by Dan Corcoran, Chief Technology Officer, VP Sales Enablement at Mainstay
If you’re like most enterprise technology companies, you’re always looking for new ways to attract customers. Yet most still rely on what they know best: touting the features and functions of their products and services. But that’s not good enough for the current generation of technology buyers. They need to know exactly how your technology or solution is going to help their business, whether it’s by cutting costs, boosting revenue, or growing market share.
Forward-looking companies have stepped up to this challenge, building teams of value engineers responsible for communicating the business value of their technology solutions to potential customers. This has been a successful sales strategy – up to a point. The problem is that value engineers are highly skilled, expensive resources, so there’s never enough of them. That means sales organizations that want to expand value selling can quickly come up against a scalability problem.
Value Selling Tools: Doing more with less
The answer is an approach we call value selling at scale. In short, it means doing more with the resources you already have. While value engineering teams can help win a lot of high-value deals, if you can increase the win rate of your average sales team by even a few percentage points, the impact on your sales revenue would be just as big.
This is where value selling tools can make a huge difference. These tools enable you to scale out the acumen of your value engineers to a broader user base that may not have developed the skill set of these top performers.
Empowering your broad middle
Most organizations have what can be called an “addressable middle” of salespeople. In terms of performance, they’re not the top 20% of your reps – or even the bottom 20% – but they’re likely the ones closing the bulk of your deals and generating a large chunk of your company’s revenue stream.
Empowering this critical mass of salespeople to sell more by using techniques and tools pioneered by experienced value engineers can be a game changer for your sales organization. The latest generation of value selling tools are relatively simple to learn and deploy, can be tailored to industry-specific sales situations, and provide built-in value calculators and automated executive presentation tools.
These value-selling solutions – increasingly cloud-based and security-compliant – can help the broad base of your sales group confidently drive clear, compelling conversations about business value with your prospects. In the past, these would have been intimidating and complex interactions better left to the few higher-level value engineers in your organization — or simply ignored in favor of typical feature-function discussions. Unfortunately, the result of missing out on more value-based, business-centric sales engagements could be a less-productive salesforce and fewer closed deals.
Choosing the right opportunities
Using value tools (and platforms) to reach a greater portion of your salesforce can be a key first step in transforming your business. Of course, these tools are not always the right choice for every engagement because you’ll still encounter highly complex and unique opportunities that need greater attention and customization. That’s when you want to deploy your value engineers to best advantage.
The point is that these complex deals, while lucrative, probably represent only a fraction of your total opportunities. We’ve found that the best place to deploy [automated] value tools is – once again – in the wide middle layer of your account base, where your value proposition tends to fall into structured, easily repeatable scenarios.
Consider also the importance of integrating with your CRM platform. Every opportunity and deal is there and using a CRM is commonly part of the proscribed selling process. With integrations, your value selling tools can become a seamless part of this process.
A note on scaling the value tool
As you start implementing your value tools or platform, you might be tempted to assign that task to your value engineering team, hoping they could quickly deploy tools to your sales teams on demand. But in our experience, this approach tends to pull specialized sales resources away from their critical customer responsibilities and forces them to spend a lot of time learning and maintaining a third-party software platform. Although they are highly skilled sellers, your value engineers are not likely to be expert at rolling out and supporting modern enterprise software applications.
So, instead of burdening skilled selling talent with time-consuming operational responsibilities, consider working with a strategic partner like Mainstay. We’ll help your value engineers leverage our proven Advisor Platform to build models in a familiar environment (Excel) and roll out fully realized value selling applications without having to learn any new skills.
By using a powerful tool like Mainstay’s cloud-based AdvisorTM platform, you can build business cases and ROI calculations faster than ever and scale your entire sales organization for success. To learn more, or to demo our new Advisor value calculator, click here or contact sales@mainstaycompany.com.
Dan Corcoran, Mainstay’s Chief Technology Officer, is responsible for empowering enterprise technology sellers to message value to their customers more effectively via innovative technology solutions. Dan’s primary focus is on Mainstay’s Advisor solution, a SaaS platform that leading technology vendors like Cisco, EMC, Google, Oracle, VMware and others use to help operationalize sales and marketing strategies that orient value messaging to customer-relevant issues.
