As 2021 closes out, we look back on a year of rapid change. Organizations have continued to adapt their strategies to succeed in an economy that is still recovering from the impact of business disruptions and labor shortages due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the B2B sales cycle has continued to evolve amid heightened buyer expectations and increasingly complex buyer’s journeys that require more and more stakeholders to buy into a purchase. With more competition than ever before, getting through to customers, winning, and keeping their business has become increasingly challenging. As a result, sales leaders are leveraging the latest technology and trends to increase customer acquisition and retention. Value-based selling, which is the process of ensuring customer value is central from the beginning to the end of the sales cycle, has emerged as a powerful method of converting – and retaining – loyal customers. Done well, value selling helps organizations build momentum, improve win rates, land larger deals, and close deals faster. However, to achieve the benefits, it is important to keep up to date on best practices and your customers’ evolving expectations. The following are five trends in value-based selling that are here to stay as we enter 2022.
1. Quantifying customer value from pre-sale to post
As B2B purchasing cycles have become more complex, the importance of quantifying the value of your product or service has also increased. Customers now expect to see data early in the sales cycle that clearly demonstrates measurable impact in solving their challenges. Customers now depend on value data to build confidence in the ROI of their purchasing decision, as well as gain executive support. Value-based selling without quantifiable data simply won’t yield the results you’re looking for in today’s sales environment. To learn more, see our recent blog post on 4 ways value-based selling helps overcome resistance and close more deals.
2. Personalized customer experiences – at scale
While data is now essential to the modern sales cycle, so too is personalization. Generic metrics and case studies only go so far. Targeted messaging by customer persona, industry, and other attributes is critical to ensuring that customers understand your solution’s unique business value and have the necessary justification to invest. Where businesses have a chance to stand out is by providing metrics in the context of their world and helping understand the total cost of ownership (TCO), return of investment (ROI), and other non-monetized elements like risk mitigation as it applies to their specific use cases. Cloud platforms like Ecosystems’ value management software enable organizations to digitize how they quantify value for their customers at scale.
3. The disappearing line between pre- and post-sales
The line between sales and customer success is gone. Why? Because customers want and expect this change. Rather than focusing on closing the deal, value-added sales focuses on solving the customer’s challenges – and that does not end when the contracts are signed. Value realization is a process that begins pre-sale and continues throughout the relationship with the customer. To stand out in today’s business environment, you’re no longer selling just a product, you’re selling a partnership where your sales teams are invested in the success of their customers. Along with this shift, quarterly business reviews have now shifted to quarterly value/success reviews. Watch our webinar recap to learn more.
4. Customer success, not just customer support
As the lines between sale and post-sale have blurred, so have the expectations for customer support. Customer support can no longer be reactive, focused on fixing problems as they arise. Rather, customer success is proactive, a continuation of the value-selling process that is focused on helping customers reach their goals. This offers many benefits, including improved customer satisfaction and retention. Meanwhile, since you are proactively monitoring your customer’s success and value realization post-sale, you are able to quickly identify if customers are at risk, as well as identify customers that are good candidates for upselling and cross-selling.
5. The rise of revenue operations (RevOps)
Another emerging trend in 2021 was the growth of revenue operations (RevOps), a business function focused on driving predictable revenue from marketing, sales, customer renewals, and more. In short, revOps refers to the processes, systems, and people that control and optimize how your business generates revenue. The mindset, practice, and manifestation of unifying your internal operations is how you optimize RevOps and create the right internal foundation for the best customer experience. RevOps’ core principles include:
- Striving to deliver greater value without proportionally scaling labor resources by investing in the right technology and automation
- Improving advisory services and partnerships with customers
- Collaborating with customers and focusing on thought leadership
- Enabling the right engagement model to drive customers towards their desired outcomes
Watch our webinar recap on revenue operations to learn more.
Start value selling today
Not just trends, these approaches to modern value-based selling are here to stay. Interested in learning more about value-added selling? Check out our whitepaper, The Future of Value Selling: Value Co-Creation.
