In our Customer Value Community’s webinar on Accelerating Growth for 2023: Prioritizing Value Delivery, we took a closer look into what top SaaS companies like Palo Alto Networks, Google Cloud, and Automation Anywhere are doing to acquire, retain, and grow customer accounts. Below are our top 10 tips for 2023.
1. Value Is More Important than Ever – and Scaling It Even More So
Value often becomes most important when companies have the least amount of resources available to dedicate to it. Facing economic uncertainty, companies are cutting internal costs (e.g., value COEs) while simultaneously seeking to boost account retention and expansion through improved customer value capabilities. The result is an increased need to find more scalable ways to deliver high-quality, value-based customer conversations.
2. Prioritize Value Teams’ Work Around Top Company Goals
There are countless ways a value team can positively impact the organization (e.g., work with marketing for pipeline generation, help close new deals, drive value realization for customer success, weigh in on innovation for product development). In order to scale value efforts and ensure highest impact, it is critical to understand and align value team efforts (only) around the company’s top three strategic objectives, as defined by senior leadership.
3. Move from a Bookings Approach to a Continuous Value Model
Being “helpful” is not enough. Value teams must be perceived as deeply aligned and indispensable to the company’s current operating model. For example, many value teams are still using a bookings approach to value, even though company value is being realized on a consumption basis. Ecosystems’ client Google Cloud is innovating in 2023 to move to a continuous value model with hundreds of collaborative best-practice templates, models, and outputs for their sellers and customer success managers to use with their customers.
"Being 'helpful' is not enough. Value teams must be perceived as deeply aligned and indispensable to the company’s current operating model. "
4. Invest in End-to-End Customer Value Management
Especially in a consumption-based model, operating in a highly dynamic macroeconomic environment, it is critical that customers can access and engage a supplier’s value platform on an always-on basis to adjust targets and conduct real-time scenario planning, what-if analyses.
5. Focus on Holistic Value with Your Customers
A value engineering team must consider value through three lenses – their company, their customers, and their customers’ customers. Far beyond ROI, each “lens” must account for both monetized and non-monetized performance metrics, spanning corporate value, job value, and personal value. Learn more about the Value Trinity here.
6. Align the Entire Organization Around a Value-Based Commercial Operating System
In 2023, companies should be working towards establishing an end-to-end “commercial operating system” where Value is the Golden Thread that connects the entire organization. The value promised to the customer is not the salesperson’s promise or the Customer Success Manager’s (CSM’s) promise – it is the company’s promise. Therefore, every person from sales and CS to product and marketing needs to be aligned around it. This vision only works through strong sponsorship from the CEO. Get the Blueprint to a World-Class Commercial Operating System Here.
7. Use Live Collaboration to Get Sales and Customer Success Buy-In
Leading SaaS value teams are winning the hearts and minds of their sellers and CSMs by involving them in the process of defining “value” for customers and then providing easy-to-use templates to enable direct iteration with prospects and customers collaboratively. The best way to win over internal stakeholders on the importance of proving value is to allow them to experience the business case building process directly. Making sales and customer success teams part of the value management journey is crucial for their buy-in.
8. Make Your Sales to Customer Success Handoff Seamless
The value promised to the customer by sales must seamlessly align to post-sale customer success conversations of value realized. Those conversations must include partners and anyone involved in implementation and deployment. By using a value platform that is fully integrated with CRM and success platforms like Gainsight, companies can provide a customer experience more prone to expansion.
9. Support Sales and Customer Success Self-Service
A company’s value management platform should support self-service for sellers and CSMs, allowing them to make changes on the fly to reflect new customer priorities, product updates, and industry trends.
10. Always Be Innovating and Differentiating
Top organizations never become complacent in aligning with customers on value, as customer priorities change with shifting market conditions. For example, Ecosystems’ customer Palo Alto Networks uses every customer engagement as an opportunity to update hundreds of best practice templates. In their collaborative customer value management platform, those updates are immediately accessible to the entire team on a real-time basis.
Looking for ways to improve your new logo sales, customer retention, expansion, and scale? Learn more about Ecosystems’ collaborative customer value management platform here.
This blog was written by incorporating thought leadership from our Customer Value Community network of panelists:
- Marc Goldstein, Global President, Business Value Consulting at Palo Alto Networks
- Eric Ranta, Director, North America Cloud Value & Transformation Advisors at Google Cloud
- Tarani Arunachalam, Intelligent Automation Advisor & Value Engineer at Automation Anywhere
- Omid Razavi, Former Chief Customer Officer & Ecosystems CVC Advisor
- Brent Adamson, Global Head of Research & Communities at Ecosystems
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