Driving Value First
I have chosen this topic to lead our blog because I believe that every successful company begins with understanding how they create value for their customers and which customer derive the most amount of value from their products or services.
We have come a long ways from the days of speed dialers, talk-time quotas and boiler rooms. We have matured from driving volume and managing call numbers to understanding that the most important factor for any customer is HOW MUCH VALUE WILL THEY RECEIVE FROM DOING BUSINESS WITH YOU?
At the end of the day, nothing else matters. If you are the best salesperson in the world and convince every prospect to buy your product, you will end up with the wrong group of clients. You may have good sales numbers but customer service will likely get crushed with requests from clients that don’t like your solution out of the box and customer success will be hurt with high churn numbers. The damage from transactional selling cascades throughout the organization and it can be a silent killer of your business.
The best organizations in the world, large or small, are obsessed with figuring out not who will BUY their product but who will get the most VALUE from your offering. Doing the hard work to figure out who is your ideal customer will pay dividends for years to come. Here are just a few questions to answer:
What industry needs your product more than any other
What size company would be optimum for your company to support
What is the exact use case that your solution provides without customizations
Who within an organization absolutely needs your product in order to thrive or succeed
What role within a company can fully understand the full value that your solution provides
What kinds of companies have stayed customers of yours the longest
Why are some of your customers less expensive to support eventhough they buy the most
These are a few examples but if you can get granular with your understanding of your ideal customer profile, it will drive many other decisions that you make as an organization. It will drive your marketing and lead generation. It will help determine the best account segmentation. It will influence your talent acquisition. It will determine your customer success process and organizational design. It will end up making a powerful impact on your revenue growth and profitability. How companies derive the maximum amount of value should be the guiding star for every singe decision within the sales organization. This process, coined “value engineering” in the eighties is a broad topic and one that we will get into in future discussions. However, keep your focus on your customer’s value and you will likely stay pointed in the right direction.