Using Customer Value Management to Close Your Tech Solutions Deals

When you’re selling a technical solution, it’s easy to get caught up in demonstrating the features of a new product. But when your prospects must make the case to their leadership to invest in your product from a limited budget, exciting features are not enough. Your prospects need to be empowered to explain clearly how your product will provide value to their organization’s bottom line.

Demonstrating the economic impact of your solution is a win-win-win situation: your customers get a technology solution that fits their needs, their company gets the financial results that build growth, and you establish a relationship that can lead to future sales opportunities through renewals or upselling. This is the real power of value.

The Underpinnings for Effective Value-based Selling
Customer Value Management (CVM) gives you the power to evaluate and more effectively share the value your solution brings to a company. Fundamentally, CVM helps you answer the question, “Given your understanding of our business challenges, what is the potential value of your solution for my organization?”

Although this value-based approach is not new, historically it has had limited use because “it requires complex frameworks for cost and benefit discovery and quantification specific to each customer and, typically, to each opportunity,” as a 2020 report from IDC explains. Without a team dedicated to this kind of analysis, most businesses have had to limit value modeling to the largest potential deals. As IDC notes, “Value-based sales practices cannot be scaled without the proper technology infrastructure.”

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However, the cloud makes Customer Value Management more realistic for more companies. Cloud-based solutions like DecisionLink’s ValueCloud® can make the power of value accessible to everyone in your organization. With a centralized platform, companies have the ability to efficiently create value hypotheses, develop case studies, track value realization metrics, and more.

What to Look for in a Customer Value Management Solution
According to IDC, companies should be looking for a cloud-based CVM platform that makes creating internal champions easier. To be effective, a value management solution should be able to:

• Track value delivery over time;
• Deploy in multiple ways (e.g., for marketing purposes like web calculators, quick start assessments, and deeper business value hypotheses)
• Enable easy, self-service access for your sales team, customer success, partners, and other value stakeholders
• Deliver data-driven outcomes
• Provide industry-standard security for customer data
• Enables model customization and tailoring

Supporting your internal champions
Using value as a sales foundation encourages collaboration between you and your prospects. It’s not just about giving your prospects data. It’s a mutual process of discovery, tailored to your prospects’ business needs that leads to sharable models that make the economic case.

As IDC states, “The primary job for the rep should be to get the internal champion to ensure that the operational data specific to the account is defensible.” This idea is key for a technology solution, because often the impact of your features and functionality may not be obvious to an executive audience. With Customer Value Management, you have the power to provide a tailored business case and other case studies that apply to a prospect’s specific business needs and directly demonstrate ROI and other value-driven metrics that have meaning in the C-suite.

By giving your prospects tangible metrics to help them and their executive sponsors understand the business impact that your product will bring to their organization, you have the power to turn them into champions. Compelling value drivers and the ROI of your solution clearly outlined in impactful presentation materials helps ensure your champion will have an easier time gaining senior executive support. With value supporting their advocacy, they have the ability to be recognized for more than researching the right product, they become business problem solvers. The value materials you provide elevate your champion’s efforts and interactions.

It’s a win-win approach that also happens to make closing the sale easier.

Want to learn more best practices? Download the IDC Spotlight.