Do Enterprise Sales Teams Need A Dedicated Value Stage?

These days, buying committees are bigger, and CFO scrutiny is more intense. Being able to communicate your product’s value effectively is one of the most important parts of pushing a deal through. 

Still, 60% of enterprise-level deals are lost due to indecision, indicating that teams still have a hard time communicating value to their buyers. And, as Doug May pointed out in a podcast: 

“If you lose a deal, it’s because a customer saw more value in an alternative solution than yours”.

So, what’s the fix? 

Well, for starters, collaborating with your customer directly by building a business case is helpful in articulating your product's value in a hands-on way. But this is easier said than done, especially when sales cycles tend to be long and complicated. 

A dedicated value stage

At an enterprise level, sales cycles are clearly defined but will vary slightly by company. A dedicated value stage could be a solution for organizations struggling to communicate value to their buyers. 

At this stage, the seller would work closely with the buyer to lay out:

• The value proposition, specific to the buyer. 
• How the solution will measurably impact the buyer (the business outcome). 
• Specific use cases of the solution and how they relate to the overall business outcome. 

Usually, this would be done with the deal champion. By outlining these things to the champion, the seller ensures that the deal champion fully understands the value of the solution and can re-articulate that to a buying committee. But it has other advantages too. 

Firstly, it ensures that the value is quantified in every deal. Given how much influence CFOs have on purchase decisions these days, this is key. Quantifiable metrics turn the benefits of your solution into tangible reference points that can be linked back to the wider strategic goals of the buying company.

Secondly, it helps the seller qualify the buyer faster and more effectively. The value stage might reveal that the seller’s solution isn’t relevant to the buying company. Far from being unhelpful, this saves the seller time that would otherwise be wasted on a redundant lead; time which can be recommitted to other sales opportunities. 

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it helps the seller find true deal champions. In other words, if someone is willing to sit down on a call and define value with you, then they’re more likely to be convinced of your solution and help push it through the buying committee. 

What’s the catch?

There are some limitations to a dedicated value stage. First and foremost, it gives the sellers the impression that value is only a single part of the buyer’s journey rather than something to be stressed throughout the whole sales cycle. To work properly, reps would need to understand that a value stage is to help define and articulate value, not to isolate. 

Secondly, it has the potential to become a redundancy, and further complicate already complex sales cycles. Unless your team buys in and you have the right resources and tech infrastructure to facilitate a dedicated value stage, it becomes a “checkbox”. 

Finally, any dedicated value stage would come after a rep has made first contact with a prospect. While this is fine, it understates the importance which value has on cold outreach. For example, centring the outbound message’s value prop around revenue generation, cost reduction or risk reduction. 

Integration

So, a dedicated value stage has flaws, but value does need to be defined and communicated at some point in the sales cycle. One potential solution could be to integrate value discovery into another stage. For example, we often see sales cycles that look like this: 

• Discovery
• Scoping
• PoC
• Proposal
• Negotiating
• Close

We could potentially see the following instead: 

• Discovery
• Scoping and Value Quantification
• PoC
• Proposal
• Negotiating
• Close

Putting the value stage alongside the scoping stage is practical since questions and data needed to work out a solution’s scope often help identify value, too. Moreover, placing the value stage early sets the stage for value to be reiterated throughout the remainder (bulk) of the sales process. 

Minoa

A value stage can be formal, informal, or semi-formal. It might be integrated or separate. It could be a combination of any of these things. What matters is that value is quantified and emphasised throughout the sales cycle. 

Value selling tools like Minoa help enable teams to define and quantify value in a systematised and streamlined way. Not only does this help at a practical level, but it instills a value selling culture across sales teams. 

Minoa has built a dedicated Salesforce app that you can activate as part of a specific stage. This means that every seller is encouraged to build a business case together with the champion and keep value a part of the discussion. 

If you’d like to find out more about Minoa, drop us a note, and we can demo it for you!