How to Use Value Metrics to Fast-Track Deals—Step 3: Driving Adoption

Successful Businesses Build Credibility and Trust with Metric-driven sales enablement

Metrics are essential in creating compelling business cases to win over clients. Many businesses already use them in selling. But in a value-based sales approach, metrics are not just the icing on the cake—they are the cake batter itself.

What’s in that cake matters a lot. Most clients are not getting enough empirical information on products to justify buying them. In fact, industry analyst research reports that 90% of buyers require quantifiable evidence of business benefits before investing, but only 33% feel they have enough information to make that decision. With metric-driven Customer Value Management, your business can satisfy customers’ need for proven results—and close deals faster than ever before.

What Metrics Matter?

Not all metrics are created equal. The most important ones are those that your client has identified as significant for their business. These may be hours saved, resources reallocated, or quantity of materials reduced. By getting a close read of the client’s business, you can begin to build a case for your product based on the measures that matter to them. The ultimate goal is to build the final economic value statement.

A cloud-based Customer Value Management platform such as ValueCloud allows for input on important metrics throughout the sales cycle. It also enables sales teams within an organization to gain insight on how they are doing by quantifying conversion rates, sales cycle times, percentage close rates, and average sales price. 

ValueCloud can provide insights for marketing and customer success teams by tying marketing campaign response rates, marketing qualified leads generated, MQL conversions, retention rates, churn, and cross-sells and upsells to specific value drivers. These data points allow businesses to see what matters most to customers and how they help deals progress from initial contact to renewal talks. Having a real-time dashboard of value delivered can make all the difference in retention and renegotiation, and even in convincing a reluctant client to try out a product.

Using Metrics Effectively

Within Customer Value Management, metrics serve two main purposes: building a credible, transparent business case and developing a continuously improving value model. The business case enables the buying team to reach consensus on whether to make a purchase. When client-identified, relevant metrics are included, buyers can see how their priorities are directly addressed and folded into the overall value calculation, which generates greater buy-in.

DecisionLink ValueCloud uses “Pain Point-Value Statement” pairs for this purpose. Pain points are the priorities clients have identified. The value statement is a quantification of how the proposed product alleviates that pain. Each Pain Point- Value Statement pair in the CVM value model is quantified using a formula consisting of three factors: Driver Factor, Financial Factor, and Improvement Factor. By providing a one-to-one mapping of stated need to deliver value, ValueCloud makes your product’s worth to the customer irrefutable.

Metrics are important to include even when first approaching clients or in earlier marketing stages. Sellers must create strawman models using metrics that reflect their knowledge of the industry. These models should be developed by capturing the collective knowledge of people internal to the B2B solution organization – across the sales, SE, marketing, and product management teams. Later on, client-provided metrics can be used to develop and refine the value model. 

While value propositions are just hypotheses, real-time feedback enables businesses to perform a reality check on how the hypothesized value of their product matches the actual value. With this information, new value statements can be proposed at renewal times and leveraged for up-sells. Insights gained from the particular client can often be applied to other clients in the industry, compounding the benefits of Customer Value Management.

Accelerate your company’s Customer Value Management efforts. Read more about integrated performance metrics that matter across your entire sales funnel.