When you want to maximize business value in the best deals, and best leverage precious value consulting / engineering resources, having a well-defined Value Consulting Engagement Model is essential.
This model serves as the guiding compass for value consulting teams, ensuring they engage effectively with sales and customer success teams, set clear expectations, and promote value-centric practices. Here, we outline the key elements of a Value Consulting Engagement Model, shedding light on why it’s indispensable and the benefits it brings to organizations.
Defining the Who, Where, and What
Who is Assigned: The first crucial aspect of the model is determining which value consultant should be engaged by the sales or customer success team. It’s about matching expertise and skills to the specific needs of the engagement.
Territory and Group: Effective engagement often entails keeping value consultants aligned with smaller groups of sellers. This fosters relationship-building and encourages greater usage and engagement.
Expertise: Industry expertise and deep knowledge of solutions are invaluable. Vertical industry expertise and solution-specific knowledge enhance a consultant’s ability to provide tailored value insights.
Crafting a Deliverables Catalog
Engagement Types: Value consultants can be involved in various ways, from hands-on engagements with customers, to providing back-office support for sellers and customer success teams. The consultants also serve a crucial role in supporting automation tools, ensuring that they are effectively used to engage customers. Defining the type of engagement needed, is
Deliverable Types: Value consulting teams provide a range of deliverables to support sales and customer success efforts. These deliverables include: Outside/In reports, capability and maturity assessments, pro-forma business cases for rapid value analysis, and comprehensive CFO-ready proposals. It is important to define and document the deliverable types, creating a clear catalog of offerings.
Establishing the Rules of Engagement
Criteria for Engagement: Defining the criteria for engaging value consultants is essential. This includes identifying whether the engagement is required during the pre-sale, post-sale, or both phases. Common criteria for engagement include:
- Deal size, defining the type of support the team will deliver based on the size of the opportunity. Typically a certain threshold is established for the largest enterprise deals, with the most hands-on value consulting services, mid-sized deals, with some customer engagement and back-office support, and the smaller deals, with just back-office support, or strictly relying on self-service tools and providing support for those.
- The stage of the opportunity, defining the services that are recommended at each stage in the buyer’s journey, and determining whether the request may be too early, too late, or just right
- The overall quality of the opportunity, assuring that the deal is qualified, proper discovery has been performed (think MEDDICC) and that the right customer personas are engaged.
- The criteria for engagement should be used to map and guide the service deliverable recommended for particular deals, stage and quality.
Navigating the Request Process
How to Request: Establishing a clear procedure for requesting value consulting services is vital. This includes specifying the information required for a request to be considered.
Turn-around Time-Frames: Setting clear response time-frames is essential. This ensures that requests are acknowledged promptly, and deliverables are provided within defined timelines. Properly managing expectations and communication is key to enabling sellers and customer success to set expectations with customers and properly plan next steps with clients.
The Bottom Line: Why a Value Engagement Model Matters
Having a robust Value Consulting Engagement Model in place yields numerous benefits for organizations:
Alignment and Efficiency: The model ensures that value consulting teams are aligned with sales and customer success efforts, maximizing efficiency and effectiveness in delivering value to customers.
Higher Sales Performance: By engaging value consultants at the right time and under the right criteria, sales organizations can get effective value communication and quantification into more deals, significantly increasing win rates, boosting deal size and accelerating decisions.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Tailored deliverables and hands-on engagement with customers lead to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, retention and growth.
Consistency and Quality: The model establishes consistent processes, delivery timeframes and quality standards for value consulting engagements, reducing variability, missed expectations and errors.
Competitive Advantage: Organizations with a well-defined value engagement model can use it as a competitive advantage, showcasing their commitment to delivering value to customers.
A Value Consulting Engagement Model is not just a framework; it’s a strategic asset that can drive results, foster collaboration, and set organizations on a path to sustained success. By defining who, where, and what, establishing clear rules of engagement, and delivering valuable insights, organizations can unlock their full potential and stay ahead in a competitive business landscape.
We use this model in our own value consulting deal support engagements for clients …
