What are best practices in connecting value promises made during sales to value delivered?
Marketing, pre sales and sales often make value promises, including providing ROI calculators. What are the best practices in connecting these value promises to the value actually delivered by customer support? Can the tools used to communicate value during sales be used to confirm value by customer support?
Best Answer
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Hey @StevenForth this an incredibly important question. Martin Dove leads TSIA's Subscription Sales Research Practice and he grappled with this exact question in a recent webinar - The Need to Deliver Customer Outcomes is Here and Now. Martin provides a lot of insights in the webinar, but one topic that I have found particularly important is "account team collaboration". It is essential that pre-sales, sales, services, and support are in regular communication and act collaboratively to enhance each customer's experience and value realization.
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Thanks @Spencer Hancock and @Martin Dove . Those are good pointers. I have found that having a shared tool or document that captures value promises, connects than to price and ROI and then travels from marketing, through pre sales and sales to customer success can help with this. Many companies use things like ROI calculators in the sales process but do not transfer them to customer success. This can lead to the customer seeing the ROI claims as a broken promise.
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Has anyone used the Outcome Selling tool that TSIA acquired? That looked like an interesting way to map desired outcomes of customer personas throughout the customer lifecycle and could also maybe of help.
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Thanks @Doug Caviness Do you have a link to this? If used from marketing through pre sales and sales to implementation, onboarding and sustaining customer success to could be a compelling framework.
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Hi Steve. I found this link here: https://www.outcomechains.com/pages/about/ .
I think Glen Gramling at the TSIA would be a good contact for you: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenngramling/
If you do a Google search you'll see a TSW Keynote talk and other references.
It's been a couple years since I looked at it so I hopefully it goes in the direction you're looking.
Thanks,
Doug
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Interesting stuff, thank you. LeveragePoint is also taking this approach by showing how to apply Economic Value Estimation (EVE) to sales. I think the missing links here are the ones that connect value promises made in selling to value delivery led by customer success.
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we lean a lot over our kick-off meetings, to explain the customer what they're entitled in their contract (in other words: what they really have bought). Depending on size/importance of the customer, we may have several meetings with different stakeholders so all of them understand it.
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@Carlos Alves I think that is a good foundation, but in my experience the contract itself does not usually contain the value promises (and probably should not) but it is delivering on these value promises that really drive customer satisfaction, renewals and expansions. Value to customer (V2C) should be front of mind to everyone at customer success.
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correct, @Steven Forth : throughout the contract lifetime, the customer does not look for that partner that "looks at the contract to see if it is/is not included", but the way you react to crises, urgencies, etc.
However it does not exclude the need to provide scope and service catalog during pre-sales phase to establish some boundaries to the commited services. You do not have to write: "I'm NOT doing it", but let an opening to say "I CAN do it as your partner, but in these cases I need to charge you to keep running".
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