Authored by Chad Quinn, CEO & Co-Founder, Ecosystems
The Ideal of Value Selling
Look at the tree outside your window. It is not the same sapling that first poked its head through the earth. The tree changes. It grows. It breathes. In one hour, it will be a different entity, a different ecosystem still churning with life. Its survival from one year to the next depends on its ability to adapt. Each leaf, stem, and branch, while separate and distinct, must evolve in concert with the rest to survive. If they cannot, the tree goes extinct.
The business-to-business (B2B) sales team of the 21st century should be and can be, a living, breathing, adaptable part of what I call the "Value Ecosystem™." A Value Ecosystem™ is a collaborative environment where multiple players—including provider, customer, and partner—co-create value. Sales are the regenerative oxygen of this teeming universe, but there is more. Within this Value Ecosystem™, each player must be equipped to produce and feel empowered to contribute.
As I like to say, value is a collaborative game, but it’s not the kind of game where one player wins and one loses. In this game, both players win because they can choose from thousands of game pieces that snap and click into place like Legos, resulting in a never-before-seen creation that solves the customer’s most pressing dilemmas. Along the way, the rules of this game perpetuate a mutually beneficial, longstanding relationship.
This is ideal, but the reality falls short. That’s what this paper explores, Legos and all. The truth is, buyers are changing rapidly, but sales organizations are not. In the old model, salespeople are assigned to a transactional corner. But where is the aspirational nature of a job designed strictly to push products and bring in revenue?
A Value Ecosystem™ is a collaborative environment where multiple players—including provider, customer, and partner—co-create value.
Keeping pace with an increasingly sophisticated and data-empowered base of buyers requires that organizations transform salespeople into consultative value sellers. In this reenergized ecosystem, customer interactions are no longer transactional but are steeped in collaborative value management. Every member of the sales team is eager and equipped to solve the customer’s problems, not their own. It’s time for sales teams, and their companies, to embark on a journey around value, where success is measured not in units sold but in customers who experience higher profits, better productivity, improved retention, and other desired outcomes. Otherwise, sales teams find themselves afflicted with the B2B sales disease of “productitis,” where they are indoctrinated to see every encounter as a product searching for a problem.
The wellness version of selling discovers value, quantifies value, and tracks outcomes to deepen and make more meaningful B2B relationships. Sellers and customers evolve as a team into co-creators of value. Conversations are relevant to the buyer and focused on business outcomes. Products only enter the dialog when they are solutions driving toward those desired goals.
Creating this formative ecosystem demands that organizations adopt the tools of technology that allow sales teams to inject discipline and precision into once-unstructured content. Here, sales divisions become equipped to quantify and communicate their unique business value. After all, their customers empowered to harvest their own data are way ahead of them on that front. “Enabled with a modern toolset, sellers and buyers can have more unique and collaborative interactions,” notes Forrester Research in its report, “The State of Digitized Selling.”1
As the collaborative ecosystem flourishes, it integrates and interacts with the larger body of customer value management strategy. In turn, that generates value DNA throughout the enterprise and a sense of professional fulfillment for the newly empowered salesperson.
The Ecosystem is Changing, Are You on the Journey?
In this report, I offer the tools to assess your sales team’s collaborative strength and chart a course for transformation:
Along the way, this report shares the behavioral attributes of effective value co-creators, insights from my conversations with pioneering thought leaders in the field, and the key questions to ask potential partners. Your journey to value selling begins here.
The Value Selling Landscape
The Post-2020 Buyer: Empowered by Data
COVID-19 lurched the sales economy into a radically altered world. Virtual selling emerged as its own unique creature. The post-pandemic sales model has a choice: Feed and nurture the ecosystem of the tree, or let it wither and die. Move toward a relevant approach in sales, or adhere to old show-and-tell models.
When ecosystems experience upheaval, the resilient elements survive. In the post-pandemic churn, virtual selling is not simply in-person sales converted to digital formats. As Forrester puts it, sellers are challenged to meet targets “while fulfilling expectations of increasingly digitally oriented buyers.”
The post-COVID sales landscape is a vastly changed place, as Bain & Company reported in its brief “Virtual Selling Has Become Simply Selling”: 2
The sales environment of today is the place where outdated perceptions collide with data-based reality. Bain made this discovery by posing the same questions to executives and frontline sales staff, and comparing their answers to actual analysis:
I see the ecosystem becoming a value-selling entity—a recognized contributor to the company’s comprehensive value DNA—when sales functions and outcomes align with customer goals, needs, and buying behaviors.
However, digital-native customers have very different and much more sophisticated expectations than their analog predecessors. The answers to most of their questions are, quite literally, at their fingertips. By the time buyers engage directly with sales reps:
Of course, we can’t frame all buyers as paragons of streamlining. Some remain guilty of perpetuating outdated models of purchasing by delegating the initial investigation of options to junior staff. Without fully understanding all the levers of value to the business, these mid-level employees give the wrong impression about what the buyer actually values.
Data does not lie. The “digital self-service” environment puts the power in the hands of buyers. These same buyers, hungry for data, “expect salespeople to use digital tools with data outputs that can be turned quickly into relevant insights,” reports Bain. And as Forrester notes, buyers want access to those same tools for collaborative effect. The salesperson who delivers value, and a long-term relationship instead of just a product, is the one who seals the deal.
The Post-2020 Seller: Stuck in the Past
In the business of hiring salespeople, it’s a seller’s market:
- The Wall Street Journal headline said it all: “The Pay Is High and Jobs Are Plentiful, but Few Want to Go Into Sales.” As ZipRecruiter has reported, sales roles advertised in 2021 skyrocketed a post-pandemic 65 percent, with more than 700,000 openings—and they remain just that: Openings. Even fat paychecks can’t entice early-career hires to shed “images of glad-handing car salesmen or ‘Mad Men’-style account representatives.”
- Annual turnover of 20 percent to 30 percent means that companies are training a new sales corps every three years—and sales training costs significantly more than other training.3 Only 43 percent of quotas are met, according to Salesforce. Bet black over red at a Las Vegas roulette wheel, and your chances of winning are better, at 47 percent. This raises the question: Quotas might still have a place in sales, but why do old-style selling models cling to them as the primary marker of success if they are, in fact, toothless?
Clearly, gaps are widening between sellers and buyers, as I learned in a conversation with Frank Cespedes, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and influential author of the essential “Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World that Never Stops Changing.”
The exponential rise in data has empowered buyers more than it has sellers, but sales management has barely budged from decades-old practices, Cespedes told me. Nearly three out of four sales-compensation plans are tied to volume—not profitability, not customer satisfaction, not cost to serve, but simply volume.
“The message to the sales force is very clear,” Cespedes said. “'Go forth and multiply.’ And that’s what they do.”4
Nearly three out of four sales-compensation plans are tied to volume—not profitability, not customer satisfaction, not cost to serve, but simply volume.
The Journey to Co-Creation
The vibrant ecosystem absorbs value selling like a nutrient. The highest level of a company’s involvement in digital-forward sales is true immersion, and a key element in that ideal is fostering collaboration. It’s the place where buyers and sellers convene over digital platforms to innovate, co-create, and track outcomes.
In this value-oriented atmosphere, all players arrive with contributions. No one has all the answers, but working collaboratively, they land on solutions:
Enter Legos! I mean it. Not literally, since as we’ve shown, we’re in a digital collaborative ecosystem. But put what I just said into Legos terms, and the process becomes clear. I’m the seller, and I have a multitude of red and yellow Legos full of proven solution implementations, honed over time. The buyer shows up with green and blue Legos, brimming with years of the company’s experience, plus a hint of frustration. Together—I can’t stress this word enough—the two select and snap their pieces into place, and cohesive solutions emerge.
Collaborative value creation is the discovery process that differentiates sellers from their competitors, Geoffrey Moore told me with his usual keen insight. He’s the best-selling author of “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers.” In this realm, the seller understands the buyer’s narrative and spends time interpreting that story in the context of available products or technologies. The seller shifts from a transactional to a relationship approach, aligning the outcome to build a budget and solution in concert with the buyer.
“It’s much more of a ‘we’re both on the same side of the table,’ as opposed to, ‘I’m trying to sell you something,’ on the other side of the table,” Moore said when we sat down to talk. “This is not about you. It’s not about your company. It’s not about your product. This is about your customer’s issue.”5
The art of collaborating to achieve the buyer’s desired outcomes delivers transformative results for the seller:
- 28% Increase in Win Rates
- 34% Increase in Cross-sell and Upsell
- 7.1% Increase in Customer Retention
In short, a culture of co-creating empowers sales talent to become consultative value sellers to customers and recognized contributors to the broader vision of the enterprise.
- Faster, more frequent communications with customers.
- Cost-effective interactions.
- The ability to interact with more prospects and serve as a trusted adviser. 6
- Instant access to transactional data that enables conversations more relevant to the buyer’s dilemma than simply to the product specs.
- Relief from time-consuming paperwork and negotiations—time that can be devoted to the more satisfying pursuit of building relationships. 7
The Tao of Sales
The science of co-creation makes it clear: Co-creating value drives improved outcomes for buyers and higher sales revenues and win rates for sellers. But that makes me wonder: What are the key aspects of an effective value seller? What fuels the value seller’s passion for being welcomed as a co-creator?
Science answers those questions, too. It’s the proper behavioral attributes. The right set of personality and skill traits influences customer participation, citizenship, and commitment to the salesperson, and that leads to success, according to a study on customer value co-creation behavior published in the Journal of Business Research.
Researchers pinpointed the top behavioral attributes of value sellers:
Ironically, these very human behavioral attributes matter more than ever in the virtual-selling environment. When being “across the table,” as Geoffrey Moore puts it, actually means “through the screen,” instinct and training must conspire to keep connections personal. Is your toolbox stocked with techniques for creating virtual engagement? Are you attuned to the stress of customers redefining their business models? Do your virtual meetings escalate into tangible value co-creation? The most progressive sellers I’m seeing are those accentuating these human-first value drivers in virtual as well as in-person settings. They are reducing anxiety, injecting flexibility into the partnership, and contributing to their customers’ sustainability initiatives, all in the name of value selling.
No matter the type of encounter, these emotionally intelligent salespeople send the customer’s engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction soaring upward. When those buyers are given active roles in the co-creation of value, they feel confident about leaning into innovation and risk-taking, opening doors to partnerships with sellers that generate breakthrough results.
3x Increase in Close Rates: A leading SaaS provider, Sumo Logic, leveraging a value selling platform has seen a 3x increase in close rates in those opportunities where there is high intensity of information exchange in the platform.
In short, the researchers concluded, “as more firms recognize the value in co-creation with their customers, more firms will also embrace emotional intelligence and empathy by embedding it into their corporate culture.” 8
The Ripple Effects of Value Selling
Fix sales first. It’s the crucial step toward instilling value DNA in every corner and aspect of the company. Through collaborative value selling, companies gain in three key ways, as we learn from IronNet CEO Bill Welch. He earned his credentials by deploying a global value selling platform across four different companies—Symantec, HP, Zscaler, and IronNet. All were at different maturity levels, from
pre-IPO to Fortune 500.
In an analysis of more than 500 deals, Welch found that those structured with a collaborative value selling platform and mindset delivered:
- Reduction of Price Discounting: A 38 percent reduction of price discounting when value co-creation was applied.
- Better Quota Attainment : The seller’s success and ability to achieve quotas—from 100 percent to 200 percent of the plan—are linked to embracing a high-intensity use of value selling
- Higher Win Rates, Bigger Deals: Deals sealed through value selling are three times larger, four-and-a-half times more likely to create upsells, and convert faster.
Collaborative sales wrapped in empathy and interest for the buyer’s needs foster customer success, sales success, and success in other areas of the company, Welch tells us.
As I see it, a vision of co-creation for sales, once turned into reality, fans out through the company. Sales team members achieve their aspirational goals of serving as solutions providers for customers and key role players in the company’s vision. This report delves into the transformation of sales in the Value Ecosystem™. Future entries in this series will share insights into the updraft of benefits that other business functions—marketing, customer success, and business value team included—derive from a vibrant, collaboration-intensive sales team.
“Our value platform has over 1,000 activated users that are co-creating value with our prospects and customers across 49 different Google Cloud offerings.”
- Lori Mitchell-Keller, Global Leader, Industry Solutions at Google Cloud
The Four Phases of Value Co-Creation
When sales are digitally immersive, sellers are positioned to meet buyers where they are—or even stride ahead to where buyers are going. Consider this continuum of digitally immersive selling. Compare your sales organization to these four phases, from worst to first. Where is your team?
Phase One: Status Quo
- You battle just to get sellers to use the CRM.
- “We just need a better sales deck.”
- Value selling is confined to a superficial web calculator or an Excel spreadsheet
- You wish you had better customer data and a grasp of how your solutions deliver value.
- Field sales is viewed as the main channel of communication with prospects and customers.
- Your training is product-focused.
Phase Two: Acknowledgement
- You’re evaluating a few modern sales enablement tools.
- You want your sellers to be more dynamic in meetings.
- You’re thinking about hiring an agency to revamp your website.
- You want to better connect marketing and sales tools.
- You’re investing more into inside sales.
- Training elevates to focus on a customer problem and align back to a product or solution.
Phase Three: Transformation
- The fields are equipped with discrete role-specific sales tools, such as qualitative assessment tools for pre-sales consultants and return on investment (ROI) calculators for sales.
- Sellers can share interactive content via virtual or in-person meetings.
- You revamped your website to make it more engaging.
- You’re building a customer data strategy.
- Prospects and customers want more efficient buy cycles.
- Buyers can purchase some transactional products on your website through their preferred online channel, such as your website, alliance partners, value-added reseller (VAR), and cloud service provider marketplaces.
- Sellers are trained to identify pre-built proven outcomes with unique and distinctive provider capabilities and resources.
Phase Four: Value Ecosystem™
- Sellers have access to a collaborative value platform that includes both qualitative and quantitative value content.
- Sellers and buyers meet and interact on a collaborative value platform to co-create value.
- Your collaborative value platform extends into your company’s website with buyer-centric interactive tools
- You have complete cross-channel visibility into all prospect and customer interactions.
- You meet prospects and customers digitally and in person.
- Buyers can purchase through any sales route they want and have a greater proclivity to move through the commercial transaction in a self-service model.
- Sellers are trained to co-create value by merging customer-specific outcomes with unique and distinctive provider capabilities and resources.
Every company is in a different phase of the journey, as evidenced by the results from an annual benchmark study on value selling excellence. Co-authored by Ecosystems, a collaborative value management SaaS provider, and IDC, a global provider of market intelligence and advisory services, this benchmark study monitors the ongoing evolution of companies’ paths to be collaborative, attuned to customer priorities, and digitally immersive.
“Over 40 percent of the users in our value platform are actually the end customer, co-creating value with us.” - Grad Rosenbaum, General Manager, North America Services and Solutions at HP. Watch Video >
Scale your Value Selling
Are you part of an ecosystem that’s a living, breathing entity? Is it relevant and adaptive?
A transformative journey is ahead if you modernize sales for value selling. The commitment starts at the organizational level. Let’s consider two scenarios, with and without a value platform.
Without a Value Platform: The organization sends the salesperson into the hard-won customer face-to-face meeting (increasingly virtual) with the product. Productit is rears its head. The customer, unengaged in value, focuses on price and discounts.
With a Value Platform: The organization equips the salesperson with a robust platform offering industry-specific outcomes, proven solutions, and effective tracking methodology. All are honed over time and presented in digital form. The buyer, intrigued, joins the seller in clicking selections that express their challenges and align with goals, and you know what happens with a click. A few clicks by both players lead to a Lego-style, digital snap-and-click masterpiece that addresses the problems at hand.
Under the value platform scenario, here’s where the magic happens. The resulting solutions are embedded with outcomes-tracking mechanisms—and outcomes are what brought everyone to the table in the first place—so both partners now have the launchpad for establishing mutually beneficial, long-term relationships.
The Transformational Leader
Leaders foster a collaborative value selling environment. To institute true systemic change, remember these key points about the 21st-century sales environment:
- Buyers expect to conduct transactions virtually.
- Buyers want solutions. They already know the specs of your product. They don’t want sales pitches.
- Those organizations that deploy a collaborative value platform will attract the best and the brightest salespeople from an increasingly shrinking labor pool.
- A well-designed, collaborative value platform is a powerful tool for hurdling the outdated dynamics of selling and buying.
- The classic questions now come into play: How do I transform my sales organization? How do I transform fast but without causing too much disruption? The dilemmas miring sales teams can be resolved by taking the first steps toward a transformative journey, injecting the stagnant ecosystem with a digitized jolt of energy, and drawing inspiration from a community of like-minded people already invested in the value-selling revolution.
Fortunately, these transformative resources and peer executive connections are at hand in the Value Advisory Ecosystem, a dedicated, high-powered community of over 70 world-class companies and 135-plus leaders focused on sharing emerging best practices on value selling excellence.
True change finds acceptance among beleaguered salespeople only if the tools used on the journey are intuitive, effective, and delight all players. The road to an ecosystem of collaboration and co-creation elevates salespeople into purposeful, valued contributors to the complete customer value management cycle and the company’s dynamic growth.
Key Questions to Ask Potential Partners
When sales entities undergoing transformation consider their choices in value platforms, they ask these key questions:
- Is your value platform natively designed for value co-creation between buyer and seller?
- What type of research is embedded in your value platform to highlight third-party objectivity for the customer?
- How comprehensive is the platform in managing the total customer value lifecycle from upfront discovery to customer references based on value?
- How robust is the value platform? Can it handle both dollar and non-dollar value?
- Can your value platform operate at any altitude—e.g., high level for sales and deeper level with consultants?
- Given how fast business evolves and changes, can you self-author your own value content ongoing in the platform to operate with total self-sufficiency?
Sources
1 “The State of Digitized Selling,” Forrester Research, April 5, 2021, https://www.forrester.com/report/The+State+Of+Digitized+Selling/RES150015
2 “Virtual Selling Has Become Simply Selling,”Bain & Company, April 2, 2021, https://www.bain.com/insights/virtual-selling-has-become-simply-selling
3 “Hitting ‘Big Casino’ in the Sustained Data Revolution,” Eco Platform Blog, Episode 20, https://www.ecosystems.io/voice-of-value-podcasts/episode-20-hitting-big-casino-in-the-sustained-data-revolution”.
4 “Hitting ‘Big Casino’ in the Sustained Data Revolution”.
5 “Sales Transformation: Geoff’s Jihad on Outcome Selling,” Eco Platform Blog, Episode 14,
https://www.ecosystems.io/voice-of-value-podcasts/episode-14-sales-transformation-geoffs-jihad-on-outcome-selling
6 Faster communications, cost-effective interactions, ability to interact, from Bain & Company.
7 Transactional data, paperwork, from Forrester.
8 “Customer value co-creation behavior: A dyadic exploration of the influence of salesperson emotional intelligence on customer participation and citizenship behavior,” Duleep Delpechitre,* , Lisa L. Beeler-Connelly, Nawar N. Chaker. Journal of Business Research 92 (2018) 9-24, Delpechitre et al. (2018)- Customer Value Co-Creation Behavior.pdf
