BetterCloud is a New York-based SaaSOps platform that centralizes its customers’ IT and security apps. It enables them to automate routine processes and monitor for security threats.
The company supports around 14,000 IT professionals across 2,500 companies in 60 countries. We spoke to Mike Connery, BetterCloud’s VP of Solutions and Value Engineering to learn how Cuvama has helped realise their ambition of making value selling integral to their new business model.
About BetterCloud
- Industry: SaaS integration software
- Location: North America
- Company: Warbus Pincus Series F-funded
Hear from BetterCloud's VP Value Engineering
Before Cuvama
In recent years, BetterCloud has evolved its product. The solution originally focused on integration for GSuite applications but expanded to cover a whole range of use cases across multiple platforms and apps.
These changes created two challenges:
- Salespeople needed to speak to a wider range of stakeholders during the sales process
- Each deal faced a wider range of competitors
They also changed their perception of customer value. Instead of seeing it as something generic that can be applied across all customers, they now approach it as something that must be tailored to each customer.
This involved taking a discovery-first approach to selling. This means salespeople gaining credibility with the customer, before asking deep questions that uncover business challenges and the KPIs that will help solve them.
The company wanted to scale value selling across the business, driven by the Business Value Engineering team.
Here’s what Mike Connery and his team wanted to achieve:
- Start using value selling as a methodology: In a world where most salespeople jump straight to talking about their solution’s features and functions, having a more consultative, discovery-led approach would enable BetterCloud to differentiate from competitors.
- Systematise this across the customer lifecycle: BetterCloud wanted a solution that could take the customer outcomes and KPIs agreed upon during the sales process and use them to realize value throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
The BetterCloud team started by using spreadsheets to perform discovery and systematize value.
However, they found the spreadsheets would quickly go out of date, were complicated to update, would easily break and version control became challenging. This made scaling value selling very difficult.
They tried several value selling and management tools. However, they found these had a number of flaws:
- They were too slow and hard to update, instead of being flexible and easy to update as the value proposition and product evolved
- Reps wouldn’t use them due to their complexity, so value selling remained stuck with a few value selling consultants
- They jumped rushed to ROI calculations, instead of starting with discovery and framing value in terms of what mattered to that specific customer
BetterCloud realized they needed a digital platform that reps would actually use, that aligned to their discovery-first approach, and which would keep up with the business needs.
With Cuvama
The Cuvama platform met all BetterCloud’s needs. Here’s why:
A single source of truth
BetterCloud needed a platform to provide a single source of truth that could store the information uncovered during discovery. This means that if a customer is handed over to a different salesperson—for example, to perform a demo—that person has an up-to-date digital record of the discovery so far. If required, BetterCloud or the customer can add new information and so the record evolves with the customer’s changing needs.
Enabling value selling
BetterCloud wanted its Value Engineering team to be the enablers of value selling and to scale it across the business.
But they also wanted the team to remain relatively small—they didn’t want a one-to-one ratio of value engineers and sales reps.
Cuvama enables their salespeople to work a deal independently by guiding them and their customers through the value selling process.
It also gives salespeople credibility during conversations with clients by helping them form value hypotheses and asking informed, relevant questions.
Flexibility
BetterCloud is growing rapidly and its range of use cases and applications is expanding all the time. The company needs to regularly update its value messaging, hypotheses and calculations to reflect this. Any delay in doing this would affect its sales reps’ abilities to connect on value.
This is quick and easy to do with Cuvama. Value Engineers can make subtle changes via the tool’s back end, so they are ready for the Sales Team to use immediately.
Ease of Use
BetterCloud had two main user groups. The Sales Team, which uses the tool in the field and the Value Engineering Team whose job it was to adjust the different benefits, language and calculations in the tool’s back end.
Both user groups find Cuvama simple and intuitive.
Easy setup
BetterCloud’s Value Engineers love working with the Cuvama team. They have been very impressed with how fast we got Cuvama up and running and the level of support that we provided.
The transition was seamless and there was no need for BetterCloud to recreate any of their messaging or value calculations. The Sales Team was able to continue driving customer value throughout the implementation process.
What’s Next?
Cuvama has helped BetterCloud to solidify its approach to value selling. But what of the future?
Mike Connery sees two areas where Cuvama will transform the business:
1. Post-sales handoff
BetterCloud intends to implement systems that will allow the pain points, customer outcomes and the KPIs agreed during the sales process to be used to deliver success for that customer.
This will make teams like Customer Success far more effective as they know what challenges the customer faces and what they want to achieve. They can help them achieve these goals and suggest new products to add further value.
2. Tracking against customer outcome
BetterCloud is also working with the Cuvama team to track progress towards achieving customer success outcomes. This will help to justify renewals, improve upselling and cross-selling and highlight any areas where there is a concern or need for improvement.
