Venkataraman Lakshminarayanan, Board Advisor, CRON AI, former ServiceNow Business Value Leader
In recent years, enterprise technology leaders have discovered that implementing a modern value automation platform can help their sales teams create compelling ROI business cases that boost win rates and drive renewals. Now, with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), companies are empowering their value platforms with new capabilities to build business cases faster, cheaper, and with greater deal success.
When implemented in a thoughtful manner, value automation platforms can provide sales enablement teams with a powerful set of tools to help accelerate deals and boost seller productivity. These include: standardized methodologies, ROI calculation engines, seamless CRM integration, and analytics apps, allowing reps to spend more time with the customer and less time on back-office research and administrative tasks.
Many organizations have chosen to mandate the use of these tools across their sales teams with the hope that they will benefit from greater operational efficiency and economies of scale. But the success of these platforms to date has been somewhat mixed, with many sales organizations encountering stubborn operational, structural and skills-development challenges. These include:
- Ongoing coaching: While many account executives and pre-sales teams have eagerly adopted value automation platforms and tools, many tend to need a lot of ongoing coaching and support from value-selling experts and outside consultants to make sure their business cases are credible.
- Growing product complexity: As sales deals get larger and more complex – and require ever more sophisticated ROI models – value teams need more time and support to build and refine their business cases.
- Need for soft-skills development: Value selling often relies on repeatable processes across deals, but it is also an art form that calls for customizing the effort in several respects, such as securing the customers’ time, asking them the right questions, and using the language of the customer to gain trust. Much of value selling is conversational, requiring skills outside of the ROI tool itself.
- Standardization / unification of the approach: Many value management consultants are adept at spreadsheet-based tools and will secretly confess to still using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to create their favorite ROI models.
- Full lifecycle coverage: For value selling to be effective, value needs to be communicated throughout the customer lifecycle. This requires seamless collaboration across cross-functional teams, including customer success managers, especially when it comes to renewals and upsells.
Getting the most out of your value automation platform
What these caveats tell us is that the traditional value management platform, in and of itself, does not guarantee a high-quality business case. That is why the best companies ensure quality at scale by adopting a multi-dimensional approach that programmatically raises the value management skills and practices across their entire marketing, sales, and customer success organizations.
This new approach is built from multiple building blocks that together form a complete, easily scalable value automation platform. Here are some of the key building blocks:
- Business case models and methodology
- Value taxonomy
- Value content
- Value training and enablement
- Value management operating models and workflows
- Platform for engagement, analytics, and AI
- Cross-functional alignments
- Company-wide strategy and programmatic approach for value management
- KPIs and metrics to track progress
Taking your value automation platform further with GenAI
Even as value automation platforms have matured and gained an ardent following among enterprise technology leaders, a game-changing capability has come on the scene that is destined to transform the way tech companies sell, upsell, and renew their products and services.
That game changer, you might have guessed, is GenAI, and it holds the potential to unlock orders of magnitude more value and productivity from your value automation platform. For example, imagine using a GenAI-based digital twin as a “value assistant” or “co-pilot” to help you create every building block on your value platform, from business case models to sales training to KPI performance tracking –- and do so at a mere fraction of the time and cost. And that’s just for starters.
Introducing the Value Management to the power of AI blog series
We are excited to kick off this “Value Management to the power of AI” series with this blog! In this series, we will engage in probing conversations with the value management community and jointly explore, share, and seek ideas on each building block of a modern value automation platform, including ideas from early GenAI adopters.
We’d love to learn from you. How have you scaled your own business value management program? What are some top challenges you are solving for? Are there specific topics and ideas we should explore in this blog? Contact us at sales@mainstaycompany.com
