As the end of 2022 draws near, with continued economic uncertainty, closing deals can feel near impossible. A recent survey conducted by Mediafly, in partnership with RevOps Squared, revealed that 65% of B2B companies are leaning into value selling to help.
But did you know sales isn’t the only commercial team that can benefit from value selling tools and processes? In an economic downturn with new logos harder to close, driving customer loyalty across your existing client base becomes even more critical. According to Gartner, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by up to 95%.
But keeping your customers happy means proving your worth long after the sale closes.
How do you ensure your customers see enough value in your product or service to guarantee renewals, expansions, and upsells when they’re likely reprioritizing and re-evaluating budgets? Enter value realization.
What is value realization?
According to Salesforce.com, “value realization is effort that creates a quantifiable benefit that accrues to a stakeholder.”
In lamens terms, value realization is the quantifiable value your customer has gained from using your product or service. And that value isn’t always monetary. It can be anything that benefits the business, such as:
- Increased revenue
- Reduced costs
- Improved productivity
- Time savings
- Increased engagement
Why is value realization important?
Quantifying and communicating the value of your product or service has become a requirement during the sales process. 66% of buyers say making a clear ROI case highly influences their purchase decisions, and 95% of buyers now require financial justification on any significant purchase. But the need to prove your value doesn’t stop there.
To improve customer retention your clients need to understand the value they’ve gained from using your product or service — and be able to communicate that value internally to key stakeholders and finance teams.
Realized value storytelling and calculators can be leveraged post-sale to help clients answer critical questions, including “why renew?”. These value selling tools enable customer success and account management teams to prove realized value from using your product or service. Reps can also leverage the proof points and projections uncovered by the calculators to show the value of purchasing more licenses or additional solutions, increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
How do I prove realized value?
Leading companies like IT services management firm Okta partner with Mediafly to create and deploy sleek and intuitive realized value calculators that customer success managers (CSMs) can leverage in QBRs, at renewal time, and to proactively upsell their solutions to existing clients.
Okta’s realized value calculator empowers CSMs to lead more collaborative and prescriptive conversations with existing clients, walking them through a series of inputs to:
- Measure the value realized and set a baseline for improvement
- Identify unrealized benefits and establish a roadmap to value
- Assess and measure additional value opportunities
- Align IT investments to business priorities and initiatives
The output report from the assessment empowers Okta clients to confidently renew services knowing they are getting the greatest value out of their investment.
“When business value is engaged, we see a better win rate and a higher ARR. Using Mediafly’s toolset, we can confidently arm our sellers and customer success managers to report on those metrics and prove the value of our product in real-time,” said Zach Rickenbach, Business Value Analyst at Okta.
Do you want to improve customer loyalty and drive more revenue? Learn more about Mediafly’s value realization tools here.
Comments are closed.