by Venky Lakshminarayanan (LV), Chief Strategy & AI Officer, Mainstay
How to scale business value coverage without blowing up your budget.
Mainstay recently surveyed enterprise tech enterprises about their value management programs and found a consistent issue: Only 14% of respondents said they are able cover more than half their deals with business value support.
So why aren’t more companies able to reach this level of coverage—and why is it so hard to break through that ceiling?
I’m resisting the temptation to rush to a simple “AI fix”.
Why value selling is hard to scale
At its core, this is a “value at scale” problem. Most value management teams start off operating like a high-end concierge service. They do incredible, high-touch work on the biggest, most complex strategic deals, but they simply don’t have the bandwidth to cover the rest of the pipeline.
To support more deals, companies usually add a “value at scale” model that mixes high-touch, consultant-led business cases for big deals with low-touch, self-service business cases for account executives and sales support staff to use on less sophisticated opportunities. These lighter-weight business cases work well enough for smaller deals.
Yes, every extra dollar of investment into your value selling program can be used to boost coverage and sales outcomes, but exactly what should you spend that next dollar on?
Should you invest in:
- More value content?
- More ROI and business value tools?
- More value management headcount?
- Or better adoption of content and tools you already have?
Two takeaways from our research report stand out:
- Although it’s exciting to keep creating new content and tools, the real challenge is low adoption by sellers. Instead of figuring out how AI agents can handle the heavy lifting of research, discovery, and modeling, the best bang for the book may be improving how teams actually use what already exists. And that’s something AI can help with.
- Executives such as the CRO or CFO need proof that every dollar invested in value management is paying off. Do you have data, tooling and process to measure the “ROI of your ROI program” and clearly link value management efforts to pipeline and revenue outcomes?
Access the report, The State of Value Management Programs here.
At Mainstay, we love the art and science of value management. Two decades of work with some of the most admired enterprise tech companies creating tens of thousands of business value artifacts adds up to plenty of real-world solutions, ideas and lessons!
If scaling value management is is a topic dear to your organization, please let us know. Mainstay would love to have a conversation with you.
