Ultimate Guide to Customer Value Management

During this phase, the value calculations are developed that describe how your solution delivers cost savings and revenue growth to your customers.

Depending on how many products or solutions your company sells, there may be multiple iterations of this phase.

To execute this phase successfully requires the participation of marketing, sales, and product leadership, so that key constituents are aligned on the elements of the solution’s value.

Existing customer case studies and testimonials should be leveraged, in addition to third party research.  These can be wonderful sources for “value drivers” that can populate the model.

We must take a methodical approach to identifying subject matter experts who really get the model and are very passionate about it. And these subject matter experts can fall into different categories:

• Sales reps who really get it.  This tends to work if your product is in your value model and is relatively straightforward.

• If you’re in a high tech area or your solution is very complex, it may require a solution engineer or a solution consultant to be that subject matter expert.

The Subject Matter Expert can help lead the end user training, as well as become a frontline support person in the field when there are needs for change requests.

Phase 2 (4-8 weeks):  Integrate the calculations with sales and marketing materials

To present the calculations in the most compelling way, the best practice is to leverage the existing sales and marketing materials that have been effectively used with customers:  presentations, proposals, marketing content.

It’s helpful to embed dynamic charts, images, and figures into the materials.  This helps appeal both to the emotional and the intellectual elements of the brain.

The most effective way to do this is through best-in-class software that populates the key data into the slides.

When we integrate with those marketing assets, we want to have a set of slides which include qualitative information, as well as quantitative information which calculates pain points and value estimates. These charts and slides can include both bar charts as well as visuals with dynamic data overlaid on them.

The key thing when you’re integrating your models with your marketing assets, is to ensure that you have a combination of qualitative information, which is information that customers share about what they care about and what their goals are, and what their pain points are.  Some of that information can be collected via a form with drop down boxes, multiple choice, and/or fill in the blank text. It’s also helpful in that section to understand who their current vendors are for different capabilities. There may be opportunities to help your client reduce their spend, or dependence on other solutions, which would become redundant when your solution is introduced?

Phase 3 (2-6 weeks):  Deployment to sales team

Deploying value tools to your customer-facing organization is the most important thing to do right to get the biggest return on your program.

During the training you should require each of the sales reps who’s participating in the training to bring one of their existing customer opportunities.  Typically a customer prospect would be ideal. But an existing customer where you have more data will work as well.

Conduct a role play between a sales rep and a sales manager who is pretending to be an actual customer…this will be powerful and fun!  Offer a reward for the participants.

The goal is to have each rep use the tool at least once or twice in the field in the first 10 to 21 days while that training is fresh, if they don’t use it in those first 10 to 21 days, the likelihood they use it after that is going to be reduced.

After completing the training, you’ll find that you have a handful of reps that’ll really pick it up. When they start to have success, you can come back to retrain the broader team maybe in a couple months.  At that time you’ll be able to socialize the success of that initial group.

Phase 4:  Integration

So the next section is integration with existing applications and data sources. If you properly integrate this application with your existing CRM solution, your marketing automation solution, and/or third party datasets like zoom info, you may be in a much better position to

gain adoption. You’ll have a data set that you can act upon. It’s a very intelligent data set around where you’re winning and where you’re losing, as a function of key value drivers.

Phase 5:  Monitoring and analytics

Finally, analytics. When you deploy the application, it’s important that you have a rich analytics foundation where you can understand which variables are associated with the success of the application. It’s important to have open source.

Choosing a CVM solution with an Open Source stack allows you to synchronize data with different solutions, such as a BI solution

So this is the ultimate guide to Customer Value Management. And this section is about the process and how long it takes to get something of value. So we’ve covered stage one in stage two, which relates to building your models and integrating your models with your marketing assets.

So that’s what we try to achieve in the first section, which is defining a model with enough qualitative and quantitative inputs, that we can build a pain statement and build off that pain statement to develop a value statement. So to achieve this first step, what we want to do is to leverage the existing materials your team may have developed over time including case studies, testimonials and any ROI calculations that you built internally or through analysts.