VALKRE | Value Creation

How Can Product Marketing Help Win Deals?

Give Product Marketers Better Tech Tools

If you give Product Marketing better tools they will help Sales win more deals. It is really shameful in today’s age how underdeveloped and non-integrated Product Marketing tools really are. Companies are losing deals everyday as a result. Here is the basic logic:

1. A sales person who has better customer Value Intelligence than their competitor has a better chance of winning.
2. The backbone of Value Intelligence is the threading of: Customer Challenge  ⇒  What the Customer Gets from You to Solve the Challenge  ⇒  How You are Differentiated from the Next Best Alternative  ⇒  Who Cares at the Customer  ⇒  What are the Customer Metrics and Financial Outcomes that result. In many circles this Value Intelligence is referred to as a Value Proposition.
3. “Someone” within a company is in charge of getting this Value Intelligence into the hands of Sellers. Product Marketing is most commonly the “someone” but the role does goes by different names.
4. And here is the problem: the tools Product Marketers use to manage this critical Value Intelligence are underdeveloped, not connected and thoroughly inadequate. To cut through it, Product Marketers are using Crappy Tools.

The result is that sellers use whatever they can get their hands on or make up their own Value Intelligence. This actually should be some sort of financial crime given the amount of money that goes into building products and services and taking them to market.

 

Product Marketers Have Crappy Tools

The challenge for Product Marketing is they have no digitally enabled place to manage Value Intelligence. Pause for a moment and think about your own organization, where does this information get created? Probably in a Word doc, Excel or PPT. It may be the Word docs then get sent to an awesome content management system. But that does little for the Product Marketer as they are still stuck managing a source doc in Word, PPT or Excel. And so these problems result:

• Next to impossible to manage the Value Intelligence at a level of granularity below the generic offering. The result is that sellers see the Intelligence as too vanilla and not applicable to their customer situation.
• Ten Product Marketers will create and deliver the Intelligence ten different ways. The sellers experience little consistency and are confused.
• Versions are rampant, there is no real source of truth which results in sellers wasting time searching and using versions that may or may not represent the company’s best thinking.
• The concept of quantified customer outcomes is in an obscure spreadsheet a handful of people understand and no one is willing to put in front of an actual customer.
• Crazy hard to connect the qualitative story to quantitative customer outcomes in a manner sellers can communicate.

 

What Kind of Tools Do Product Marketers Need

To get started on this journey here are a few requirements to consider:

1. A Place for Product Marketing: Embrace a platform that promotes the Product Marketers workflow and integrates their work into the critical digital threading of the business.
2. Structure: Decide on your list of Value Intelligence. Focus on those elements that are dynamic or change from one segment to the next.
3. Quantified Customer Outcomes: Connect tangible customer outcomes that sellers will understand. This is an area where technology can hold a truly special place by providing reusable customer metrics, calculators, and inputs.
4. Connect it to Sellers: Get the Product Marketing work into the hands of sales thru CRM integration or wherever the sellers digitally live. Give Sellers the ability to customize and connect Value Intelligence into their Deal streams. 

 

Win Rates Improved

This is what we mean by enabling Product Marketing. And here’s why win rates improve.

• The Product Marketer is now able to manage the Value Intelligence at an appropriate customer segment or even persona level. Now when the sellers access the info it is relevant.
• Sellers are provided with customer metrics and customer outcomes in easy to understand value trees that visually explain how their company’s product or services impacts those metrics.
• The qualitative stories and the quantitative customer outcomes are linked together with customer challenges. In this way the Sellers have, at their fingertips, a source-of-truth that threads together customer challenges, their company’s solutions and potential quantified customer outcomes.
• The Product Marketers are producing Value Intelligence that carries a consistent structure across the organization. Sellers learn what to expect and how to use it. Furthermore since it is consistent the sellers can provide improvement feedback which is impossible for Value Intelligence that lacks structure.
• There are no versions coming from Product Marketing. Just the source of truth on what the organization believes is the best Value Intelligence sellers should be using.

 

Win Rates are a Hot Button but there are More Benefits

Enabling Product Marketers and connecting digital Value Intelligence to Sellers to improve Win Rates is a big deal. But this is not the only benefit. This digital Value Intelligence can now also be better connected to Marketing Campaigns, Website Content, New Product Development, Strategy and Pricing. For companies that deploy Key Account Management strategies the Value Intelligence can be threaded thru to customer plans and customized down to specific customer levels.

 

Where Do Our Insights Come From

We provide SaaS products and services to a growing list of progressive B2B companies. Just like our customers, our insights come from collaborating with many companies across a spectrum of industry situations. In our case we get to experience thousands of users working to improve how they produce, manage and deliver Value Intelligence to their sellers. Their ideas are our innovation source for what continues to be a rich arena for improvement.

 

Product Marketing is One of the Last Underdeveloped Leverage Points for Sales and Marketing Technology

Enabling Product Marketing and the resulting digitization of Value Intelligence is genuinely an underdeveloped arena and is one of those few big levers that remains to be pulled to improve win rates, margins and profits. To learn more about how we are changing this, visit valkre.com

SAM Enablement™ versus Sales Enablement

Filling a Market Gap: SAM (Strategic Account Manager) Enablement fills a gap in the marketplace. The gap exists with the 3 million Account Managers who are not served by Sales Enablement, CRM or any of the enabling technologies built for Sales.

Value Creation is the Difference: The fundamental difference between Account Managers and Field Sales is Value Creation. Field Sales tend to go after deals with existing products and services. Account Managers do this too, but they also get deeply engaged as the quarterback of Value Creation. They quarterback the activities of figuring out customer challenges, convincing their companies to dedicate resources to solve challenges and collaborate with customers to execute solutions and achieve outcomes. In Account Management these activities lead to lifelong relationships and business growth between companies and their customers. Account Managers serve the largest, most strategic customers who set the tone for an entire company.  In this role the dramatic difference is Value Creation.

Value Creation is a Process not a Box:  Account Managers know that the work of Value Creation is not a box that gets typed into once a year but is constant, everyday work. Work that follows a continuous process of understanding customer challenges, decisions on challenges to pursue and execution. Account Managers do this work in collaboration with teams of people within their companies, within their customers, across business units and across continents. So, when the Account Manager opens up CRM or Sales Enablement and finds a box to type in a few paragraphs, they are in no way being enabled to get the work done. There is no workflow, there is no place to quantify and track the value delivered, and there is nothing to share with their customer to collaborate on the Value Creation work. The work of Value Creation ends up a hodge-podge of PowerPoint and spreadsheets that wastes the account manager’s time and severely limits Value Creation and growth.

Enough is Enough! Time for SAM Enablement: The Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) and its large community of Account Managers understand all of this. SAMA has been the center of gravity for training and best practice sharing for over 50 years with leading companies all over the world. The community has risen up and said enough is enough; we need our own form of enablement, SAM Enablement.

SAM Enablement: SAM Enablement includes the critical elements necessary to achieve world class Account Management.

• Training: a SAMA specified and controlled set of training modules, resulting from 50+ years of learning, are targeted at developing the skills most important to the SAM community.
• Technology: Purpose built technology that reinforces training and enables the account manager’s work to bring Structure, Speed, Sustainability and Scale to the practice of account management.
• Coaching: With Training and Technology in place the ability to provide real time coaching is dramatically improved. This is the lynch pin to ensuring accountability, continued improvement and results.

SAMA Amsterdam Conference March 14^th thru 16^th: As for Valkre, we have been collaborating on the technology piece within the SAMA community to bring SAM Enablement into the world.

We are excited to introduce and present SAM Enablement at the upcoming Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) conferences:

• Amsterdam March 14^th thru 17^th  Learn More
• Chicago May 23^rd thru 26^th Learn More

Hope to see you there!

 

Give Customers Access To Their Scorecard

Over the past couple weeks, I've shared with you two stores about how some of our customers are finding practical ways with Render to get their organizations to be more customer centric. Here's the continuation in that series....

If you're an account manager, you probably live and breathe the daily management of critical customer-facing initiatives. Which means you probably have to collaborate not only cross-functionally in your organization but also with your customers. As such, we don't have to tell you that internal account plans are not optimal to create the accountability, visibility and alignment on initiative execution.

In order to assure customer engagement with key/strategic accounts, some companies are using Render to achieve success by providing their customers self-service access to a list of the top programs, deals, issues, innovations their customers care about. When customers can access content they care about, it has a way of driving more customer centric behavior internally.

Here is a quick and easy path to getting this done:

Replace the Presentation With a Scorecard. Every time you meet with customers, replace the mentality of pitching with an attitude of "here's the update." This should be a simple table with columns for Initiative Name, Owner, Promised Completion Date, Expected Completion Date, Status and Latest News. That's it. Show it to the customer (even if its blank) and say I'd like to operate around this simple list. Using the list will simplify customer meeting prep for you and create a simpler experience for customers to engage and collaborate. You can always back up this list with supplemental materials and details.

Put the Scorecard in a Place Your Customers Can Access. There are numerous tools out there to establish self-service access to information. You can use Sharepoint, DropBox or many other secure file sharing utilities, but of course, we think our web portal is the best.

Ask Your Customers How You Can Help Them Make More Money. With a simple, blank table that is accessible to customers, it is time to fill it in. Start by asking the customer how you can help make them more money. Write those things down with a status of Not Approved. Show customers you have listened and documented such that there is accountability to consider and responsiveness to the customer's request.

Add Existing Work, Critical Issues and Big Deals. While decisions are being made on customer requests, add ongoing efforts to the scorecard. Often times there are disparate lists of critical issues, programs being executed, or upcoming deals floating around emails and spreadsheets in the organization. Consolidate them and pick the most important. Then confirm with the customer whether those things should be on the scorecard.

Establish Dates and Owners. As initiatives in the scorecard are approved, first establish expectations on target dates and internal owners. Putting this info on the scorecard establishes accountability internally to get things done for the customer on time. This is the first act that will begin driving an organization to become more customer-centric.

Establish Critical Mass. While the above actions are effective for a few accounts, real change will being when critical mass is achieved. The numbers vary based on your organization, but companies using Render see dramatic change in their organizations when scorecards are established for the top 10 accounts…and that change will benefit the rest of the key accounts. Critical mass gives an organization the sense that these initiatives are real data now that needs to be managed and discussed and accountability to execute on behalf of customer is real.

Establish Management Reviews. With critical mass, you can add these scorecards into existing management processes, ranging from internal account reviews to cross-functional meetings to review 'At Risk' items across all accounts. The point is that these processes are easier to establish with data and customer expectations in place. If you make these scorecards a part of how you work, ultimately it will directly improve the customer centricity of an organization.

Those points are just a quick rundown on the steps to take in giving customers access to your initiative scorecard for greater engagement. If you want to learn more about the details of getting it done, send us a message below and we'll be happy to show you how it works in Render.

Customer Centric Hack: Require Customer Feedback

Last week I wrote about how one of our customers is using Render to make their organization more customer centric. Continuing that thread, this week I wanted to share a story about how some companies are "thinking from the right."

It doesn't need to be said that listening to customers is a good idea. But can you honestly say that you're taking action against a customer's feedback? Companies using Render take a more productive approach to feedback. From a linear process perspective, they think from the right: They establish the decision or plan that requires customer feedback, then collect feedback under that context. In that way, the feedback will be used, decisions will be smarter, and plans more successful.

Here is a quick outline of how some of our customers get this done:

Declare the Value Proposition You Are Trying to Improve. Not product or service. Value proposition. By starting here, it is clearer what you are trying to sell more of to a specific type of customer under a defined competitive context. This can be for a deal, product, service, or customer. Declare to your organization that the purpose of upcoming decisions and planning sessions is to improve the value proposition and that, before anything is done, customer feedback on that value prop will be collected and incorporated into the process.

Write Down Your Value Proposition. This step may sound academic, but the value proposition establishes a baseline on which to improve and provides the topic of customer conversations. So if you don't have a clear, crisp articulation of what your offering is and how it benefits the customer, then you should start writing. 

Identify the Customers Whose Voice Will be Impactful. You are talking to customers in order to inform a decision, not just to talk for the sake of conversation. Think critically about the customer with whom to speak and who to include in that discussion. They should be people who benefit from your value proposition and heavily influence buying decisions.

Use Your Value Proposition as Basis of Discussion with Customer. Customers care about how they are better off with your value proposition versus other alternatives. It should not be a secret, so use it as the basis of discussion with your customers. If you wrote down your value proposition, now ask the customer what they agree with and where does it need to be improved. Customers will use their own understanding of the challenges they face and the goals of their business to inform their answers.

Summarize Customer Discussions into Themes. Gather all the customer feedback and create three lists about your value proposition: (1) what customers value most today, (2) what needs to be fixed, and (3) what are their new ideas to consider investing behind. Analyzing these insights will ensure that you don't kill investment in areas of value and that you allocate resources to areas to which customers will respond.

Hold Yourself Accountable on Which Themes Make the Plan vs. Ones that Don't. Take each list and create a decision scorecard that specifies what steps you will take as a result of the feedback. If the decision is something that customers might not like, then describe your logic behind that decision. Saying no is better than no decision at all, because, besides needing to address growth challenges, your customers wants to know you were actually listening.

Follow Up with Customers to Show How They Impacted the Decision Making. For each customer that took the time to provide feedback, report back to them on next steps. You will be more confident in your decisions, customers will be more engaged in the outcomes of your decisions, and your organization will work on the things customers care about.

 

Stay tuned for my next post, which will describe how the most customer centric companies are collaborating with their customers on initiative execution. In the meantime, if you have your own customer feedback stories to share, we would love to hear how effective those are for you.

Convert Your Product Catalog into a Value Proposition Catalog

How many 50 page catalogs have you flipped through, filled with 1-page product descriptions focused on features that are expensive to create and are rarely updated? Probably more than you can count, and probably more than you cared to read through because the information truly wasn't useful. Even worse, why don't any of those offering documents sell the outcomes and benefits for a customer?

I'm currently working with a company, helping them take a customer-back perspective and organize what makes their offering great according to outcomes by customer segment and competitive situation. The intent is to provide a more useful 'catalog' that will have real impact on a customer's buying decision.

Here are the seven core activities you can do to make your offering catalog more customer centric:

Align on what customers buy, not what you sell. This nuance can kill customer engagement right from the start. Do customers want to buy a partner or a specific product? Maybe both? For example, a contractor using your products is more likely looking for a business partner. A railroad is probably looking for a product or service to improve their operation. Understand this and take an inventory.

Align on the competitive situations you find. For each of the things customers buy, identify relevant competitive situations. Competitors could be another company, a product substitute, customers doing it themselves, customers not doing anything, or upgrading from a specific solution. There could be one or more contexts to consider.

Align on the customer segments you serve. For each of the things customers buy, identify the relevant customer segments that matter to your business. Start simple and use a segmentation scheme that is already well known to your organization

Create a distinct list of your value propositions. A good value proposition will encompass those first three dimensions: what customers want to buy, competitive context, and customer segment. How many do you have? List them all out and start with the ones most critical to growing your business.

Define differentiated value propositions that connect product features to customer outcomes. For each value proposition, don't simply document a pithy elevator pitch. Instead, articulate a series of value stories that connect differentiating features to the people who care about it at the customer and to the outcome they should expect. You may end up with more than a few of these value stories. Rank them based on value to the customer, given the competitive context and customer segment. Bonus points for quantifying the value customers should expect for one or more of the value stories.

Complete the Marketing Strategy. Now it's time to bring in the rest of the marketing 101 information. What is the market size? Who are the competitors? What positioning? Branding considerations? Pricing / profitability? This information will be easier to communicate by starting with a value proposition rather than just the product.

Connect to the organization. Establish this work as a dynamic source of record for the organization. Sales, marketing communications, product management should all know where to access the most up-to-date information on the value proposition. You can't force people to become more customer centric but their use of the same common data on outcomes will push them in the right direction.

 

The above is just a quick outline for achieving a better product catalog that resonates with customers. If you want to learn more about the details, send us a message below and we'll be happy to share more of our experiences.