With today’s buyer more in-control , risk averse and focused on economics more than ever, it’s vital for your organization to consistently articulate and deliver value to customers.
Unfortunately, many solution providers are falling short on their value engagements, causing a Value Gap
- With prospects, where unfortunately 56% of sellers revert to conversations about your company, solutions and features versus focusing on what buyer’s care about, their challenges and potential outcomes..
- With customers, where an even greater 88% of Account Managers and Customer Success reps focus on adoption metrics, not realized value outcomes.
This is where the Value Lifecycle Assessment (VLA) comes in. It offers a comprehensive framework to assess and refine your organization’s capabilities in establishing a value enablement function and constructing an elite Value Office. This Value Office serves as the fulcrum of value enablement excellence and coordination within your organization, to help bridge this Value Gap.
The VLA empowers your organization to enhance value enablement across all stages of the customer engagement and buyer’s journey. It applies a dual perspective, examining both the solution provider’s view and the buyer’s standpoint. The resulting insights fuel alignment of business strategies, optimize your resources, and accelerate value development, delivery, and scalability, fostering a culture of value.
Developed by GENIUS DRIVE, the VLA draws upon over three decades of value enablement experience. It assesses vital dimensions of value enablement such as strategy alignment, governance and processes, value measurement and reporting, stakeholder engagement, and continuous improvement. With the VLA, organizations can gain insights into their current capabilities and discover areas ripe for acceleration, growth, and optimization.
Illuminating the Path Forward
The VLA identifies practice gaps and areas for improvement, providing a clear roadmap for targeted investments in training, resources, and technology. It cultivates a culture of measurement and continuous improvement, enabling organizations to address challenges, adapt to evolving needs, and sharpen their competitive edge.
The Value Lifecycle Assessment measures capability and maturity of a value program across the stages of customer engagement, throughout the buyer’s journey. The dimensions of analysis include:
ATTRACT
At this stage, buyers are experiencing challenges and looking for ideas on how to alleviate the pain. For this step in the journey, the solution provider leverages value to better attract the right buyers and to inspire them to engage. At this stage, marketing, outreach reps and sellers outreach to prospects, to make them aware of potential issues, that solutions are available to effectively address, and the high-level potential outcomes available.
To Attract with Value, the team needs value messaging across and relevant to the ICPs and personas, value marketing and outreach content, a customer capability and maturity assessment, and value outreach skills and coaching.
ENGAGE
In the Engage stage, buyers are pursuing and evaluating a solution to their pain, better understanding their challenges, and narrowing the potential solution providers and solution options. For the solution provider, marketers, business development reps (BDRs) and sellers at this step in the journey need to help prospects understand the scope of their challenges and the cost of “do nothing”, educate buyers about priority use cases, and recommend specific solutions and quantifiable business outcomes.
To Engage with Value, marketing, BDRs and sellers need value communication content, value model and calculator, and value engagement skills for effective conversations, discovery and communications.
SELL
At this stage, buyers are choosing a particular solution provider and solution option, justifying the purchase to executives and stakeholders and building specific implementation and launch plans. At this step in the buyer’s journey, the solution provider needs sellers to justify the solution to the buying team, gaining consensus and approval.
To Sell with Value, sales reps need to deliver a compelling and credible business case, with the tools, intelligence, certification, coaching and support to effectively collaborate, convince and defend.
RETAIN AND EXPAND
At this stage, post-sale, customers have implemented the solution, driving adoption and usage and proving they made the right decision before doing more. At this stage, customer account managers and success reps need to leverage the expected outcomes and pre-sales value assessments, and go beyond typical usage metrics to prove realized value success.
To Retain and Expand with Value, account managers and customer success reps need to regularly tally and communicate advancements in capability and maturity, realized value to prove outcomes and return on current investments. This can then be used to justify renewals and support expansion of licensing and use cases.
ORCHESTRATION
Value programs need to be developed, launched, orchestrated, communicated and optimized over time in order to support the buyer’s journey and empower the value lifecycle.
The VSA helps guide the development of a Value Office, the orchestration hub for improved value enablement. It does this by measuring the practices of assessment, governance and intelligence needed to effectively implement value across the lifecycle.
The VLA maturity model can guide organizations on their transformative journey towards establishing a high-performing value enablement function and Value Office. This, in turn, can unlock benefits like improved lead generation, win rate, deal size, sales cycle, retention, and growth, sooner and more cost-effectively.
Navigating the Value Enablement Maturity Stages
Across the dimensions of the buyer’s journey and customer engagement, the VLA framework identifies five stages of value enablement maturity, a progression of practices and capabilities:
- Planning – Here, value enablement functions are reactive, responding to immediate requests and providing custom solutions. Formalization and proactive planning of value activities are minimal.
- Implementing – This stage sees the inception of a more structured approach to value enablement, with nascent processes and methodologies. However, these practices may not yet be fully integrated across the organization.
- Adopting – At this stage, value enablement is being adopted with proactive processes and tools. The Value Office, acting as the central orchestrator, is starting to gain recognition as a key player in the organization’s success.
- Maturing – Value enablement becomes well-embedded within the organization. Strong alignment exists between business strategies and value realization activities, backed by robust governance structures and standardized processes in the Value Office. The focus on continuous improvement is also intensified.
- Optimizing – This is the pinnacle of value enablement maturity, characterized by excellence in value enablement and lifecycle optimization. The Value Office functions are fine-tuned, leveraging advanced practices, technologies, and data-driven insights to consistently drive innovation and identify value enhancement opportunities. Solution priorities, positioning and selling are based upon data-driven insights coming out of the Value Office.
These levels provide a uniform measuring stick, helping you to understand your current practices, uncover potential gaps, set priorities and drive improvement strategies and plans.
The Bottom-Line
The Value Lifecycle Assessment represents a transformative approach to understanding and bridging the critical Value Gap in today’s increasingly buyer-centric world.
By meticulously examining and enhancing every aspect of your value enablement function, the VLA offers not just a roadmap but a full-fledged GPS to guide your organization’s journey toward a higher level of value realization.
The result is not merely a higher win rate, deal size, or growth rate but a more profound connection with the very challenges and outcomes your buyers care about. In leveraging the VLA, you place your organization at the forefront of the modern value-driven economy, ready to adapt, grow, and thrive.
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