Value selling initiatives have long been deployed by leading B2B organizations in an effort to boost sales outcomes and bottom-line productivity. By delivering superior innovation value, these companies can share the associated economic benefit with the customer in a mutually beneficial manner, where solutions are fairly priced and purchased based on financial outcomes realized.
However, the impact associated with value selling does not happen magically. Having superior differentiation, even if well-documented and quantified, is far from sufficient in the quest to achieve value selling success. It requires alignment across the commercial team, from product and pricing, to marketing and sales – all working in concert to make customer value delivered central to product development and management decisions, pricing strategies, messaging, and the buyer experience.
This coordination challenge is why too many organizations have historically failed to sustain value selling efforts over time, or generate widespread adoption outside of high-performing teams. However, this is likely to change over the coming years.
AI has the potential to be as transformative to B2B productivity as the dawn of the internet and the shift to the cloud. Enterprises are beginning to explore business transformations and efficiency gains never before possible. At LeveragePoint, we are hyper-focused on finding ways to best quantify and communicate customer value, and are hard at work to introduce new ways to streamline and automate the creation of value propositions and stories into our cloud platform (sign up here for the latest updates).
But we believe automation is only part of the story.
For the foreseeable future, and likely beyond, the most promising applications of GenAI are assistive – helping humans accomplish their “jobs to be done” faster and more efficiently, allowing them more time to put their specialized skills to work.
This makes sense if you consider some typical responsibilities of a few key members of the B2B commercial team:
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- Paul, Product Manager: A strategic and innovative thinker, he spends hours of a typical workday searching for hard-to-find competitive intelligence and writing up stories and bugs.
- Nisha, Marketing Director: Creative and pipeline-creation focused, aggregating marketing data across spreadsheets and tweaking pre-built web copy for reuse across verticals and teams takes a substantial part of her (and her team’s) time.
- Elaine: Account Executive: A talented and organized salesperson, with excellent negotiation and interpersonal skills. Yet, she too often finds herself spending time crafting outbound email messages and tracking deals in the CRM that she could be spending building pipeline and closing deals.
In these small ways, AI is already helping Paul, Nisha, and Elaine in a way that allows them to spend more of their time on tasks that they personally excel at and deliver more value to the company. When we started considering our approach to AI, we constantly asked ourselves how we could deploy it in a way that streamlines and improves the human-to-human experience of value quantification and communication.
In the final two entries of this three-part blog series, we will explore how AI technology can help create higher-quality value content at a faster velocity. First, we need to explore the critical relationship between value content and the customer conversations through which it is delivered.
Why Value Conversations Matter
The ability of sales to engage in high-quality value conversations is what ultimately defines the success (or failure) of any value selling initiative. Impactful, memorable value conversations are how quantified differentiation and value-based prices are realized as revenue won and value captured. Without an understanding of the superior outcomes associated with a premium offering, B2B buyers are liable to default to low-cost alternatives or the status quo.
High-quality value conversations are especially impactful because they impact all four levers of an organization’s sales velocity:
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- Increased Number of Qualified Leads
- Boosted Win Rates
- Higher Average Deal Size
- Decreased Sales Cycle Time
Given the substantial lift that value selling can generate for B2B sales, what are the roadblocks to achieving consistent, high-quality value conversations in every sales interaction? From our conversations with B2B sales teams, we often hear responses such as:
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- Lack of sales team capability/aptitude.
- Lack of investment in sales training.
- Lack of executive sponsorship.
- Lack of bandwidth due to competing priorities.
- Lack of alignment with marketing and product teams.
While these represent real challenges faced by B2B teams on a daily basis, these also represent broader systemic challenges that make any type of change management a major undertaking. Improving commercial performance typically happens in the face of one or more of these challenges undertaken by motivated change agents. While true, these background facts don’t pinpoint an addressable root cause of value selling failure, and are too often used as excuses for staying the course.
However, one response we often hear gets at the heart of why teams often fail to adopt and sustain value selling initiatives:
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- A Lack of High-Quality, Value Content for Sales
Creating usable value content for sales is a challenge for any B2B organization. Product teams are constantly innovating, leading to frequent updates in offer design, solution capabilities, and pricing. Marketing teams are tasked with generating brand awareness and lead-generation campaigns that drive the sales pipeline in addition to creating sales enablement content. Sales teams are charged with achieving aggressive sales targets, and rely on their colleagues across the commercial team to provide them with the content they need to successfully sell value.
As a result, the quality content required to achieve value selling success is often not there for sales to use during customer and prospect conversations. Even in scenarios where it does exist, it may not be applicable to the breadth of solutions within their portfolio, leading to an inconsistent sales approach and lack of adoption.
This is understandable, due to the amount of time it takes to create great content. Broadly speaking, there are two root causes of this content creation challenge:
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- Lack of consistent content quality value content.
- The time required to create quality value content.
Historically, this has been best overcome by a structured value selling process that is scaled across solutions and teams over time. With the emergence of Generative AI, a new frontier is possible – one where value content can be created with speed and scale like never before, without sacrificing quality and usability.
In our next entry, we will focus on how AI can help B2B teams improve the quality of their value selling content.
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