Creating a successful business value consulting team can be challenging whether you are just starting off or are looking to improve your internal team. Deciding how large your team should be, who should be accountable for what responsibilities in the organization, and where the business value team should sit in the organization, can all be tough questions to answer.
This was a topic of discussion for our Customer Value Community members in a recent Sandbox workshop, where we discussed efficiently scaling business value consulting. We brought together leaders from top B2B companies to hear their insights into creating a successful business value consulting team. Below, we have consolidated their top insights.
1. Where Business Value Should Sit to Drive Adoption
In order to gain buy-in from your organization around value, it can be crucial to ensure that your business value team is properly positioned to help achieve adoption by both the executive team and the front line managers and reps. Often, this means that sitting close to sales/sales enablement or revenue is best.
When sitting close to sales and sales enablement, you are able to have a more hands-on approach to the sales cycle and are able to gain direct buy-in from your front-line sellers. By aligning with the front line, you are setting yourself up for success by engaging in value from the start of the conversation.
Sitting close to revenue and reporting directly to the Chief Revenue Officer also has its benefits, as you can more easily gain direct buy-in from leadership to drive adoption throughout the organization. And, like sales, you will be directly involved in the sales cycle and revenue of the organization.
Whether your organization should have business value consulting sit near sales or revenue depends on what sort of approach is more appealing to you.
2. Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Approach
When driving adoption within your organization, there are two key styles of approach that top B2B companies lean toward:
- Top Down: Gain buy-in and adoption from the C-level leadership team and work your way towards front-line sellers with the support of leaders.
- Bottom Up: Gain buy-in from your front-line sellers first to grow adoption from the bottom and more towards higher leadership.
When you focus on a top-down approach, you work directly with your leadership team to engage in training programs. With your C-level team, you work together to develop a value-selling program that is right for your organization and roll it out to the front-line team to gain overall organizational alignment on value and drive adoption.
With a bottom-up approach, your business value team goes directly to your front-line selling to win the hearts and minds of your sales team. You work closely with the front-line team to gain buy-in, and as adoption grows, your value-selling program will spread through word of mouth to organically grow and align your organization on value.
Both a bottom-up and top-down approach can be highly successful and beneficial for your organization. Work with your leaders in value at your organization to determine what would be best for your organization to scale your business value program.
3. How Large Your Business Value Consulting Team Should Be
Once you are aligned on a cross-functional, organizational approach to scaling business value, you need to decide what the appropriate size for your business value consulting team should be to suit your needs.
A number of factors can come into play when making your decision, including:
- Number of deals per quarter
- Complexity of deals
- Volume of high-touch versus low-touch deals
- Extent of offshore support for your organization
- Access to budget and platforms to scale value selling
Work with your value, sales, and leadership teams to determine what is right for your organization’s specific needs, as well as to determine a budget and receive approval.
4. Who Should Own Value Realization
Beyond aligning your organization around value selling, you must also align on value realization and determine who in the organization should be responsible for owning it. For many organizations, the ownership of value realization falls to the customer success team who works closely with your customers once the deal has been won.
However, while primary ownership often falls to customer success, it is crucial to note the important role sales plays in value realization as well. It is the sales team's responsibility to document the value promised in the sales process to ensure that customer success can successfully deliver the value promised in sales. While customer success may take ownership of value realization, it is ultimately a group effort from the organization as a whole.
5. Leveraging Customer Data
To achieve value realization, a large component of this is capturing customer data. By capturing data from pre-sales to post-sales you will be able to successfully follow through on the promised outcomes. Additionally, through tracking customer data you are able to demonstrate the success of your relationship with your client to demonstrate your value for renewal conversations. One of the best ways to track and document customer data from presales to post-sales is through a value platform, such as Ecosystems.
With Ecosystems’ platform, you are able to collaborate with your customers from sales to customer success, allowing you to align on value and business objectives in order to set the foundation for tracking value delivered. This is made easy with our library of 5,000+ value drivers and best practice business case templates. To learn more about our platform and see it in action, contact our team.
