Stay ahead with customer value thinking.

Angela Wall, a Senior Manager of Technical Program Management at Oracle, is an influential leader at everything she does. But what truly makes her stand out is her strong client focus, her wonderful communication skills, and above all, her transparency and honesty. 

When I worked for Mike Murphy, VP of Value Practice at Zscaler, we were working together on a huge deal that Mike had painstakingly prepared a business case for. At the time, our business cases were very manual and Mike had worked many hours with his champion to understand the project’s ROI. 

Marcel Eisma, Senior Director of Value Management at Proofpoint, a leader in cybersecurity solutions, is making huge strides with his changes to Proofpoint’s selling practices. Not only did Marcel introduce value management to Proofpoint, he is also working to develop new sales practices, incorporated with existing value methods.

It is one thing to sell to a prospective customer based on your company's value, but it’s a different challenge when you’re up against competition that is claiming to have the same benefits as you. 

Several months ago, Lindsey was working an 80 day sales cycle for a prospect that she felt confident about. Communication was flowing and everything seemed to be aligning perfectly. She was able to go right to the CRO at her prospect with a compelling value statement, which he was immediately responsive toward. They happened to be in growth mode and a 5% ACV would be huge for him. 

The SaaS space is booming. It is expected that the number of SaaS companies is going to grow exponentially around the world within the next five years. And these SaaS companies have one thing in mind: to make doing business easier and more convenient. Software in general removes manual processes, accelerates scaling, and enables users to be focused on much more valuable activities. Part of the simplification of business is also to make solutions much more accessible, transparent, and easy to buy. In 2015, a blog post on Forbes based on a Gartner analysis reported that 57% of the traditional...