Value! Value! Value! Value!
The number one complaint from presales, sales, and customer success leaders about their teams’ demos is that “they don’t communicate business value.” And in order to communicate business value, teams need to know what the value is for their prospects!
This is a watershed skill level. Those who fail to communicate business value will struggle with their demos; those who convey tangible value are positioned for success.
Most vendor demos don’t communicate value at all, leaving prospects without the ability to sell internally. Some vendors describe generic value, and a subset of these vendors go further to make it tangible. However, the real objective is to communicate the tangible value gains for each specific prospect. Let’s break these important ideas down!
Generic Business Value:
Case 1: In the simplest case, presales, sales, and customer success teams should be able to articulate the intangible benefits of their solution. This might be phrased as, “Our software enables you to reduce the time needed to…” This is too generic and is nearly meaningless.
Case 2: Slightly better is to communicate the kinds of tangible gains seen across the industry, “Our customers report savings of 2-4 weeks in process time.” But will this resonate with the current prospect? Hard to say!
Case 3: An additional improvement is to be more specific, “Other customers who are very similar to you report process reductions of 2-3 weeks.” This will feel more relevant for the current prospect but note that the numbers are someone else’s.
Specific Business Value:
In the absence of doing discovery, vendors are limited to generic value statements. Correspondingly, discovery needs to be executed with the clear objective of uncovering meaningful, prospect-specific value elements.
During discovery, any time your prospect “admits pain,” your job is to quantify it. Each of these is a Delta: the difference between your prospect’s current state and their desired future state. While capturing and communicating Deltas is richly developed in both Doing Discovery and Great Demo!, here is an introduction.
When your prospect says, “It takes too long…” your response should be two questions:
1. How long does it take today?
2. How long should it take?
The difference is the Delta: A simple and direct expression of value. A few additional questions will enable you to do the math (“maths” for you in the UK, etc.) to calculate meaningful business value statements.
Measurement(s) for Achieving Level 4:
A) Presents tangible, prospect-specific business value metrics.
Pros:
- Often sufficient to achieve Technical Proof.
- Enables prospects to build internal business cases.
Cons:
- Still unsuitable for Vision Generation.
- May still be a unidirectional monologue.
- May be difficult to differentiate from competition.
- May leave money on the table.
Grade: B
See this article for more on uncovering Deltas:
https://greatdemo.com/lets-talk-about-value-uncovering-the-delta-new/
For the full methodologies, see:
Doing Discovery:
https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Discovery-Important-Enablement-Processes/dp/B0B8RJK4C2/
Great Demo! Third Edition:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/
And this story in “Suspending Disbelief” illustrates the power of doing superior discovery:
“You Know You Already Closed Me” https://tinyurl.com/yc7rsrmy
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