New tools extend ValueCloud® to customer success, providing unprecedented visibility and insights into customer value achievement; DecisionLink launches first certification program for CVM to ensure success within 90-days
DecisionLink, the leader in cloud-based customer value management (CVM), today unveiled its new Value Realization Bundle at the Gainsight Pulse Conference. This comprehensive solution expands tracking and AI-powered analytics capabilities to customer success programs, facilitating and improving customer retention and expansion efforts such as cross-sell and up-sell effectiveness.
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“Most companies have long understood the advantages of value-based selling, but few have been able to scale these practices nor extend them downstream into after-sale conversations within the customer journey because the technology to support, scale, and automate value-based engagement simply did not exist before today,” said DecisionLink Chairman of the Board, Chief Evangelist, and Co-Founder Jim Berryhill. “Now, with the addition of the Value Realization capabilities to the ValueCloud® family, any organization can easily track, quantify, and leverage customer value from initial customer acquisition all the way through to retention and share of wallet expansion.”
CrowdStrike, an early adopter of ValueCloud® value realization capabilities, documented its compelling results in a recent case study. With ValueCloud®, CrowdStrike sales and customer success managers can easily create automated, polished Value Realization reports that help proactively block competitive efforts to steal contracts by clearly defining and easily communicating actual value realized. Beyond quantifying value delivered, CrowdStrike uses these Value Realization reports to frame a vision for the additional value it can help customers capture through the adoption of new modules and capabilities that align with the customer’s business strategy.
“As a DecisionLink customer, we’ve leveraged their value selling automation to help us win business. That said, winning deals is only half the equation; the real test of a business is winning customers and winning them for life. Suffice to say, I’m pleased to see this type of value realization innovation coming out of DecisionLink and to see them execute on their vision of an end-to-end customer value management platform,” said Mike Carpenter, President, Global Sales & Field Operations.
The ValueCloud® Value Realization Bundle consists of the following capabilities:
- Value Implementation Tracker: Ensures continuity in tracking so that all key performance metrics outlined in the sales process are being carried through to implementation efforts.
- Value Achievement Tracker: Provides customer success, renewal, and sales teams with value tracking capabilities to demonstrate successful attainment of goals as part of renewal or expansion negotiations.
- Business Case Builder: Enables development of the business case benchmark for post-sale comparison.
- Value Case Study Builder: Automates the creation of value-based case studies from successful deployments to support marketing team needs, turning customers into advocates.
- Survey Builder: Allows customer success administrators to create qualitative questions within the Value Achievement Tracker using a free-form builder that enables open-ended questions to capture feedback beyond data points.
- Value Integration APIs: Facilitates seamless integration to third-party CRM and customer success platforms and tools.
- Implementation & Training: Supports knowledge transfer within an organization for developing models and assets.
- Value Professional Workbench – Powers the ongoing refinement and development of models.
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“ValueCloud® and the Value Realization Bundle automate the process of demonstrating value, making it effortless to defend ROI and avoid extended procurement negotiations or discounting for both renewal and expansion discussions,” said new DecisionLink CEO Tim Page. “This continuum of value tools is also the single biggest source of value data and analytics ever created. Consider that it supplies ServiceNow with more than 20 million customer value data points generated through its solutions. The potential for value data-based pricing and go-to-market decisions using ValueCloud® is enormous.”
“We decided on DecisionLink because of the comprehensiveness of the platform,” said Brint Driggs head of Revenue Enablement at Harness. “As a fast-growing, SaaS-based business, we don’t have time to deal with spreadsheets and labor-based solutions. We needed something that scales across the organization and across the customer lifecycle. The marketing, sales, and this recent value realization piece will help us market, sell, and measure the value our customers get from our platform, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.”
The inability to realize the full potential of technology is the number one customer satisfaction (CSAT) killer for sales organizations according to an upcoming IDC QuickPoll survey of large US companies. “The question of value is even more of an issue than aggressive renewal pricing, which was number one last year,” said Gerry Murray, Research Director of IDC’s Marketing and Sales Technology research practice. “A successful CVM program requires a platform that enables marketers, sales reps, and customer success teams to collaboratively manage value realization as the foundation of true brand equity before, during, and after the sale. Outcome-based value measurement is key to raising B2B customer experience, account penetration, lifetime value, and margin.”
Value Leadership Certification
In addition to the new ValueCloud® bundle, DecisionLink also announced its Value Black Belt (VBB) program – a formal role-based enablement and certificate award initiative that empowers value professionals to engage customers in meaningful conversations throughout the entire value cycle from discovery to delivery to realization.
VBB ensures that value professionals across sales, marketing, customer success, and value engineering teams are prepared to fully and quickly leverage the ValueCloud® platform and its powerful collection of applications. In addition to providing all stakeholders with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to confidently and quickly unleash customer value, VBB provides an adoption success tracking method and platform to ensure management visibility and business success.
Each stage of the program specifies three checkpoints: competencies to be demonstrated, education to be completed, and an activity readiness test to measure progress. As competency expands within the program, participants progress from yellow to green to red and finally to a black belt, which signifies value leadership.