Have You Hired Your VP of Value Yet?

The migration to a subscription-based economy and recent hypergrowth of B2B SaaS solutions across marketing, sales, and service categories has spawned the evolution of a handful of new B2B roles: VP of Customer Success, VP of Renewals, and VP of Sales Enablement. The VP of Customer Success is responsible for implementing customers and ensuring they are realizing value from your solution; the VP of Renewals is responsible for securing renewals from existing customers (and in many cases has a larger quota than the VP of Sales!); and the VP of Sales Enablement is responsible for ensuring that the sales team is equipped with the most effective tools and resources, among the thousands that are available on AppExchange.

Each of these roles is integral to a sales team’s success, and each of these functions will *state* that they care about communicating value to customers.  However, typically none of these roles will *own* the function of determining how to actually quantify and present value to customers. This function is called “value management.”

To fill this function, there is an emerging role which exists in a handful of companies today, and will likely grow over the next few years to become as prevalent as the other VP roles: the VP of Value.

The general concept is not new: SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and several other top software companies invest millions of dollars annually in “value engineering teams” who perform the value management function.  The typical mission of the value engineering team is to support the biggest deals through the creation of custom business cases.

While these value engineering teams are typically “ROI-positive,” meaning they pay for themselves through the new business they generate, they do not scale. They do not support the typical rep in the typical deal. They do not support marketing or channel or renewal needs in a scalable way. In a Buyer 2.0 world, where buyers are doing more research online than ever before, sales, marketing, renewal, and channel organizations need a platform to enable the consistent quantification of current pain, and potential value, and realized value in an operationally efficient way.

Try this new role on for size: the VP of Value.

Mission

The VP of Value is an outbound role, responsible for driving pipeline generation and revenue attainment through all channels and customer lifecycle stages by ensuring the value of the company’s solutions are properly calculated and delivered.

Metrics

Reporting to the COO, or Chief Revenue Officer, the VP of Value is accountable for:

1) Generating new pipeline by creating compelling, dynamic tools and applications which convey the value of the solution while capturing and nurturing leads

2) Achieving a new business goal by collaborating with salespeople to provide customers value-related content during the sales process and at proposal time

3) Achieving a renewal goal by developing and including content around the value obtained by a customer throughout the life of their contract; the content is to be utilized by the Customer Success Team and sales reps at renewal time.

Note: Optionally, the VP of Value can “subsume” the VP of Customer Success or Account Management function. The benefit of this approach is that “all things value,” including customer success, renewals, satisfaction are under the purview of the same individual. However, Customer Success and Account Management functions in certain industries can be extremely high-touch/high-service and may be subject to different evaluation criteria.

Deliverables

• Assemble information from primary and secondary sources to create a framework for quantifying how customers benefit from company solutions. Primary sources include actual customers, while secondary sources include testimonials, analyst reports, and benchmark surveys.
• Provide Marketing, Sales, Channel, and Customer Success teams best-of-breed software, data, presentation options, qualitative and quantitative scripts, and out-of-the-box value stories for marketing, sales, and renewal workflows.
• Create recommendations on pricing and bundling strategies, driven by calculations of how customers derive value from company solutions.
• Deliver a monthly presentation to the Executive Team regarding value-related activities, including pipeline and revenue generated by account to which value was presented, data collected, and the impact.

Often, some degree of these responsibilities fall on other roles at an organization — imagine a role specifically to gauge value. I welcome your comments on this concept/role. I recently became aware of a pre-IPO company that just created a new role called the Head of Value Management. However, his stated mission is to enable Fortune 500 revenue generation. Nothing specific to SMB or mid-market is cited. We’ll see if, and how, he is able to scale…

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