Elevate Your Total Value Experience with Bruce Scheer and Darrin Fleming

Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePro Show, where value pros get value ready. Hi. My name is Bruce Scheer, the host of the ValuePro Show. In this episode, we are talking with Darrin Fleming, fellow cofounder at valuepros.io and a seasoned expert in applying value based strategies and driving go to market success. Together, we'll explore the transformative concept of the total value experience. It's designed to elevate how businesses deliver value at every critical touch point from initial interactions to post sales engagement. This episode is packed with insights into creating value centric strategies that enhance win rates, shorten deal cycles, and foster lasting customer relationships. Let's dive in. Well, Darrin, I'm so excited to talk about this new bid idea that we have that, for 2025, which we're gonna be talking about so much, but it's called total value experience. Shortened, it's TVE. So really excited to get into it with you on this.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. No. It's I'm really excited too because I think that it's definitely got some game changing concepts and ideas that I think we're gonna go through here.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Well, let let's jump in. And, I got this technique from corporate visions, but it's called grabbers. And I've got 3 key data points that I just think are gonna rock everybody's world here. And I believe these data points still hold true right now as we roll into 2025. 75, 87, and then 59. So according to Gartner, 75% of b to b buyers prefer to have a sales free experience. I'm gonna pause for effect right now. Pause. That is a big, big ass number. Okay. So the second number, 87. 87% of b to b buyers expect to be interacting with a trusted adviser, and that comes from salesforce.com, their their state of the the union report that they put out each year. And then finally, Darrin, 59. 59% of of the influence, the impact on a buying decision, a bold buying decision. 59% of the impact comes from the go to market experience that buyer has with the organization and the marketers and sellers involved with that experience. Only 41% of the decision making is impacted by the offering itself. And, again, this is b to b, but 59% of the impact comes from that go to market experience. And this is a pretty credible source as well coming from SBI. So, Darrin, these three key, data points, you know, just to summarize, 75% of buyers don't wanna interact with sales. They prefer a sales free experience by, as according to Gartner study, a credible source. That's horrifying. If the seller makes it through, 87% of buyers expect to be dealing with a trusted adviser, which they're normally not, just to be honest. And then 59% of the, of the experience, that's 59% of the impact on that buying decision. And given that 75% stat, we know that many b to b organizations are completely dropping the ball and turn to that go to market buying experience. So over to you, Darrin. Any reflections?

Darrin Fleming: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm just thinking about this. I went back through just thinking about over the last year or 2. My own experience, my own buying experience for especially software products, fast products and different types of things. And I don't remember the last time I talked to a sales rep. I I literally don't remember. And the when I did go back to the years, it wasn't necessarily a positive buying experience. It was it didn't help enhance the buying experience. It it actually was more negative. I typically do an evaluate online myself, so I totally totally resemble exactly exactly those numbers. And, you know, if I do talk to someone, it's because I wanna understand how it's gonna help me, help my business. I don't wanna demo the product. I don't wanna, you know, a, a feature function discussion. So it absolutely matches my own experience.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. Yep. So, Houston, we've got a problem. We we literally really do, and, this needs to get fixed. This is our the reason we exist, Darrin, in, you know, in in this partnership for valuepros.io. We've got a big problem in the overall buying experience, the go to market experience in the b to b world, and, we're we're we're sold out for trying to fix it. So that brings forward our big idea, what we're calling a total value experience. And so for people watching this on YouTube, they can see, you know, we've got a an arrow from left to right. 1 the left, start of the arrow is is labeled as low. On the right side, it's labeled as high. And then labeling the overarching arrow is total value experience. And so this is something that, you and I coined together with our other partner, David, thinking about just how do we elevate the overall experience. Now total value experience, just to provide a definition, what that is is the cumulative total value of all the the critical touch points and interactions that your organization's having with that buyer, both up to the point of, signing a contract and beyond making sure that buyer receives value, the impact that has been promised. And, so we see that as the total value experience. So it's not just the offering value. It's actually even the value of all those critical interactions. And, and and the whole emphasis here is how do we increase the total value experience so we can improve our win rates and and help those buyers buy at the end of the day.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. Absolutely. And it and, you hit on a key point there that it's more than just during the buying experience. It's also getting all the way to value delivery by giving that, I was actually just having a conversation with a a customer the other day, and they actually recognized that their selling process ends when they get a signed contract. And then they've had cases where 3 months later, they go back and say, oh, we haven't talked to the customer since then. And, you know, they they've kinda dropped the ball on making sure that the customer actually starts to get value from what what they sold them.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. I'm I'm telling you. And even immediately after signing contracts, I've seen some new data from Gartner. I'll do another episode on that, but most buyers right now in 2025 have buyers' remorse even sometimes days after signing the contract. You know? Because they're they're still overwhelmed and lost and don't know they don't see the value. So and, there's another episode that we did with Chuck Macaulay, and, I love that episode where we're talking about first impact. Hanging in there with the buyer, setting up, you know, follow on meetings to make sure you're measuring for and delivering on that promise of first impact and the value associated with that. So some some of our clients are building that functionality literally into their product and so the the customer can see it real time, but many aren't. And and so you need to, you know, orchestrate a meeting where where you prove the efficacy of that solution and and the associated value with that solution. So, yeah, just big issues here. So just to move the story along here, we see 3 key barriers that, get in the way of providing your buyers, your customers with a high total value experience. These barriers keep the value experience very low. The first one's perspectives. The second one is tools, and then the third barrier is disciplines. So what I'd like to do next is just break down each one of these, each one of these barriers. And and what's holding go to market teams and revenue teams back from providing this high total value experience to their customers. So as it relates to perspectives, Darrin, what I see and you see very often is just a product centric perspective where, the marketing team and the sellers, they show up answering the wrong question. And the question we'd call it, why us? They're answering the question of why choose us, our product, over competitive alternatives. And let me tell you what's awesome about our product. It's got this feature. It's got this feature. It's got this feature. It it does this type of function, and here's some of the benefit associated with this. But isn't it a great product? Don't you need it? That's the focus both from the marketing side off the go to any website. You're gonna see product center content. And then if you and and then sellers, especially junior sellers, will show up with a product centric point of view. Again, answering the wrong question. Why us versus why change? And what's the urgency of that change? So just the wrong orientation, product centric orientation. Any thoughts, Darrin?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. No. Absolutely. I I remember years ago when we first started working together, we were working with a customer, and we were reviewing some of their content and their website. And I remember you specifically saying, and this was probably 15 years ago, and or maybe even more. You said, it's all about you, baby. And it was their whole content was about their product, their offering, their service, nothing about the customer, nothing about what the customer is doing. And, unfortunately, that's still true today for most organizations. So

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely.

Darrin Fleming: Focusing on the customer first is a critical critical element.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. Yep. And we'll move into that. But, you know, just to agree, you know, the predominance of this product centric approach, It's not resonating with the buyers. It's not resonating with their contact. It's not talking about the value that they're they're losing their cost of inaction. It's not talking about the potential upside, the outcomes. It's literally focused on on the stuff, which is a dangerous place to be. So that's the first barrier perspectives. The second one's tools. And so, you know, metaphorically, I think of of a, you know, trying to put a square peg into a round hole. And and that's how I see most tools that are being afforded to, to the buyers in in this world of of trying to provide buyers a a a higher total value experience. Most of the tools that the sellers are using are almost even like a ball and chain. They're kinda holding them back, or they or they, you know, they they don't use them or don't want to use them, and they're very often very internally oriented, like a CRM system, for example, or a account development form, you know, that they need to fill out. You know, just activity level tools that don't translate into real value for the buyers, for the buying experience. Any thoughts, Darrin?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. No. I totally agree. I mean, I I think that across most organization, most of the tools provided to sales are more for internal management reporting and understanding of what's going on. CRM tools are for management. They're not really, in most cases, for the the sales, and it's certainly not about the customer experience, which is kind of interesting because it's called customer relationship management. But they typically are more focused on internal metrics than internal things, forecasting tools, like you said, account development tools. It's all about how is it impacting our business, not how is it gonna help our customer make a buying decision.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yeah. And and things are getting a little bit better. Gosh. 1 of our, one of my former clients, gong.io, can really jazz up a CRM system and make it more relevant. But that's that's the exception, not the norm that we see. Now fine the final barrier is disciplines. And, you know, from our experience, we might see, you know, high performers within an organization. Some of those sellers that that, you know, that that do help their buyers see the value and quantify the value, but it's random at the end of the day. Random acts of value is what I might call it. And, it does happen, but randomly and not and not often enough. And, so those are the 3 key barriers. Any any other thoughts, Darrin, before we move on?

Darrin Fleming: No. I yeah. Totally agree. I mean, you'll see spots. And even people who are good at it don't do it consistently. I mean, you know, it's, you know, still it's easy to just slip back into focusing on the product, focusing on the wrong things, you know, and, not have the right discipline to really always be customer centric, always be customer customer focused.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. Yep. So it it's still Random Acts, etcetera. So so these three barriers, perspectives, tools, and disciplines, what's the cost of these barriers? Here here's what it's costing, in terms of win rates. Right now, you know, a vendor, if they're lucky, might be winning 2 out of 10 deals. And, the unlucky ones are winning 1 out of 10 or sometimes even lower than that. Rarely would they win more than 2 out of the 10 deals, that they're pursuing. So win rates are just in in a trash can right now. And and, you know, these these barriers and the these lack of discipline, lack of the right types of tools, and the product centricity really do hold everything back and and end up with very low win win rates. Secondly, deal cycles. When the when the customer can't see and articulate the value, let alone themselves, how do they go about selling, you know, 10 plus people on the buying committee? You know? And and, hence, you've got these proactive deal cycle, sales cycles that, you know, 60 to 70% of the time end in no deal at all. You know, just complete inaction. And then finally, you you'll know if you're providing a low total value experience because there's gonna be more discounting pressure where where the buyers are gonna go, I don't see the value, and you guys are charging too much. You know, I I need some serious concessions here if we're gonna move forward. So you're gonna have way more price pressure discounting pressure. And then, for people watching this, I I do have an unhappy smile face here. Emotionally, this this is kind of a sucky situation. Everybody's losing. The buyer, the buyer's unhappy. Sellers that are trying to serve the buyers are unhappy. Leadership's unhappy because, you know, things aren't moving forward in the right type of way. Everybody's kinda losing in this low total value experience paradigm, again, presented by these barriers. Any thoughts, Darrin?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. No. It's I mean, I would just take the load cycles or long deals deals cycles one step further, and I think you talked about it a little bit, the indecision. It's, you know, the the dreaded no decision, you know, where you still think you're chasing this deal, you still are pursuing it. It's not lost yet, but you never get it over the goal line. And the customer is frustrated at that point as well. The buyer's frustrated because they can't get it approved or they can't get the budget allocated or whatever. So it's not just long deal cycles. It's wasted time chasing deals that are never gonna close if you can't get a business case.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Great great point. And, yeah, I've got another, disheartening quote, but 92% of buyers of technology solutions need a business case. And, one of our affiliates for Darrin and I, he's former head of procurement for Levi Strauss and also CDW. And he mentioned rare is the occurrence where a seller comes in and helps with the business case, you know, which which protects that sales cycle and very often ends in inaction. No no deal for nobody. So, we call this whole situation that, that we're painting, we're calling it value disconnected because there's typically great value there. It's just not connected into that total value experience you're trying to deliver to your customers. And, you know, sometimes we refer to that as the value fog. Everybody's kinda lost. Nobody's seeing clearly. We, but in this instance, we're calling it value disconnected. So let's talk about a better way, Darrin. Let's let's let's turn the corner and talk about how things could be. So on the perspectives barrier, the the the better perspective to have is like a magnifying glass on value. 1 of our affiliates out of London loves to talk about value, and his definition of value is value is a mystery to be solved for. So if you think of Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass, you're out there looking for the value, and you're working with your buyer and and getting their point of view on where the value is gonna be. And you're you're mutually shaping the value proposition together solving for that mystery. So that's, you know, on the perspective side. On the tool side Well, so I've got I've got

Darrin Fleming: a point of yeah. Just I've got a quick point. You know, around that that I it just reminds me of back about the time we met. You know, Stephen Covey kinda put it best in habit number 5 out of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit number 5, seek first to understand and then to be understood, which then it's it's the same thing applies and people still don't do it. Seek first to understand the customer and understand their perspective and how it could create value and where their problems are. That should be the first goal, not to have them understand what you're trying to achieve you know, what you wanna sell to them.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yeah. And there's a lot of chatter on LinkedIn, etcetera. Just just how everybody falls down on discovery, and it's just so critical to to listen. You can also offer point of view. You can speak, and and and lead the witness as long as the witness is led and believes in that. So you you really it's this cocreation type thing that you're trying to get into. And that's the second point. What helps in doing this is having the right tools. And, visually, I'm painting a picture of 2 smiling faces, one of the revenue team, the other of the buyer, both looking at KPIs. Whose KPIs? The buyer's KPIs, obviously, you know, trying to see in their universe, what are the metrics that you can you can manage for and influence to help them get promoted, to help them get the value that they're seeking. But, you know, having both the seller and the buyer, on the same team with with tools that help them figure that out. And, again, most sellers don't have the tools, and and, you know, some of the high performers try to whip things up on spreadsheets, etcetera. But, you know, the we do believe there should be this more external orientation, buyer centric orientation of what tools can we provide that are really gonna support this total value experience. So that's the second, barrier there. Uh-huh, Darrin?

Darrin Fleming: Yep. Absolutely. And it's and, you know, the more you can tie it to business impact, the outcomes that the customer's gonna see, and the more you can tie it to what are their overall objectives? What are the priorities of the business? How are how is what you're gonna, how you can help them gonna tie to what their executives are saying. These are our top three priorities, making sure you understand because the more you can tie it to their overall, executive priorities, the the better chance you're gonna get of actually being able to, get funded. Absolutely. The deal. Win win the deal. Absolutely critical.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. No. I well put. And then the on the third side, on the disciplines, what we see is a much better way is, having a set of disciplines that you can follow to increase the consistency of creating a high total value experience for your customers as they're buying with you. And, we offer a framework for that, thinking about 4 phases where you really need consistency to drive a higher total value experience. The first phase of the relationship with that customer is building trust. And and there's a number of disciplines around doing that. The second phase is around understanding their needs, just like what Darrin was saying, you know, seek first to understand before you're understood. You know, really diving in with deep discovery, doing your homework first, of course, but for diving in with deep discovery with your your your buying champion and and different stakeholders to figure out where what are their needs and where where's the potential value point. So that's the second phase. The 3rd phase is deliver delivering insights with with your buyer. Where do we see the potential value? What's real? What might not be so real? But figuring it out together and presenting that, justifying that value, and and quantifying for it. So that's the 3rd phase. And then the 4th phase is, like Darrin said, many, you know, customer sellers, you know, they sign a contract and run, you know, but but sticking around, making sure that that promise is being delivered. Driving execution is what we call that. So four key phases where you need to have consistent behaviors that are gonna, you know, result in this total value experience, a very high total value experience. Darrin, comment.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. No. Absolutely. It's all about, you know, I you know, we taught a lot of people talk about becoming a trusted adviser, everything else, it's all about helping the customer, you know, create value for the customer. I mean, in the end, in a b to b setting, you're selling money, you're selling money to your customers, so you need to understand how you're gonna help their business perform better. And it actually goes to what we named named this business, Value Pros. You're you need to become a value professional. You need to become a value professional, helping the customer understand value, identifying areas of impact, and then taking it all the way through to actually delivering value for the customers. And that's what being a value professional is all about. A value pro.

Bruce Scheer: Love it. Love it. Absolutely. So, the benefits when when you get this right, you know, all those negative, metrics that I talked about, you know, the low win rate, of course, you're gonna increase your win rate when you lead with this value and and and provide a greater total value experience. Your deal cycles, they'll be shortened, and you'll know if it's go, no go way faster when you're leading with value. Of course, if you lead with value and help shape that value proposition in a very clear way, a very credible way, very compelling way, then discounting, you know, it might not go away, but but it it, the buyer won't have as much power over that when when when that's really well stated, and, everybody understands it. And then, also, everybody's having more fun. And and, you know, when you're providing a greater total value experience, your buyers love you more. Your sellers wanna stick around and have more fun because they're kinda killing it now and and having a much better selling and buying experience. The the marketing team, they're enjoying life, you know, because they're creating better content and seeing better results as a result of that. If you're a leader, you're having more fun because, not only do you have a a a happy revenue team, but you're hitting your financial targets. So there's a lot of upside towards improving the total value experience in what we've been talking about. Any thoughts, Darrin?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. No. It's, absolutely. I mean, it's it's all about, like I said, value pro and delivering delivering value to customers, allowing, you know, helping cost helping your customers, businesses perform better and make more money. And if that's where you focus, everyone's happier. Everyone wins.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. And I would just give this, a label to this whole, you know, desired state of creating a greater total value experience. I'm calling it value energized, Darrin. What one of my keywords for 2025 is energized energy. And, when when when you're leading with value and helping to shape value, quantify value, that's what I call value energized. Everybody's gonna be more energized at the end of the day because because they could see and understand that value. So critical.

Darrin Fleming: Rather be value energized than value disconnected for sure.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, in terms of, what are the key drivers then to making this happen to be value in you know, how do we energize with value? What's needed? So the first thing we would say is value content. So if you wanna shift the perspective from, you know, off of the product and onto the value, How do you do that? It doesn't it doesn't just happen on its own. Value content will lead the way. So you'll have a value narrative, and and what Darrin and I are doing with you right now is a perfect example of this. We've got a narrative that we're that we're sharing with you. Secondly, value studies. You know, looking across a number of different customers and just looking for pattern, where are they seeing the value, and how can we swing back and write about that, communicate about that, and and use that as a basis for quantifying value, those studies, getting our benchmarks from them, etcetera. And then value stories. So, you know, client x, You know, here's what their situation was before. After we arrived, here's the type of metrics that they've been able to to to really improve in their world. And then, emotionally, here's what they have to say about it. So really anchoring case study by case study so your revenue team has more to, help them in communicating that value perspective. Thoughts, Darrin?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. No. Absolutely. And it's and obviously, we're focused very much here on the selling, the buying process, the customer bought buying experience, and everything. But this starts all the way back with product management, and developing the right product, understanding the market, understanding the needs of the customer, developing the right products, marketing, communicating appropriately based on how it's gonna deliver value in that value content, value narrative all the way through the sales on the buying process with, the the message through the narratives through the sales process.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. So that's on the value content side. So the the the next key lever in making this happen is putting together value tools for your revenue team. You know, for, you know, these tools can sit off a a of a website and and marketing might own those, or these tools could be used directly with sellers and the buyers as as part of that, you know, person to person type of movement. But enabling your your team with value tools so they can help to communicate and quantify the potential value. So the the type to tools that, you know, just for example, you know, preparation tools. I know there's a lot of AI this and that out there, but, you know, are you providing the right tools for your sellers and marketers to truly understand their target buyers so they can do a better account based marketing or actually, you know, prospecting and outreach and having direct selling conversations. But showing up prepared, showing up relevant. So, again, we I swing back to that stat that 75% stat, and your own experience, Darrin, mine as well. We'd rather run from sales and engage. But if if those sellers had the right tools, had the right perspectives, showed up value ready, ready to deliver insight that we'd appreciate, it'd be a a, you know, perceived so much differently. So that's preparation types of tools. We have one that we offer called value brief. Secondly, assessments. You know, what are we talking about here is what we're trying to answer in terms of why change. You know, is this a little change, big change? You know, what's the delta? What's that look like? Assessment tools can just be brilliant in helping, the buying organization get their head around the problem and the degree of change required and also the outcome if they do change. So having a solid assessment is wonderful, in in that spirit. And and we've got another episode on this where we did a deep dive on what constitutes there's different types of assessments and what constitutes good versus bad, etcetera. I'd encourage everyone to watch that episode on assessments. And then thirdly, and this is, you know, an, of course, type of thing, but you wanna have value calculators. And there's different flavors of those, value calculators, ROI calculators, TCO calculators. And, it's funny. Very often, we'll talk to clients and and they'll say, oh, yeah. Yeah. We've got a value calculator, and and we'll ask, hey. Could you show it to me? Give me a minute. Dang. Okay. Good. Give me a few more minutes. And and, you know, they, a, they can't find it. B, you know, it's maybe some nasty spreadsheet that a financial analyst put together, from the from the finance team who didn't really understand the customer's world, etcetera, but whipped something up. That's not what what we're talking about. We're talking about, you know, something that's concerted, really well made, and something that people want to use.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's as you said, value value assessments. And even even if you can get it all the way to a benchmark assessment to say, here's how here's how you compare. Here's the big rocks of of things that we've seen across other customers, other parts of the market. How do you compare, and what's the value that you could create? And not jumping too quickly too. We see, as Bruce said, we see a lot of people say, oh, we got an ROI tool. We got a spreadsheet that we build the ROI business case that no one uses. It was too complex, or it jumps too quickly into trying to get to the ROI business case, which it's early on, it's more about highlighting and demonstrating where's the value, what are the problems, how much is it worth to solve this problem before you try to get to the cost justified business case. That's the last step. That's that's at the end of the process, not not too early. So that's you know, if you jump too quickly to that, it can slow down the process or turn off the customer.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. Especially if it comes across as being very vendor cent centric and product centric. Now we're trying to be customer centric upfront and talk about, hey. What are we talking about here? What's what's the potential value? And what's the potential cost of inaction? You know, that if we don't move forward, what's the downside of this whole thing? What are the risks associated with this? Having kind of a bigger conversation, upfront. So that's the value tools. That's the second key lever that's really gonna help everybody move to a, you know, provide a a greater total value experience. And then the 3rd key lever is value enablement. And what we mean by that is, you know, providing your team with with a playbook on, you know you know, hey. You know, where where's the go to market, strategy leading us? You know, what what what segments? What what's our ideal client profile? What are the personas we're targeting? And then, wrapping around some of the content that we talked about. You know, what's our core central narrative that we're gonna be talking to those buyers about, and and where's the potential areas of value? Where's the potential areas of risk if they don't change? Having, you know, and then also within those playbooks talking about how to use the tools that are being provided. Just having everything wrapped up, just thinking about maybe a football team analogy so everybody knows who's on 1st, 2nd, you know, who who's doing what, when to be successful in in in selling, the the solution. So the playbooks is a key part of value enablement. Secondly, training. You know, many sellers, especially junior sellers, might not have the level of business acumen, might be uncomfortable, and so they need some support in having better value based conversations, and and training certainly is helpful in that. And then thirdly, coaching. You know, coaching for managers. How can they be a do a better job of helping their first line reports do do a better job of, value selling, if you would, and having those value conversations? And, how can they be better managers in that process? So those are the 3 key levers that we see in driving a higher total value experience. Again, value content, value tools, and value enablement. Value content helping to shift the perspective from product to value. Value tools helping to, you know, break away from some of the internal tools to using tools that are truly gonna drive a better buying experience. And then value enablement, which is gonna take care of that lack of disciplines, and inconsistency of disciplines problem, through through value enablement.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. Absolutely. And I, you know, I I mentioned Stephen Covey in 7 Habits earlier, but when I think of value enablement, I think of, you know, the the whole sharpen the saw, you know, that you're constantly trying to be better. You're trying trying to become a value pro, trying to deliver value to customers every day, and be focused on that as your number one priority.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well and then, you know, a a bit of a punchline here in in our story. Value pros dot I o, you know, the reason we're existing is to help people have a greater total value experience, provide a greater total value experience. And we do bring together the value content, the value tools, and value enablement. We've got capabilities and and experience across all these three key levers that our clients can leverage, you know, based on where they need support. And, Darrin, just a quick one. We've done this type of work. This isn't our our first rodeo. You can see both Darrin and I. We've been around the block and and worked with many organizations. And, but, you know, we we've worked with some of the best of the best. You know, we we, put together our overall program for Tableau before they, had their IPO. Most all of our clients, at Tableau are multimillionaires now. They they kinda hit it big. SAP, we've worked with them. They acquired a company called Success Factors, and we did a bunch of work with them, you know, both on getting their story straight with a value narrative and then, you know, playbook that helps everybody understand, you know, you know, what's our go to market strategy, and who are we focused on, and what are the key personas, what's key messaging and talk tracked, etcetera. And then how do we have that value conversation? Especially, trying to enable more of the sellers to have more of the value conversation versus constantly trying to get the attention of the value engineering team? How could we enable the sellers to be more self sufficient, at least up front, to get the ball rolling before the value engineering team gets involved? And then, Darrin, do you wanna talk a little bit about Verizon?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. No. We've been working with Verizon for years on enabling their sales teams to sell, you know, enterprise level, IT and telecommunications solutions. And, you know, change the way they sell it from, you know, selling the technology, selling the features and functions. I mean, they're selling a platform. They're selling a enablement set of enablement technologies and really focusing on what is the customer trying to achieve, what what are they trying to solve for, and how is the enterprise solution around telecommunication going to enable them to achieve those business outcomes that they might not be able to achieve otherwise. So very focused on the the whole value value experience within within their enterprise sales.

Bruce Scheer: Well, Darrin, this has been a great discussion. Why don't we just, come up with a few concluding remarks? I guess my big wish is, for this whole notion of a total value experience. I'm hoping that this dialogue was helpful to you in thinking about how can you create and drive for a a higher total value experience in 2025 with your clients. And, you know, we offered several perspectives on that. Perspectives, we talked about tools, we talked about disciplines, and we talked about some of the key levers to try to improve that. So, my biggest wish is you you got something out of that and and some ideas perhaps that maybe where where you can put some emphasis to try to create a a a a higher total value experience. Darrin, any thoughts you have? Yeah. No.

Darrin Fleming: It's I mean, and along the same lines, you know, what I would say is wake up every morning if you're, you know, customer facing, if you're on the revenue team for or anyone in individual contributor, marketing sales, whatever it may be, wake up every morning thinking about how am I gonna become a value professional and deliver more values to our customers, both through the buying process, through the interactions, and make sure that we're enabling our customers to be better every day and make more money. If you can do that, you're more likely to be successful than not.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yeah. And then I'll for also the sales leaders and revenue leaders, the CROs of the world watching this, and and enlightened marketers, you know, it's time to probably shift emphasis towards a value centric strategy, especially if you have a high consideration solution. And and, you know, you're not a 100% into the product led growth strategy. Tableau, for example, was, but they decided to shift their strategy towards value where we got the opportunity to work with them. You know, thinking about how do we land more, you know, bigger deals, more enterprise deals. How do how do we move upstairs into the executive offices to have those types of selling conversations? So if that's part of your strategy as well, we we yeah. Hopefully, this is useful, and we should talk. But Darrin, on that note, thanks, Darrin, for your contribution. This has been fun.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. Same same year, and hopefully, everyone got value out of it. Yeah. Take care, everyone. Alright. Thanks.

Bruce Scheer: To wrap up, we dove deep into the total value experience, a game changing approach to creating meaningful, measurable value throughout the buyer journey. For me, the most insightful takeaway was the emphasis on breaking down barriers, perspectives, tools, and disciplines that hold companies back from achieving success. It's a powerful reminder that leading with value isn't just a strategy, it's a commitment. If you enjoyed this episode, please like like and subscribe to the ValuePro Show. And if you're feeling kind, leave a review so others can find and enjoy it too. Take care.