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The Future of Customer Value Management

As value selling has increased in popularity, so has the need to continuously monitor the customer’s experience both pre- and post-sale. This is where customer value management, or CVM, comes into play. The following post explains what customer value management is, where it is today, and the future of CVM to help position your organization for long-term success. 

What is Customer Value Management (CVM)? 

Customer value management is a strategy that focuses on effectively managing every aspect of your customer’s value journey experience–from the first touchpoint to the ongoing customer relationship. CVM involves discovering value opportunities, delivering on value, and helping customers realize that value in a quantifiable way.  Customer value management starts with value selling, a sales approach that focuses on showing customers the potential quantifiable value they can gain from using your product, service, or solution. In other words, value-selling shows how your solution will measurably benefit your customer and help them solve their challenges. This is the discovery phase and the start of a collaboration between you and your customer. Learn more about value selling.  The next step in customer value management is actually delivering on that value. This is where your solution is implemented in the customers’ real-world application and starts yielding results against the predefined goals and metrics–including KPIs like revenue growth, cost savings, risk reduction, and more. In this phase, also known as value realization, customers will actually see the real-world value that your solution has achieved. Value realization is typically managed by your customer success teams, who will monitor and communicate the quantifiable results of the solution. Learn more about value realization.  And finally, it’s important to understand that customer value management is cyclical. The process of defining goals and metrics, further expanding or refining the solution, and measuring success are ongoing. Done well, customer value management creates long-term, trusted partnerships with customers, where value is continuously co-created.  

Why is Customer Value Management Important? 

Customer value management is key to success because they help ensure a customer’s value journey doesn’t end when the deal closes. Instead, customer value management helps organizations execute on the promises of value that the customer was sold on during the sales cycle. To learn more, see our recent blog post: Why You Should Care About the Customer Value Journey. 

Customer Value Management Today 

Customer value management today is a powerful strategy, but in many organizations, it’s still a time-consuming and manual process. Realized value is still frequently tracked via analog or offline methods. Customer success teams may rely on cumbersome spreadsheets and spend hours combing through disparate datasets in order to track and report on the value of the solution. These methods are error-prone and extremely difficult to scale across all customer accounts–and it can even spread your customer success teams too thin, making them less effective in other ways.

The Future of Customer Value Management

Fortunately, customer value management doesn’t have to be such a manual or time-consuming process. With the help of digital technology, customer value management can be fast, scalable, and seamless, unlocking even greater capabilities for your team.  With an end-to-end digital platform, the future of customer value management is here: 

1. Scalable 

Customer value management platforms make it possible to scale your value management program–fast. For example, a digital platform automates cumbersome processes, streamlines reporting dashboards, and provides a shared portal for customers and customer success teams. This makes it possible to leverage the power of customer value management across all of your accounts without overburdening your customer success team. In the meantime, automation gives your staff the time to focus on the more meaningful human touches that are so critical to developing and maintaining long-lasting customer relationships. 

2. Seamless

A digital customer value management platform ensures a smooth and seamless transition from sales to customer success. Customers move along the customer journey without friction. There are no miscommunications or failed expectations. Instead, the sales conversation transfers immediately to a value realization conversation that delivers on the promises made during the sales cycle. When customers can quickly see the value they expect, this opens up additional opportunities to upsell and cross-sell into that account.

3. Collaborative 

Finally, a digital customer value platform increases transparency and enables collaborative co-creation of value. Both customers and customer success teams have access to the real, quantifiable results of the solution–on demand. This allows them to get ahead of stakeholder questions or concerns, make adjustments or refinements to the solution on the fly, and build ongoing trust and confidence in the solution–and in your organization as a whole.

Conclusion 

Modernizing your customer value management approach with digitization and automation offers many advantages for your business, helping you scale quickly, engage seamlessly, and build long-term trusted partnerships with your customers.  For more information, join the Customer Value Community, a community of over 900 professionals just like you. This is an open forum where you can expand your network, solve common challenges, and share learnings with top SaaS companies like AWS, Google Cloud, and Salesforce.

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