It is no longer enough to have one static business case to communicate your value message to all prospects. Today, customers expect you to know their company and their priorities. Forbes recently released the results from their 2024 State of Customer Service and CX Study which found that “81% of customers prefer working with companies that offer a personalized experience, and 70% say a personalized experience in which the employee knows who they are and their history with the company is important.”
A business case tailored and personalized based on the industry and the unique needs of the specific customer is a requirement, not a “nice to have.” However, creating tailored business value assessments for your prospects and customers while also making it scalable for your team can be a daunting endeavor.
Talkdesk, a cloud-native, AI-powered Customer Experience platform, faces similar challenges at their organization. Clayton Lougée, Senior Director, Value Consulting Team Lead at Talkdesk, worked with the Ecosystems team to devise a solution to this problem. And, in a recent Customer Value Community Sandbox, Clayton explains how Talkdesk is using Ecosystems’ platform to create unique and personalized business case templates to improve scale for their teams. Below are his top five learnings based on value selling with B2B sales reps and customer success managers.
1. Create Templates Based on Industry
Clayton and his team at Talkdesk were struggling with a problem many value teams at top SaaS organizations are facing today, which is how to scale and enable front-line sellers around value. Often, value teams do not have the resources to assist every opportunity with a custom business case, enabling sellers to be more confident and self-sufficient. This led Clayton and his team to search for ways to keep business cases personalized while still being able to scale efficiently.
In order to create personalized business cases at scale for Talkdesk, Clayton and his team took a look at the most common industries Talkdesk works with, including:
- Healthcare & Life Sciences
- Retail
- Financial Services & Insurances
From here, they determined a correct starting point would be three curated templates that focus on industry verticalization.
To do this, they utilized the following steps:
- Determine the top industries your organization sells to and their relative priority.
- Analyze the most common support requests from sellers within the industries:
a. What do the sellers have to adjust the most?
b. What are the most common custom challenges they look to address? - Assess how industry sensitization will impact the calculations and value narrative of your core outcomes and value drivers.
- Summarize the common themes and customer case studies related to your top industries.
- Create a template sensitized to an industry based on the gathered information.
By creating these templates, they were able to customize and fine-tune their business cases based on industry benchmarks, adjust the language depending on the audience (For example, changing customers to patients for the healthcare industry), populate the value drivers based on typical business objectives for the industry, and more.
Through this, Clayton and his team at Talkdesk are able to create the personalized experience customers are currently after, according to Forbes statistics. By having templates already personalized to the industry of the customer, Talkdesk is enabling front-line sellers to create business cases on their own, helping to scale and increase efficiencies of both the sales and value teams.
2. Continuous Discovery
Often in the discovery process of the sales cycle, you will find that each stakeholder has a differing opinion as to what are the top priorities and business outcomes of the organization. To solve this issue, Clayton and the Talkdesk team coach their sellers to identify and document each of the business desires of their stakeholders, especially C-level leaders. This also allows your stakeholders to get a better look at each other’s individual goals and priorities, helping stakeholders to better align internally around their business objectives. However, it is important to note that discovery is always a continuous process in sales, as it is crucial to consistently go back and verify the business objectives still align with your stakeholder's goals. This helps to ensure that the business case remains relevant and up-to-date with the top priorities of the customer.
“Discovery never ends, it’s not something you do at sales stage one and then you’re done. We’re always doing Discovery.” - Clayton Lougée, Senior Director, Value Consulting Team Lead at Talkdesk
3. Curated Packages of Products/Services
During their sales cycle, Clayton and the Talkdesk team found it beneficial to add each of their products/services into the curated business case and give their customers the ability to edit the business case and select the product/service that is right for them. Through this, they are able to rapidly generate an accurate business case that closely reflects their specific needs. And, by having this built out ahead of time, it is straightforward for both their front-line sellers and prospects.
In order to make this possible, Clayton and the Talkdesk team utilize the Ecosystems platform, which is fully customizable and allows for prebuilt business cases at scale that are sensitized with relevant information. And, as the platform is fully collaborative, customers are able edit themselves.
4. Customizable Benefits
Once the Talkdesk front-line sellers have collaborated with their prospects within the assumptions tab, they are able to move to benefits. And, since the assumptions have been curated based on the prospects' needs, this filters directly into the benefits tab to adjust based on their selections to make for a seamless experience.
Once the Talkdesk team has collaborated around what products/services are right for their customers, they are able to fine-tune the actual benefits. Clayton and his team worked to create templates based on industry, but they also utilized prebuilt value drivers, also known as benefits, that can be populated straight into the business case based on the desired outcomes of the customer. When you are dealing with complex B2B products, it is easy to have an overwhelming amount of benefits. By pairing it down to only what is relevant to your customer, you are creating a more tailored experience. Additionally, by having value drivers prebuilt out, you are saving time for your front-line sellers while giving them the confidence to build business cases on their own. Clayton and the Talkdesk team utilize Ecosystems' SaaS platform and library of 5,000+ pre-built value drivers to speed up this process for their teams.
5. Curated Output Reports
Once the seller and the prospect or customer consent to the business case, output reports are created for the stakeholders to bring back to their internal teams to discuss the benefits of purchasing a product or service.
At Talkdesk, it is important for Clayton and his team to be able to customize output reports based on their audience. For example, C-level executives are often looking for something short and more concise, however, a manager may want a more detailed report that breaks down each value driver. Talkdesk utilizes Ecosystems’ platform to curate output reports based on audience type in order to personalize the reports to their stakeholder’s needs. As these output reports are already built out, it is easy for sellers and prospects to quickly generate whatever report they need.
Ecosystems’ Collaborative Value Assessment within our SaaS platform helps you to centralize and standardize your value conversations, helping you to scale value and empower your sellers. If you’d like to learn more, you can contact our team.
