Most companies struggle to understand the following:
- What customer value does your solutions deliver?
- What products offerings wins business?
- What underlying trends should influence future development?
All these questions links back to sales and calls for some clever analysis. We wanted to see the links between customer need, product selection and likeliness to win the deal. This was a starting point for the value selling project two years ago.
Value selling is all about understanding the value the product portfolio delivers to the customers. Value differs from price in one very specific way - it’s different for every customer. Therefore it’s important to initially work with segmentation of the customer base.
The next step is to understand the value delivered. This is done using value equations where customer dependent variables are combined with various research results. In this way the value for a specific customer can be calculated, discussed and agreed.
One of the important data sources that we identified early in the process is information from the sales configurator. By analyzing what’s selected (and not selected) together with what resulted in sales (and rejected quotations) one can start getting a good idea of the characteristics of offerings which are perceived as good value by customers.
This is a concept that we hope we can deliver to more sales configurator customers in the future. That is why we'll start working with Tacton in early February.
