Sales Team Blocked on Positioning Value?
Karen Chiang is a Managing Partner at Ibbaka. See her Skill Profile on Ibbaka Talent.
Every so often, those of us responsible for setting and defining the pricing of our offers hear our sales team advocating for discounts in order to win a deal.
If this behaviour is persistent within our organization, it can be an indicator of a deep underlying problem. Our sales team is blocked on positioning value.
Our salespeople are not equipped to position, communicate and quantify our differentiated value. As a result, they lack the confidence to present and justify our pricing. No salesperson would willingly want to leave money on the table, would they?
Pricing is one of the key metrics that drive the value of our businesses. Everything from the lifetime value of customers (LTV to LTC), to annual recurring revenue (ARR), and profitability relies on price. As we know, price depends on value.
Other customer-facing functions such as marketing, customer success, also need a clear understanding of how our business is providing value to our stakeholders. See how Customer journey maps are a key tool to inform and shape value.
Economic Value Estimation™, EVE™, developed by Tom Nagle, is another tool that is used by marketing, sales, and pricing professionals to quantify and communicate value. EVE focuses on the economic value relative to the next best competitive alternative. The economic value is analyzed in terms of its component parts (positive and negative value drivers). Economic value drivers are organized around the six ways companies can deliver economic value:
Increase revenues
Decrease costs
Reduce operating capital requirements
Reduce capital investment
Reduce risk
Increase options
Read more about the role of EVE™ and the connection between value and pricing models. Other tools such as ROI calculators can act as proxies to position value but are less powerful as they do not get to the core elements that are really creating our differentiated value.
In my last series of posts, I detailed elements of the strategic choice cascade for pricing. Systems play an important role in supporting our value cycle and they allow us to gain efficiencies as we execute on our pricing strategy and implement our pricing model. We rely on systems to standardize our processes, collect and analyze data, to get insights.
To be successful in fostering a true value culture, we need to prepare our sales team with the systems that can help them demonstrate and stand by the value we deliver. By leveraging the quantitative and qualitative data from customers, as well as competitive, and internal sales data, we have the ingredients to segment our customers by the value they perceive, need, and want. Furthermore, we are able to measure this value to position and justify the prices we set.
Stay tuned for our announcement on how we can help unblock sales to confidently position value and associated pricing. Foster a value-based culture throughout your organization where your customer-facing teams are well prepared to communicate the value you deliver, document the value that is delivered, and have the confidence to optimize value capture in a fair, consistent, and transparent way.
Read other posts in the strategic choice cascade for pricing series
Winning Aspirations - What pricing goals are we trying to achieve
Where to Play - Making Pricing Choices to Define your Market
Systems in the Strategic Choice Cascade - Tools and applications used to across the value cycle
Implement Customer Value Management with the Ibbaka Value Pricing Dashboard
The Value Pricing Dashboard will be where you integrate applications across the customer journey
Accelerate business growth with Ibbaka’s Value Pricing Dashboard
Is your sales team blocked on delivering value? (This Post)
Ibbaka Performance Announces World’s First Value Pricing Dashboard (Press Release)