“How do I make the executives of my company understand the value our team is delivering to ensure they keep investing in the value program?”
The key is building a world-class value program that gains true alignment and buy-in with your entire organization. But how do you do that?
This was the question our Customer Value Community members sought to address in a recent workshop led by Marc Goldstein, Global Vice President, Business Value Consulting at Palo Alto Networks. Marc is a member of Ecosystems’ Customer Value Community Value Disruptor group, who has a breadth of leadership experience in value across companies like ServiceNow, SAP, VMware, and now Palo Alto Networks. During a recent community workshop, he shared the four steps he has found are the key to success when building a world-class value program.
1. Align with Cross-Functional Leadership & Company Strategic Objectives
A successful value program starts with a clear understanding of what the company wants and ultimately needs. To achieve this, you must align cross-functionally with leadership and develop a deep understanding of the company’s strategic objectives. This alignment allows you to:
- Identify the highest-priority initiatives for leadership
- Ensure your value team’s efforts directly support business success
- Present a compelling case for your value program, rooted in both tactical execution and strategic insights aligned with the company’s goals
However, alignment is not a one-time event—it’s an ongoing process. As business priorities shift, your value program must evolve accordingly. Regular check-ins with leadership help ensure your team remains in sync with company objectives and can make necessary adjustments in real time.
By embedding this alignment into your program’s foundation, you create a value function that is not just relevant but indispensable to the company’s long-term success.
2. Build the Right Team
“Hire great people, empower those people to be great, and retain great people. Everything else is easy.”
Once you've aligned with leadership and identified the top priorities for your value program, the next critical step is building the right team. People are the driving force behind a successful value program—they serve as value champions, ensuring the adoption of value selling across the organization, particularly with front-line sellers.
When building out your team of value experts, you have to start by defining what a successful value expert looks like in your organization. Questions to consider are:
- What are the primary objectives of the value team?
- What skills and attributes are essential for success?
- Which roles are most needed—Value Consultants, Value Engineers, or others?
Once you've established a clear vision of success, you can hire with intention, ensuring that your team is equipped to drive value adoption and impact at scale.
A well-structured value team doesn’t just execute—it becomes a catalyst for transformation, embedding value into the DNA of your organization.
3. Execute with Expertise
“Innovation happens at the customer. That's why you need the right people to engage customers the right way.”
A world-class value program isn’t just about having the right strategy—it’s about execution. Your sellers must be trained to lead value-driven conversations early in the sales process before decision-making even begins. If they don’t, they risk a race to the bottom—price-driven negotiations where discussions revolve around cost rather than the unique business value you bring to the table.
To train your sellers on how to engage early, you need to utilize the well-crafted team of value experts you have built to train sellers on value selling to give them the confidence to engage their customers in value conversations, which is why building the right team is so imperative.
To enable early engagement, leverage the team of value experts you’ve built to:
- Train sellers on value selling to build their confidence in customer conversations
- Embed value into the sales motion, ensuring sellers know how to position impact over price
- Create scalable resources and tools that reinforce value at every stage of the sales cycle
To make value selling easier and more repeatable, consider investing in a value-selling platform like Ecosystems. With access to winning business case templates and ViViEN, Ecosystems’ AI-powered Virtual Value Engineer, your team can measure and improve the effectiveness of their business cases—ensuring every deal is anchored in value, not just price.
When executed with expertise, a value program does more than drive revenue—it transforms the way your company sells and delivers impact.
4. Sell the Program Internally
Driving change in your organization around value selling is difficult, as you are working to transform the way your sellers think about the buying journey. The key to adoption? Proving the revenue impact.
According to recent Ecosystems research, collaborating with customers around value during the sales process can increase win rates by up to 3.4x. This kind of data is critical for securing internal buy-in—not just from sellers but from leadership as well.
To drive adoption and long-term success:
- Give sellers first-hand experience with value selling so they see its direct impact on deals
- Track and measure results, capturing key metrics on revenue impact
- Regularly showcase wins to leadership and the broader organization, reinforcing the program’s effectiveness
The more you can demonstrate tangible success, the easier it becomes to scale value selling across your organization.
To explore how Ecosystems’ platform can help you build a world-class value team, contact our team today.
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