Authored by Chad Quinn, CEO & Co-Founder, Ecosystems
In the pantheon of punk rockers, there are the Ramones. Green Day. Violent Femmes. Topher Mitchell.
Don’t bother googling Topher. He just felt like a punk rocker, smashing old notions of established selling while the C-suite of his employer, Qualtrics, has embraced value as a touchstone of company culture.
With Topher at the mic, Qualtrics is pursuing a customer experience focused on value by following a prescriptive, five-phase Value Blueprint (see above graphic) that takes an enterprise from Nascent to World-Class.
80 percent of companies stall before they arrive at Phase III, denied entry by human limitations. And so, Qualtrics’ transition from Phase II (Emerging) to Phase III (Established) is especially instructive.
Qualtrics has cracked the code, and a digital collaborative value platform is the key. As their experience in reaching Phase III shows, the launch of a flexible, collaborative Value Experience (VX) platform puts value conversations in the hands of the entire sales team, while elevating value consultants into the indispensable role of value enabler.
Now in Phase III, Topher is free to think more strategically about how to impact the organization. The value platform unlocks hundreds of hours per month and imbues him with the punk-rock power of being a value disruptor for his organization.
This case study explores:
- The Ecosystems Value Blueprint
- The disruptive qualities of how a value platform can help create value enablers and scale value.
- How Qualtrics overcame barriers and progressed from Phase II to Phase III in the journey to create a value culture.
As a result, the value team has doubled its reach. They are now supporting 2X the number of deals while simultaneously improving win rates.
Part 1: The Ecosystems Value Blueprint
Enthusiasm and passion propel a movement from grassroots to mainstream. In only a few years, value has skyrocketed from a wonky concept embraced by early adopters to an essential in the modern sales landscape.
Ecosystems created the Customer Value Community to capture that passion and zeal. Today, more than 3,000+ members turn to their equally passionate peers to network around value, share best practices, and brainstorm solutions to their thorniest challenges.
That confluence of talent provides the perfect laboratory for exploring the evolution and future of value. Brent Adamson, Ecosystems’ Global Head of Research & Communities, finds stories and data in research collected from the CVC and its members. From the analysis of their customer value journeys, he created the Ecosystems Blueprint of a World-Class Value-Based Commercial Operating System.
Reaching the pinnacle remains aspirational for most companies. Analysis of the Customer Value Community shows that 80 percent of members are stuck at Phase 2. They are steeped in the white-glove Phase II, but unable to achieve the self-service value conversations of Phase III.
The Value Blueprint presents these phases of value that companies operate in. Pay special attention to Phases II and III:
- Phase I: Nascent Here, there’s a front-line sales or success professional, probably a star performer, with a spreadsheet on a C-drive. Value lacks a common definition or execution, but one person who sees the inherent sense of value starts collecting tools and resources. Word gets around, and coworkers approach their value guru for guidance.
- Phase II: Emerging Value has a definition, but it’s complex, and non-specialists struggle to execute it. Still, managers realize they have the beginnings of strategy and method. They build a Center of Excellence on value that answers to the C-suite and is assigned to the most strategic customer accounts.
- Phase III: Established Now, it’s all about democratization putting “value in the hands of the front-line” such that they can anticipate, conduct, and leverage value-based customer conversations on their own.
- Phase IV: Progressive Value moves from being a function to now a corporate discipline. A common framework for value exploration is embedded in all customer-facing interactions, human or digital.
- Phase V: World-Class Value becomes automated and effortless, like a great dancer whose elegant moves disguise years of discipline. Value is a central pillar of operational strategy, generated in every commercial activity.
They find themselves caught in the crosswinds where value is accepted in the culture, but the budget for more value consultants to guide colleagues toward self-sufficiency is tapped out.
Adopting a value platform generates the breakthrough to exit Phase II and enter Phase III, while also acting as a gateway to Phases IV and V. In Phase III value team consultants use software to scale up and attach to more pipeline to serve more accounts. Value coverage expands to generate critical value conversations throughout the company.
Part 2: The Disruptor
Sales in the post-pandemic technology sector is a tough place to be. Tech companies suffering a hangover from 10 years of overhiring are making drastic cuts. The so-called high costs of selling are tempting them to trim sales support resources—those individual, and unprotected, contributors who are easily plucked from the fold.
But when value consultants rise to value enablers—from individual contributors to program managers—they acquire the superpower to serve more associates and send value radiating to ever-wider circles of customers.
They make the move, at that progression from Phase II to Phase III, by deploying a digital platform. Elevated to value enabler, they help associates and teammates stake their claim in value conversations. Not every seller needs the full value treatment in all its complexity, but they need the basics. They need a digital platform for creating compelling stories to share with their customers.
This is where the software starts to sing. It transforms from a workbench for the value consultant to an enabling platform for the entire organization. Value consultants become value enablers, raising their status while acting as orchestrators and integrators of value throughout the company.
Consider the possibilities for the transformation of value consultants to value enablers:
- Disruptor: You’ve heard the old saying: “Disrupt, or get disrupted.” In this case, it translates to, “Make yourself indispensable, or get automated out.” Value enablers continue to champion value for the entire sales team, but they also play an integral role in complex, high-value deals.
- Continuity Keeper: Value enablers deliver on maintaining value-forward standards amid staffing churn. They are the brand keepers, easing the integration of new employees into the value model while partnering with experienced sellers to extract maximum benefits from value.
- Program Owner: When they’re simply individual contributors, value consultants can be vulnerable to downsizing. However, as program owners, they support not just the sales field but the full realm of customers. They are partners with a software platform that drives higher-order thinking.
Program owners/value enablers are disruptors empowered by a digital platform. They reimagine themselves into a new identity that builds the company’s bottom line by boosting the customer experience with the value they need to make informed, solutions-driven decisions—and doing it at a lower cost.
Part 3: Qualtrics cracks the code
When Topher caught the value bug, it started as a workplace side hustle. But he wasn’t a lone wolf - he had collaborators and partners eager to rock the casbah of old-school selling. “Phase I was punk rock,” Topher told Ecosystems. “The way that we were pushing value felt counterculture. The people who got it really got it. But not everyone got it.”
Within six months, he had the role of full-time value consultant. In another six months, sales leaders were asking for more. Today, he leads a business value team of three.
The Qualtrics journey demonstrates how a company can successfully move out of Phase II and into Phase III by leveraging a digital value platform enabled by Ecosystems.
Qualtrics is the leader and creator of the experience management category, enabling organizations to deliver front line customer experiences, employee experiences, and strategic research that drive substantial business value. Qualtrics is used by more than 18,750 organizations around the world, including other software leaders such as ServiceNow and Autodesk.
Qualtrics has quantified the transition. Since rolling out what they call, the Value Experience (VX) platform for the value team, they have seen:
- Increased Value Advisor productivity: The value advisory team now supports 1.9 times as many opportunities per value advisor.
- Increased scale: The team attached business cases to as much pipeline in the 12 months since VX rollout as they did in the three prior years.
- Increased impact: The value advisory team supported twice as much won contract value per value advisor per year, highlighted by the fact that 70%+ of president’s club attendees leverage the team.
- Increased speed: The team has accelerated the rate at which they grow and improve their content, increasing the number of value drivers by 3x+ in the past year with over 300 new prebuilt business cases.
With a software-enabled, scalable approach, the Qualtrics value consultants are able to drive increased win rates and deal sizes on more opportunities, while going deeper on the most important accounts. The approach creates uniform coverage, driving value conversations enterprise-wide, instead of scattershot among the people who happen to be fans of value.
The undeniable metrics helped build a fan base in the C-suite. Topher didn’t need to oversell value to the CRO, CFO, and CEO. Instead, he was able to tell stories of major deals secured and the inflection points where value tipped the scales.
As the value work created happy customers, it was an easy sell to increase demand for and investment in the program. “There was such a warm reception among key company leaders,” Topher says of the pace at which value became a cultural mainstay. “This work kept getting put on a pedestal because we were so needed by our customers and our frontlines.”
For Topher, achieving Phase III became necessary when self-service started becoming opaque. The value team didn’t have visibility into when the self service approach was being used effectively or not, and was unable to push updates to best practices and content to the decks and spreadsheets saved locally on laptops across the company. However, as he gained a reputation as “the value guy,” he couldn’t work one-on-one with each individual.
“I didn’t want to turn people away, but I also had to protect my sanity,” he says. “Even as the team grew, we couldn’t dedicate 100% of our time to deals. We had to also invest in our best practices and systems. Unfortunately, while both the deal-level work and the scalable work are important, deals are usually more urgent and take priority.”
Now in Phase III, Topher continues to hone the analytics that justifies value. Significant growth in the Qualtrics value advisory team, bolstered by the Ecosystems value platform, provides a kind of control group for comparisons. As the team covers considerably more deals, they can collect win-rate data and compare results with value advisory versus without value advisory.
While improvement in the metrics covering the white glove “with” is certainly a good sign, a steady upward climb in the self-service “without” reveals the depth of value thinking underway and the economies of scale that warms hearts in C-suites.
Other metrics can also be derived to show the impact of the value platform. For companies and teams assessing their progress on the journey from Phase II to Phase III, Topher suggests these metrics:
- Look at pipeline not covered by value. Large deals without value coverage may be cause for concern. Regions that are consistently under performing may require targeted action such as reinforcement training, visibility and accountability, or additional resources, for example.
- Compare the volume of deals receiving white glove value consultant coverage with those following the value self service path. This will make it clear whether you are actually creating scale, or if you are simply growing coverage in line with the rate you are growing your value team.
- Pay attention to active user rates. A sales rep who has only been onboarded is not as good as one who has been active in the platform. Qualtrics considers a sales rep that has created a new business case in a given quarter to be active.
Of course, at any phase, there is no rest. Topher’s team is further refining its ability to track the “golden thread” of value. Criteria include:
- Further visibility into the effectiveness of self-service by measuring collaboration and co-creation with the customer. Finding alignment and empowering customers to contribute their own data is “the right thing to do,” Topher says, especially in an era when CFOs want to see deals championed internally by associates who have full confidence in and ownership of the numbers.
- Ensuring programs are designed to deliver on the business case, including the capabilities to track value post-sale. The ability to inject value promise into the sales cycle and to articulate value delivered is critical for long term success.
- Aligning the various teams that serve the customer on a common definition of value with best practices embedded in the systems and approaches used across the company.
Technology is the catapult. The right value platform promises scale without eliminating the very jobs it’s meant to augment. A smart value platform is just that—a platform that makes everyone smarter.
Achieving scale with value
Take a moment to reflect. Where are your company and team on the Ecosystems Value Blueprint? Consider team composition, available resources, and individual and company capabilities to assess progress made and goals to set.
Chances are, you’re stuck between Phases II and III, where dreams of growing the value team meet a real-world lack of resources.
Technology is the catapult. The right value platform promises scale without eliminating the very jobs it’s meant to augment. A smart value platform is just that—a platform that makes everyone smarter at every stage of the blueprint. Sales team members become adept at value conversations. Value consultants rise to value enablers and program owners, key contributors to cutting-edge strategy and delivering value across the customer spectrum.
Want to learn more and do more? The customizable Ecosystems value platform takes quantifiable, collaborative value conversations to scale, with the power to assess, realize, benchmark, and engineer value. Plus, the Ecosystems Customer Value Community fuels exploration and insight through meaningful connections with 3,000+ modern value sellers sharing lessons learned along their value journeys.
Learn more here, and get ready to rock.
