Why Customer Value Management
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The new way to win
Everyone wants customers to understand the true value of their solution. Yet far too many B2B companies still talk to customers about products, and not business outcomes.
Communicating Value is now expected
Customers are bombarded with potential solutions for every part of their business. And budgets are tighter than ever before. It’s now tablestakes to demonstrate how you will solve your customer’s problems and deliver actual business outcomes (Psssst… that’s what we mean by customer ‘Value’).
Selling Value isn’t just a ‘sales thing’…
Getting Customer Value Management right generates great results…
We believe that B2B companies who connect with their buyers on Value will win over those who push products.
Doing this over the whole customer lifecycle – from first touch point in the buyer journey, through the sales cycle and integrated into customer success – is what turns selling value into Customer Value Management (CVM).
Furthermore, feeding customer value insights back to Product and Marketing to enhance an organisation’s proposition creates a virtous cycle, delivering that holy grail of business buzzwords – the flywheel effect.
And we’re seeing strong evidence of its success with our customers.
But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s some research from those super smart people over at Gartner. They even produced a report on it here.
Yet most companies fail at Customer Value Management
Selling value, the foundation for Customer Value Management, isn’t a new concept – it’s been around for decades. But even with multiple sales methodologies, extensive training, expensive consultants and countless sales and marketing technologies…
- Most B2B Sales teams still sell products based on features and functionality, not business value
- Most Customer Success teams still focus on the service provided, not the outcomes delivered
Everyone knows they should...
- Discover their specific business problems
- Ask & align on KPI impact/outcomes
- Link outcomes to your unique solution
- Monitor ongoing success realisation
...but the common reality is
- Jump to features, function & price
- Present generic marketing value statements
- Give Harbour-tour demos & All-in proposals
- Instantly forget about value upon signature
Why are teams failing?
The key to selling value is connecting your solution to a customer’s specific problems and desired business outcomes. If your value proposition isn’t mapped to persona and segment pain points, KPIs and outcomes, value selling simply can’t happen (at least not well).
Some reps are far more comfortable talking about features than business value. So what do they do? You guessed it, they rush straight to presenting the solution. To get the confidence to discover customer problems and discuss business outcomes reps need real-time enablement they can access during live conversations… Your annual sales training just isn’t going to cut it.
Too many organizations fail at scaling value-selling beyond their top performers. They lack a way of capturing best practice and enabling the sales org with a consistent process. The result? That handful of top performers carry the team (talk about inefficient…)
How much of your messaging is gathering dust in marketing docs? How close is your product team to the business outcomes your customer’s want to achieve? Yeah, we thought so… The trouble is they aren’t getting the live feedback from those value-driven conversations Sales and Customer Success are (or should be) having.
The Cuvama way
A discovery first approach to Customer Value Management
“Value starts with discovery and builds
throughout the customer journey“
– Wise words from our Co-Founder Alex.
The first step to selling value is fully understanding a specific customer’s pain and the business outcomes they’re looking to achieve – not rushing straight to demo or ROI quantification.
Cuvama’s approach is based on a strong belief that:
Sales teams must lead with a point of view, discover specific customer problems and align on outcomes with the customer. Then connect your unique solution to those problems and outcomes, before collaborating on a business case with the customer, for every opportunity
Customer Success must understand why customers bought a solution, create a success plan based on business outcomes that they can track with the customer, and then actually discover new opportunities for sales (yeah, we went there!)
Product and Marketing must have access to the information on what customer’s really value and should be evolving both the messaging and solution in light of that We looked everywhere for something to help solve this, but found nothing that met the mark.
So that’s why we built Cuvama.
Read more about why now is the right time for Customer Value Management.
Want to see what
Cuvama can do?
