There is a new reality that your sales reps are facing as a result of the COVID 19 lockdown and resultant economic uncertainty. In fact, a LinkedIn survey of more than 500 sales professionals found that:
- 51% of their customers were experiencing budget cuts
- 45% indicated that specific industries were at a standstill
- 42% said there was turnover or layoffs at their customers’ companies.
And this is confirmed by a recent survey by McKinsey, where a majority of executives selected cost management among their top three priorities for the next 12 months, regardless of whether the company had a positive revenue outlook or not.
Spending cutbacks, budget lockdowns, and vendor consolidations will be the norm for the next year. Frugalnomics is in full effect, with buyers locked down, economic-focused and risk averse.
Proposed services and solutions will be scrutinized and deprioritized unless you as a provider can demonstrate an alignment to key strategic initiatives, and most importantly how you can help the company cut costs and “do more with less”.
The focus on economics is confirmed as a significant challenge, with:
- 53% – of sellers indicating that Buyers now require more financial justification, the top change they have seen from buyer demands over the past 12-18 months (State of Sales Enablement Report for 2020)
- 66% of buyers say making a clear ROI case highly influences their purchase decisions (The Rain Group)
- However, only 16% of sellers are perceived as “very effective” at providing business value justification. (The Rain Group)
The research is clear, that there is a great need for financial justification, as well as a significant gap in skill sets, with most organizations falling short of post-crisis expectations.
We call this the Value Gap and being able to better communicate and quantify the savings and business value your solution can deliver can close this gap. Fail to do so, and you will face a wall of delayed decisions and stalled deals.
Implementing interactive value marketing and selling tools should be leveraged as part of this initiative to close the Value Gap, helping to automate value communication and quantification efforts, at scale to directly enable customers and sellers to do their own assessments – quickly, easily and credibly.
These interactive value marketing and selling tools can help elevate the ability to quantify your unique business value from a select group of value consultants and specialists, to empower your sellers , customer success and customers, by structuring and automating the:
- Discovery of current objectives, challenges and costs
- Quantification of the cost of “doing nothing”: the extra spending, wasted resources and opportunities by sticking with the status-quo.
- Tally of potential savings and business value benefits of proposed solutions
- Comparison of required investments versus benefits to demonstrate low risk, quick payback and high reward.
- Data collection, analysis and reporting of value storytelling and quantification to help prospects co-create the financial justification with you, and socialize the business case report with other decision makers, executives and financial gatekeepers.
- Quantification of key metric impacts, realized value and return on investment post deployment
With these interactive value marketing and sales tools you can:
- Enable customers to self-assess their current costs, potential cost savings and business value potential of your proposed solution
- Enable all sellers and partners to easily and credibly engage on, communicate and quantify your differentiating value earlier in the decision-making cycle and in every significant customer opportunity.
- Enable customer success to tally the actual value and return on investment the customer realized from the service / solution
- Proactively deliver financial justification reports to help prospects prioritize your project and bust through spending embargos by proving savings and quick payback.
- Track the consumption of the assessment report, down to the page level, as it is socialized with decision makers and scrutinized by executives and financial gatekeepers
Checkout some examples of leading firms like yours who are proactively delivering financial justification and focusing on business value to overcome these challenges:
- 6VA – 6sense Value Assessment – https://www.evolvedselling.com/evolver-spotlight-6va-the-business-value-of-better-abm/
- Highfive TCO Comparison- https://www.evolvedselling.com/evolvers-spotlight-highfive-tco-comparison-tool/
- Windstream Business Value Assessment – https://windstream.valuestoryapp.com/Windstream/ucaas
Source:
The LinkedIn State of Sales Report 2020: U.S. Edition
https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/sales-solutions/resources/pdfs/state-of-sales_pocketguide_r11_v2.pdf
State of Sales Enablement Report 2020 –
https://salesenablement.pro/assets/2020/06/2020-State-of-SE-Report_20200615.pdf
Virtual Selling Skills and Challenges Report 2020 – The Rain Group –
https://www.instagram.com/p/CB3Jt7CFTCi/?igshid=hv2vqmc3cz6b
Reset and reallocate: SG&A in the next normal – June 10, 2020 | Article
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/reset-and-reallocate-sga-in-the-next-normal#
#valueselling #valuemarketing #valuemanagement #valueassessment #businessvalue #financialjustification #ROI #TCO #RealizedROI #LinkedIn #TheRainGroup #salesenablement #interactivecontent #salestools #sellingtools #salestech #salestechnology
Comments are closed.