Win Magic: The Seven Habits of Great Value / ROI Selling

What if you had the secret sauce to win more than half of all your forecasted deals?

A recent study by CSO Insights says you can increase win rates almost 40% by elevating your Value / ROI Selling capability to Great. This means significantly less deals lost to “No Decision” or going with the competition.

And the benefits don’t end there.
Those with superior Value / ROI Selling programs have:

• A dramatically higher percentage of sales reps meeting / beating quota: increasing to 69% from a paltry 47%, an almost 50% increase.
• An incredible improvement in sales reps achieving revenue plan attainment (87%)

The gains are so dramatic, CSO Insights says investing more in a Value / ROI Selling program is one of the best investments a sales organization can make to improve performance.

The reason for the improved effectiveness? Buyers today are putting more importance on financial returns and risk avoidance. As a result, vendors on the spot to clearly differentiate unique value and deliver financial justification. A condition we term Frugalnomics.

If your sales reps and channel partners are unable to effectively communicate and quantify your unique value, buyers won’t be convinced to “Yes”, as more deals remain at status quo and stall, and competitive losses mount (going to those who CAN better communicate and quantify their unique value).

Unfortunately, most sales leaders, almost 2 out of 3, see this ineffectiveness in their own programs, admitting to CSO insights that their Value / ROI Selling initiatives are underfunded and in need of a major overhaul or improvement.

What does Great look like?

These are the seven habits we see from the best Value / ROI Selling practices:

1. Engage early – Not waiting until asked for a business case, instead use value communication and quantification proactively and early in each engagement.
2. Go beyond the numbers – Realizing that the numbers are there to support the unique value story, not to be the story unto itself.
3. Cover more and scale better – Leveraging value selling and ROI in more than just the largest deals. Expanding the value selling / ROI programs by getting sales reps and channel partners to participate, without the need to have a consultant engaged in supporting the approach with each prospect, or isolated to just the largest deals.
4. Consistently deliver – Implementing value communication and quantification, from marketing and inside sales, to channel, partner and account execs, to business consultants and value engineers. The best programs start with a solid Value Messaging & Quantification Framework, and to that, add a standardized set of interactive value marketing, sales and consulting tools and engagement methodology, so everyone knows the prescribed method for engaging, and content is leveraged and not recreated for each deal.
5. Build trust – Providing 3rd party insights and research, customer case studies and proof points to validate potential results with prospects and drive credibility.
6. Certify – Educating and certifying sales reps, channel partners and consultants on the engagement model, tools, delivery and conversations, and providing support and coaching on an ongoing basis to assure the certified skills are being applied.
7. Measure and improve –Tracking the adoption and use of tools and practices, and the impact that the approach has on sales success, measuring win rate improvements (vs. competition and “do nothing”), reduced discounting / deal size improvements, sales cycle acceleration, quota achievement and on-boarding acceleration. Leveraging customer intelligence data gathered from each engagement to deliver new and unique insights, benchmarks and advice.