Vendors that do not recognize the “value gap” may see a looming problem in 2018 as market conditions continue to change. What is the gap? It is the spread between the value the sales rep promises they will deliver from their solution’s benefits, and what their prospects expect in dollars and cents post-implementation.
Vendors Promise
If a vendor promises “revenue gains, cost reductions or risk mitigation” and lack substantiated measurement, the gap will have a significant impact on the monetization of the customer relationship.
“57% of sales propositions were resolutely product focused, yet the more effective propositions – that is those from companies who reported big bucks flowing in – were customer targeted and quantifiable.”
Huthwaite research
Changing markets
The changes can be summed up in three central areas: noise clouds, no value leaders, and no affordable help. Selling business outcomes or value helps to neutralize these changes and help vendors, especially SaaS thrive with a hugely unfair competitive advantage. These conditions are increasing in strength:
Noise Clouds, excessive vendors.
The Fortune 500 is exactly that, 500 companies. Even with 5-7 decision makers and influencers per account, they comprise only 3,500 or so individuals. The numbers of vendors vying for their attention, especially at Sr. or C-suite levels unprecedented. According to AngelList, there are moreover “9,700 SaaS start-ups domestically”, and with 5-8 average sellers, that is 77,000 sales reps! Forbes states there are “150,000 SaaS applications”, so adding in the additional Sales reps selling these apps across similar or different companies, it adds 850,000 to 1M additional sales reps. This does not include the legions of LDRs and BDRs messaging for meetings. All the millions of emails and calls have created a “noise cloud” impacting already weary buyers. Forget they already do 70-75% of the vendor research online before a sales call.
No value leaders.
The vast majority of vendors sell competent and desirable solutions. Only a small percentage sell the “quantifiable business outcome” of these solutions. Since decision makers and C-suite run major corporations on the numbers, P/L, and measure risk that way, why is this gap here in the first place?
No affordable help.
SELLING POWER’s “Top 20 Sales Training companies” (excellent programs) do not any offered help here (a few help corporate to look at value but not in granularity). They leave it up to the overburdened Reps to determine and measure their solution’s business outcomes. Once measured, they do not help them understand the prospective accounts 10K-10Q goals and initiatives and align their value financially to induce decision makers and C-suite engagement. Lastly, do not provide easy to use, account-specific CFO-grade business case to sell the value leaving it up to 92% of the vendors to either do without or hire costly consultants (vendor ROI’s are only a price of the equation).
More proof?
“Especially among people with technical backgrounds, close involvement with the functionality of the product or service gets in the way of understanding real business value – how it actually helps the customer solve problems.”
Tony Hughes, Huthwaite International CEO
Companies exist to make profits and deliver shareholder value and solve the problems to support this. Their decision-makers exist to serve their shareholders providing the results and numbers that produce shareholder value. They are remarkably adept at managing risk and require measurable and verifiable vendor proof to measure the gain and its probability.
It is all about revenues and secondarily cost-savings. Sales Reps need to support this premise by monetizing their solutions and building relationships based on mutual value.
Being that Sr. management is typically involved early in the sales process, once the need is identified; it is an ideal time to present and get agreement on the business outcomes. As the decision makers relegate the evaluation stages to their team, your business outcomes can unity the buying committee. It helps facilitate your sales processes and advances you as the preferred vendor, to help close faster and close larger.
Starting at the top with the bottom line helps all members of the buying committee to rally around your unique value proposition and quantifiable, business outcomes.
24-hour relief
Unfortunately, there’s no uncomplicated way to do this. You have to gather all of the target account’s company goals, objectives, initiatives, and financial gaps. Then, determine and measure how your solutions can deliver quantifiable value specifically into the account’s initiatives, and present this in a CFO-grade format for a decision maker to quickly see and understand.
This is not only time consuming even for the best of Sales reps with financial acumen, but too often they lack access benchmarks to substantiate their data. It would take weeks or have several target accounts, months; which robs the Sales reps of their dwindling hours left each week for “selling time.”
SPEEDSHEETS
With the emergence of A.I. and a dedicated team of C-suite value experts, comes an extremely rapid and uncomplicated way to sell top down using a bottom line. SPEEDSHEETS were created to give a Sales rep the quantifiable business outcomes of their solution, and align it into any target account’s 10K in an easy to digest, quick to use decision maker output. Time to learn: 1 hour. Time to use: immediate. Time to selling value: 24 hours. We will help you use these, or make your own if that is preferred. As long as you feel confident engaging with decision makers and C-suite.
Revenue AcceleratorsTM is the ONLY provider empowering Vendor Sales & Marketing teams to easily and more rapidly acquire high-performing opportunities from accessing and engaging Decision Makers and C-Suite. By defining the Vendors solution’s financial value, aligning it into Target Account objectives and business initiatives and using 1:1 ABM value messaging in SPEEDSHEETS; we transform Product to Value selling overnight for faster and easier selling. www.revenueaccelerators.com