Smart business leaders are investing in Customer Value Management technology to create a hedge against competition with quantified value realized.
Whether your organization is facing budget pressures, or travel limitations have made building customer relationships more difficult, most companies are finding themselves navigating a new business normal. Marketing, Sales and Customer Success leaders are faced with a host of new challenges as a result, and for many organizations, the options are to evolve, or watch your business slowly become irrelevant. How specifically should business leaders drive change in order to address the needs and preferences of buyers today? By establishing and communicating the value their solutions deliver.
by Jim Berryhill
Customer Value Management (CVM) is a new (but not entirely new) discipline that’s taking the business world by storm. It looks at the entire buyer journey, from attracting and engaging prospective customers, to helping salespeople close bigger deals faster, to helping customer success pros create raving fans and reduce churn, all by quantifying the business value a solution promises to deliver, and then tracking the actual value realized. If some of that sounds familiar, there are similarities between CVM and value selling, but the big difference is that CVM is a holistic approach that can be enabled by technology, whereas value selling is just one piece of that puzzle. Let’s look at how Customer Value Management can be applied in three core areas: marketing, sales, and customer success.
For Marketers, Customer Value Management radically changes the way you go to market. Instead of undifferentiated, “me-too” messaging, marketing pros can use CVM technology to rapidly create customer case studies that are centered around value realization data. When you create content with big bold metrics around the biggest benefits your solution has delivered to real customers, prospects can’t help but sit up and take notice. And the benefits of Customer Value Management for marketers doesn’t end there. Transform your website into a lead generation machine by implementing interactive ROI calculators that can capture a prospect’s current situation and automatically quantify it into hard numbers around the specific value you can deliver them.
The opportunities are endless when you start thinking about the many ways value metrics can be used to revolutionize your go-to-market approach. Not to mention that the best CVM technology can integrate with the marketing automation system and conversational marketing tool (like Drift) you’re already using, so data flows nicely everywhere you need it to be.
For Sales, Customer Value Management solves age-old problems that have only been exacerbated by the pandemic and a new type of buyer that is becoming more prominent every day. In light of virtual selling and younger B2B buyers who want to spend less time with salespeople, what are sales leaders supposed to do to empower their teams to win?
CVM applications help sales teams build bulletproof business cases that are trusted by buyers, because any benefit models and calculations, including assumptions, are spelled out for all to see. Leading CVM applications can also create value propositions that reps love to use because they are easy to understand by both buyer and seller.
No longer will reps live in fear of that nerve-wracking question, “how did you get to these numbers?”
And with a clearly defined ROI, sellers can ensure they jump to the top of the stack of potential investments competing for a buyer’s time and money.
For Customer Success, tracking value realized and communicating that information in a powerful way has never been more critical. The challenge has been that the potential ROI a salesperson promises a customer often isn’t “locked” and captured anywhere, or if it is, perhaps it’s buried in a Salesforce Chatter note that isn’t connected to anything else.
Best-in-class Customer Value Management technology empowers Customer Success leaders to dramatically reduce churn and have better conversations with customers because the value promised and value realized is stored in the same place, making it easily accessible to both parties. Customers are often too busy using your solution to stop and wonder about the value it’s delivering, but when it comes time for renewal, it’s absolutely essential that the true ROI of your solution is quantified and communicated clearly. This changes the conversation from “I hope you’ll consider renewing?” to “how much would you like to expand your services, and which adjacent products would you like to add?”.
While much as changed in business, many things remain the same. Attracting and retaining customers while delivering real business value throughout will never go out of style. Smart business leaders are investing in Customer Value Management technology to create a hedge against competition with quantified value realized. When customers can see the benefits of your solution, why would they look anywhere else?
Jim Berryhill is the CEO, Co-Founder, and Director of Value Management pioneer DecisionLink. He has spent over 30 years in enterprise software management, leading high-performance teams at ADR, CA, Siebel Systems, and HP Software with a focus on value selling. The Accel-funded company has deployed Value Management programs with leading brands like CrowdStrike, DocuSign, Marketo, ServiceNow, VMware.
This article originally appeared in Aithority. Photo by Taneli Lahtinen on Unsplash.
