John Porter and Kristina Cutter of DecisionLink recently led thought leadership discussions surrounding Customer Value Management and value selling for pre-sales leaders at the Pre-Sales Value Engineering/Pre-Sales Leadership Collective Fall Workshop on October 14, 2019.
John Porter is the CTO and Co-Founder of DecisionLink. He is the visionary and pioneering technical expert creator of DecisionLink’s ValueCloud ®. John is a pre-sales thought leader who also leads the Customer Value Management group on LinkedIn.
John has split his career almost 50/50 between pre-sales/pre-sales management and value engineering for small and large technology companies like edocs, Siebel Systems, Oracle and SAP. John and his team have built the DecisionLink ValueCloud® to help customer facing resources (pre-sales, sales, customer success and product marketing) to easily quantify, articulate, defend and ultimately measure customer value throughout the entire customer journey.
Kristina Cutter is the Senior Director of Customer Enablement for DecisionLink. She is former Director of Sales Operations and Enablement at Amadeus Hospitality. While there, she successfully launched and led a value selling program for over 70 field reps internationally. She is now a part of the DecisionLink team working with customers from Pre-Sales through Implementation and Enablement.
Together John and Kristina led a presentation at the Pre-Sales Value Engineering event at the Seattle Pre-Sales Leadership Collective that was held at the Smartsheet offices in Bellevue, WA on October 14, 2019.
The Seattle Pre-Sales Leadership Collective is an exclusive community of the best pre-sales leaders at growth companies that work together to network, share experiences, and learn from one another. Our membership consists of leadership from companies such as DocuSign, SAP, Concur, Tableau, Smartsheet and many more. They host Seattle-based workshops specifically for pre-sales (sales/solution engineering/consulting) leaders for networking and group discussions. The workshop topics revolve around leading a pre-sales function within a growing sales organization.
This was a full day event that was focused on why it is crucial to include a business case with every opportunity and how Pre-Sales can help as the “tip of the spear” with speaking to value EARLY in the sales process. The first half of the day was spent on what we are seeing in the marketplace, followed by a panel made up of folks who implemented “value practices” at their organization. The second half was more tactical and focused on how to create value statements and benefits in an easy to understand/scalable way.
There were 20 pre-sales leaders in attendance, and they were all really engaged and interested in learning more about insights into trends in the evolving Customer Value Management market. The presenters explained how pre-sales can facilitate value selling conversations, lead value programs, and elevate the acumen within customer facing personnel across the board. During the session, John and Kristina also conducted a workshop that taught participants how and where to build their first value model and apply it to a customer scenario.
In addition, Kristina Cutter participated in a panel discussion on the topic of Customer Value Management with the following participants:
Trent Isaacs
Trent serves as Regional Vice President, Solutions Consulting and Value Selling at Verint systems. In this role, he leads teams of presales Solutions Consultants in supporting enterprise software sales in the Americas. He has successfully launched a value-selling program in the region used for over 100 field staff. Prior to his 13 years with Verint, he held senior leadership positions responsible for the management of contact center operations in the BPO space for 10+ years.
Taylor Boldt
Former retail strategy consultant at Merkle Loyalty Solutions. While there Taylor worked with companies like L’Oreal, Sony and Michael Kors to maximize customer spend and retention. Taylor is now a member of Value Engineering team at DocuSign where he is responsible for all things DecisionLink. The tool has been rolled out to over 500 users across North America.
Josh Lankford
Josh is a former Sr. Value Engineer within JDA’s Global Value Engineering team, where he specialized in understanding client needs and mapping them to JDA solutions in order to drive value attainment. Josh has over 20 years of experience across Manufacturing and Retail organizations, and has held various roles across operations, IT, consulting, and software sales. Josh’s strengths include both a depth as well as breadth of knowledge across Retail, Merchandising and Supply Chain operations gained as a practitioner as well as a consultant / vendor. Josh’s passion lies in helping others define the strategic initiatives and roadmaps needed to unleash the value within their organization and his diverse background enables him to successfully lead cross functional and cross-cultural teams in achieving their objectives.