A Value Engineer's Thoughts on Discovery

Written by: Sansriti Saxena, Manager of Value & Solutions Engineering at Ecosystems

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I recently participated in our first Customer Value Community (CVC) Sandbox event of 2024 on the topic of Discovery and found myself amazed at the incredible engagement of the community on this topic. It was our most attended Sandbox thus far, where Ecosystem’s Kyle Wilson, Senior Value Consultant, and Lauren Wentworth, Senior Solutions Architect, co-presented with Emily Nissen, Product Manager/Owner of Inspire Value Excellence at ServiceNow. ServiceNow continues to impress with its dedication to and maturity in value selling. As Emily walked through ServiceNow’s structure and methodology for Discovery, starting from documenting the customer’s vision to sharing industry- and solution-relevant customer stories, it dawned on me that great Discovery is truly one of the most difficult processes to set up and enable across a software-as-a-service (SaaS) organization. I particularly appreciated Emily’s point on ServiceNow’s best practice in bringing in the Business Unit (BU) and Marketing teams to cross-functionally create template Discovery content in order to ensure the content resonates with customers and smoothly ties back to the product.

Discovery within the Ecosystems’ Collaborative Value Assessment (CVA) is built for maximum flexibility to your organization’s processes and is fully compatible with other frameworks and methodologies such as Force Management and MEDDICC, but what about organizations that have yet to establish a standard process for any kind of Discovery? Even with cross-functional buy-in, curating Discovery from scratch can be a daunting and time-intensive task.

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Introducing Objectives, Tactics, Metrics, Targets, and Timelines

What can be easier than setting up a Discovery process that already follows a standard workflow of aligning to customer requirements?
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• Objectives: What are the customer’s primary objectives? What challenges are they facing in their journey to achieve those objectives?
  
  
• Tactics: Align the value of your offering to the customer’s objectives with tangible methods for tackling their challenges and achieving their strategic priorities. Reference relevant customer stories, testimonials, 3rd party research, or other publicly available marketing content to build credibility with the prospect.
  
  
• Metrics & Targets: How will you measure the success of the partnership? Set reasonable targets in collaboration with your customers based on the value you can provide. Here is another area where case studies or customer benchmarks come in handy to show the full potential of your solution.
  
  
• Timelines: Start road mapping the next steps and documenting customer requirements. Help your customer understand the full journey from demos, to contract signature, through to implementation and value realized.

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For more information, please reach out to Ecosystems or your Ecosystems’ Value Consultant or Value Engineer. I would also recommend watching the following Brent’s Breakdown videos to learn more about Discovery from our resident expert, Brent Adamson, author of The Challenger Sale.

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