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!

 

Future of Manufacturing: Technology to Improve Value

The future of a business can be met with scowl and a feeling of uncertainty. Or it might be met with excitement and anticipation. Even if your business manufactures crystal balls and Ouija boards, no one could have predicted the explosive popularity of 3D printing, let alone its impact years from now in manufacturing and distribution.

The manufacturing sector is changing and adapting—and with it are opportunities and challenges. Neither business leaders nor policy makers can depend on dated tools and false predictions when technology moves faster and faster in a new environment. Your company's value and the technology you use must match or exceed the speed that your customers expect.

History repeats itself. We are undergoing a technology revolution of our own. We see the development of new technologies like 3D printing, new foreign competitors, and increasing concerns about supply chain and working capital. The future may not be as certain as a childhood board game; however, there are ways to push the planchette and in a way predict your business's future.

Valkre has worked with industrial businesses to overcome these issues. We have seen Fortune 500 companies lose market share in mature markets and helped them to create targeted growth strategies based on customer value. These efforts have identified opportunities for greater investment in new technologies, greater service offerings, and training.

A strong Value Proposition comes from the unique ways a company serves their customers: create a economically rigorous plan with an outcome that is practical, easily communicated, and updated internally. New technologies are not just good for increasing production and efficiency within your business but can change your business perspective to be forward thinking. As our friends at GE have been describing as the Industrial Internet, hardware and increasingly software are the future in this market.

Manufacturing is entering a dynamic new phase where technology is playing increasingly larger roles. Each role contributes to a business' Value Proposition. Manufacturers will have substantial new opportunities to stay competitive with advances in new technologies. Your Value Proposition will be advancing and evolving with the technologies you use for your customers. Constant improvement in your value to customers will not only show your development but also highlight the benefit for your customers. Creating that kind of visibility is a great way to predict and dictate the future.

Your Value Proposition is not a static object; it is always a good time to change it for the better. New technologies can enhance your company's value to customers. Those innovations should have the objective of helping your customers grow. Doing so will help increase customer engagement in ways that will sustain your competitive advantage.

A Mongol General, Conan the Barbarian, and a Valkyrie Walked Into a Bar...

Over the past several months, the product development team at Valkre has diligently equipped RENDER with an arsenal of new features dedicated to giving users a competitive advantage. 

• Workspaces are fully optimized for users to quickly navigate through their daily workflows. 
• Redesigned pages for Initiatives and Opportunities simplify common data entry tasks. 
• A completely new User module provides a full view of your network of fellow digital warriors.
• Another completely new module for Customers enables true value selling by communicating your current value proposition and all the ongoing improvements made within an organization. 
• CRM integration with Salesforce.com places this critical customer data directly into the hands of a sales team. 
• Wrapped around all this is a full suite of new reports that deliver DVP analytics and insights across all your Workspaces. 
• Email notifications for work assignments keep the organization focused and informed. 
• A platform API is also available for all your integration needs. 

And this little rundown of features is only the tip of the trident.

Together, all of these recent upgrades in RENDER allow companies to operate faster and with greater efficiency.  For Marketers analyzing interview data, Sales accessing quantified customer value props, and Executives tracking progress on initiatives, RENDER positions your business with an undeniable advantage against any competitors.  Our software fully integrates the voice of your customers into the fabric of your company’s strategic decisions and investments.

Making Data Visible

We sometimes like to think of Valkre as not only a software company but also a data company, and the numbers support that: our database servers are holding thousands of Interviews, Opportunities, and Initiatives.  For the first couple years, this data has stayed relatively hidden, only appearing on a few pages in our software, RENDER.  Recently, we’ve been setting the data free and allowing our clients to integrate it into their own platforms.  This enhancement, and future ones, will make implementing DVP at an organization faster than ever.

Several software features already take advantage of the data set.  Users of RENDER can search for any object in the system and get results back without having to click around looking for it.  In Analysis, Render not only aggregates hundreds of interviews into a single picture, but also provides smart suggestions for your grouping.  Both features have saved countless hours for our users, letting them focus on doing the work instead of trying to find it.

A big movement in the tech community is to be API-first. Valkre’s software development process is no different.  After creating an API that exposed data to our clients’ software, it was easy for us to use it internally as well. 

When we built our Salesforce app, we were able to leverage our current framework for authentication, syncing accounts to customers, and requesting data about value propositions, interviews and initiatives.  We also use the API to measure our own success in making customers more money.

Going forward, we hope to continue this trend. Currently, companies are sharing a lot of the data with their customers as PDF attachments in emails.   This does not scale too well, so we’re designing a Customer Portal that will allow your clients to log into Render and see the data real-time.  Your customers will also be able to provide instantaneous feedback, increasing the speed of collaboration between them and your company. In the future, we also look to mine this data more in order to provide insights automatically. 

Ideally, Render will propose opportunities to your business by using its knowledge base of your industry.  Until then, we’re interested in what you have to say. So if you’ve got ideas about using our API or data, drop us a line.