had one thing in common - they struggled to articulate their customer
value or didn't believe in customer value or believed that they were fully exploiting
their customer value.
In fact, most companies are failing to exploit between 50% - 70% of their potential customer
value - and this is largely because the techniques required are, for
many, counter-intuitive.
Our aim is to help you bring into sharper focus the power that is inherent in
your customer value and explore with you some of the ways in which that power can
be harnessed to deliver improving renewal rates, higher sales productivity
and enhanced profitable growth.
Your outcomes
You will:
- Understand the effect of 'value' on creating real differentiation, long term strategic customer relationships and the challenge of the sales skill shortage
- Have modelled, for yourself, the likely financial impact, either positive or negative, for your company of properly exploiting your customer value.
- Have greater insight into the nature of your hidden customer value and its likely impact on your ability to win.
- Understand what both 'good' and 'bad' implementations of a customer value approach look like.
- Have a greater appreciation of the practical issues to be addressed if success is to be assured from implementing a value approach to sales and customer relationships.
Identify Let's identify your customer value components
"I know we have a lot more value than this but we just can't seem to get at it"
This is a view we hear expressed quite a lot. And it's not really surprising because many aspects
of 'value' and its identification are counter-intuitive.
We find that many vendors are able to identify no more than about 60% of their potential customer value. This leaves up
to 40% that they may 'sense' is there but have no way of uncovering. The challenge of measuring is also significant (see
the Measure service).
The Outline Service
The Outline service is designed for those who know they have more value and would like to speed up the process of uncovering it.
Our Outline service will help you establish the full outline and characteristics of your customer value.
By understanding the up stream and down stream impact of your products and services, we help you to uncover the full breadth of
your customer value and set out the boundaries of what we call your 'Value Capability'.
The aim is simply to understand how your products and services deliver value to your customers and then to define the
key value groups and their characteristics - if you will - a set of value drivers.
The whole process is fixed price and usually complete within one elapsed week. You are then positioned to add appropriate measures.
Measure Let's quantify your total customer value
This step is about assigning measures to each of your
value components and determining the scale of potential value,
both tangible and intangible, available for your customers.
Our Measure service is designed for those who are already clear
about the general nature of their customer value but
need help to establish effective measures.
Once the key value groups and drivers have been agreed, we will establish their relationships, the means by which they may be
measured and the nature and extent of information required to scale the value.
The outputs from Measure will be a set of clearly defined value drivers, their associated measures and relevant generic
data collection sheets that define the data required to scale the value for any given customer.
The whole process is fixed price and usually complete within one elapsed week. You are then positioned to be
able to communicate your value. Should you need help with this, take a look at communicating value.
Communicate It's no use having great numbers if your customer wont believe them
The evidence is overwhelming – conventional ROI tools don’t work. We equip you with a Value Simulator that provides a clear and
crisp articulation of exactly where your customer value comes from and allows your customer to see all of the logic, assumptions
and data used to calculate the value.
Our Simulate service is designed for those who are already clear about their customer value but need help to
communicate it to their customers in a highly compelling way.
The 'ROI Calculator' is now largely discredited and customers need a value calculator that they can trust.
- "More than 95% of supplier models are counterproductive - we have to deconstruct them"
- "We always find assumptions that are always favourable to their outcome"
- "They have a narrow view of the solution which does not consider upstream, downstream and lateral constraints"
- "No supplier ever comes back to measure actual results vs. pro-forma"
- "There is a real disconnect between what is promised and what we get"
- "Frankly we're tired of the 'gimmicks and games'"
Director - Value Analysis
Simulate will create for you a value simulator with the capability to capture customer data and allow the customer to understand, challenge,
change and own the results. The simulator also has the potential to provide the means to track value
delivery
The whole process is fixed price and usually complete within four elapsed weeks.
Skills It's the only way your customer will believe the numbers
Our experience suggests that customers in general
are not good at making complex purchasing
decisions - and the clear implication for vendors
is that customers are ill equipped to distinguish
between different vendor offerings.
The sales techniques and processes that you use
need to guide your potential customers through all of the
key steps needed to uncover the value of your products
and services so that they can be both comfortable with the
result and provide sufficient evidence to convince
other, more sceptical, colleagues.
Our experience suggests that customers in general are not good at
making complex purchasing decisions - and the clear implication for vendors is
that customers are ill equipped to distinguish between different vendor offerings.
If you have a better mousetrap, it's possible that your customers may never understand the value
of it unless you take positive action to make sure they do.
The sales techniques and processes that you use need to guide your potential customers through all of the key steps
needed to uncover the value of your products and services so that they can be both comfortable with the result and provide
sufficient evidence to convince other, more sceptical, colleagues.
Achieving all of that takes real skill and discipline - much of which is actually counter-intuitive.
Skill will help you create a sales team with the capability
to let your potential customers understand, challenge, change and own the true value of your products and services. The
skills, disciplines and tools learned and supported from our Skill programme will reduce sales cycle time and increase
win rate and deal size.
Our Skill service takes head on the counter-intuitive nature of selling using Value and quickly brings your sales team to the point
where they are selling larger and longer term deals. Our Opportunity Support Desk helps each sales person to assess new opportunities,
ascertain the likely value for both parties and then make and sustain a meeting with appropriate 'C' level executives.
The whole process is fixed price and usually complete within three to four elapsed weeks depending upon the
number of people and their locations.
Track & Deliver track your customer value to your customer's bottom line
Stay sticky with your customer and help them track
the value all the way to their bottom line. Create great
case studies, improve renewal rates and expand your footprint
with the customer – all based on undisputed empirical
evidence of value delivered.
Our Track service is designed for those who need to demonstrate the tangible delivery of customer value (both
hard and soft) in a manner that minimises the potential for disagreement.
Track will create for you the means to agree the scale of potential customer value, the means by which it
will be delivered and the means to pre-emptively track actual customer value.
Pre-emptive tracking is important because it allows early action to be taken to avoid losing 'value at risk'. This
maximises the total amount of value delivered for both parties.
The whole process is fixed price and usually complete within two elapsed weeks.
