The Value Digest May 27, 2020

At DecisionLink we’re all about value. When we’re not building enterprise-class software solutions for Customer Value Management (CVM) like ValueCloud®, we’re busy exploring what’s going on in the world of value and sales leadership. In ‘The Value Chronicles’, published every second week, we’ll be sharing some of the news and editorial that has caught our eye.

As we move from reacting to reflecting on COVID-19, the world continues to change at a rapid pace. One common thread throughout is a desire for resilience and agility in all areas of business and most seem to agree that can only come from automation and digital transformation. It is widely accepted that crises rarely create change, but they do accelerate it. This seems to be the case with the Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 and the accelerated impetus to digitally transform business to be fit for a post-pandemic world.

Here’s a few things we’ve seen that support that:  

• IDC shares their perspective on Value Selling: The Only Way to Close in 2020, in a report that can be downloaded from the DecisionLink website. This IDC Perspective shares why organizations need to be scaling their business value selling across the entire customer lifecycle. Key takeaways include:
  • Greater financial scrutiny for technology purchases requires great value selling competency.
  • Current practices with spreadsheets and bespoke tools do not scale
  • Business value models must become the basis for assessing the success of a relationship for both buyers and sellers
• McKinsey and Company offer, “A road map for post-COVID-19 growth”. Marketing and sales leaders need to operate simultaneously across three horizons: navigating the crisis now, planning for the recovery, and leading the next normal. This article focuses on the second horizon and how companies can accelerate what they do and how they work to capture revenue quickly for the recovery.
• Gartner has suggested, “A Framework for Executive Decision Making During COVID-19”. “COVID-19 is forcing many executive leaders to make decisions regarding employee and customer safety, business strategy and other critical issues at a pace and risk level they have never experienced,” says Tina Nunno, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner. “These decisions are creating stress for executives, as they make difficult trade-offs where there is often no win-win scenario or clear precedent available.”
• In the Innovation Issue of their newsletter, ServiceNow shared an interview with CEO Bill McDermott, “Workflow is The Big Idea”. McDermott sat down with Dave Wright, the company’s Chief Innovation Officer, to talk about how business leaders can foster innovation. Following are edited excerpts from their conversation.

In our own news:

• We Announced Our Partnership with Gainsight Sightline to extend the power of value management and value-based selling to customer success. Gainsight Sightline brings together complementary technology and service solutions on the Gainsight platform. Through this partnership, DecisionLink customers will be able to reduce time to value and accelerate their adoption across customer success technologies.
• Our whitepaper, Customer Value Management: Why Excel Can’t Cope, explores four key business implications of using Excel and the value that’s being left behind by leveraging spreadsheets instead of enterprise-class software.
• Check out what one of our customers had to say in this case study entitled “ValueCloud® Enables DocuSign to Deploy and Scale Customer Value Management” Here are a few of the key benefits that DocuSign realized include:
  • 73% uplift in new account close rates
  • Increase in upselling
  • Integration with their tech stack, including Salesforce and Okta
  • Value Management is now delivered autonomously by sales professionals, scaling and automating their existing processes

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