The Buying Experience Edge

Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show where value Pros get value ready. Hey there. My name is Bruce Scheer and I'm the host of the ValuePros Show. In this episode, we're featuring a LinkedIn Live webinar where we're talking with an incredible team of value pros including me, Dean Edwards, Darrin Fleming, David Spiegel, Todd Snelgrove and Mike Wilkinson, leaders who've spent decades in procurement science, sales, pricing and value engineering. And I actually ticked out my calculator and quantified it. But collectively, we bring over 125 years of expertise helping organizations sell and buy based on real business value. So together, we unpack the broken B2B buying experience and introduce to you the B2B Buying Experience Index. A practical research backed framework framework with 10 causal factors to help revenue teams influence and elevate the value they deliver at every phase of the buying journey.

Bruce Scheer: So if you're in marketing, sales or customer success and want to help your buyers buy and make the value of your solution crystal clear while standing apart from the competitive pack, this is an episode of the ValuePros Show you definitely don't want to miss. Let's dive in. Well, welcome everybody. I am so excited for this webinar. Today it's being streamed on LinkedIn as well. We are getting some mastery over how to handle that. Three successful attempts here. And so on this particular webinar, we're Talking about the B2B buying experience and gosh, we have a lot to offer.

Bruce Scheer: You're looking right now at the A team here who had a hand in shaping our new B2B Buying Experience Index. So anyways, just strap in. This is going to be a really good one. I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm Bruce Scheer. I'm one of the co founders, three co founders of ValuePros.io. I call myself a value vitalizer. My mission is to work with revenue teams to help unleash their inner value in helping their buyers buy.

Bruce Scheer: So that's why I exist. And for value pros as a whole, one of the big problems that we're solving in the world is something we call the value disconnect. So that's where sellers and marketers show up with geek speak that doesn't do a good job of connecting with the C suite. That, that's our catchphrase here. And we see that again and again. We've all been in industry for so long and we, we see this problem persist. So that's, you know, what we're trying to solve for. Typically you know, sellers show up like at this level, executives are coming in at this level, like, like two ships passing in the night.

Bruce Scheer: And that's where the value disconnect lies. So what we're really striving to solve for is value clarity. How can we prepare marketers and sellers and customer experience people to work with their buyers to connect the value dot so buyers can buy and stay buying over time and retain and achieve that value? That's what we call value clarity. And in one of our episodes that you'll find on our website or on our YouTube channel, we interviewed a very good guy who's not here with us today, Steve Miller. But he has a catchphrase that I love, love, love when the value is clear, the decision is easy. And so that's what we're really trying to drive for in helping our sellers and buyers buy. So that's a little bit about Value Pros. I'd like to introduce themselves.

Bruce Scheer: David, maybe starting with yourself.

David Spiegel: Sure. So I'm one of the co founders of ValuePros.io and my role is really helping clients understand how their product trans into financial outcomes for their customer. So looking at their customers status quo environment and creating a personalized financial justification. So, you know, clients aren't always oriented that way. So I try to, you know, help them adopt the language of value selling in their presentation and interface to the customer.

Bruce Scheer: Thanks for awesome, David. Yeah, you bet, Darrin.

Darrin Fleming: Yeah. So I'm Darrin Fleming. I'm also a co founder of Value Pros and also president of ROI Selling. And I've spent my most of my career evaluating business cases, evaluating cost justifying solutions, and really passionate about, you know, making sure that whatever you do is adding value to your customers. That's what it's all about. So looking forward to the discussion today.

Bruce Scheer: Awesome. Thanks, Darrin. All right, excuse me, I jump forward. Dean, do you want to go next?

Dean Edwards: Sure. Happy to. Glad to be here, everybody. I'm Dean Edwards. I lead an organization called Converge sbt and our role is to support salespeople and help them deliver better results through superior engagement with procurement. And I come from a background of nearly 40 years worth of procurement and supply experience.

Bruce Scheer: Thank you, Dean. Yeah. And gosh, everybody, Dean, you're going to see a lot of fancy tricks on the screen today. Dean and I are in a masterclass together. Learning how to really kind of sizzle on screen is one of our goals. So you'll see a lot that we've learned together. And, and, and I'm being a little bit happy on my slides here, Todd. You next.

Todd Snelgrove: Hey Bruce. And thanks for the invite to join Todd Snelgrove, Experts in value, 25 plus years in industry, trying to work with the sales side and the pricing side to quantify value, differentiate and value and equip sales teams to have that discussion with procurement because procurement's not our enemy. But we need to do our work and get the right business case with the right format, with the right methodology behind it in front of them and then be comfortable to negotiate and get paid based on that value.

Bruce Scheer: Awesome. Todd and Mike.

Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. Hi. Hi everybody. Thanks for having me. Bruce. I'm the UK representative here and I work predominantly with sales leaders and sales teams, really helping them to identify and convert more opportunities more profitably by focusing on value and value selling. And a large part of my journey is just helping people to understand exactly what value is so they can have a value conversation.

Bruce Scheer: Awes thank you so much. Well, let's go ahead and get into some of our content here. What I wanted to do is just highlight three key numbers that might keep us all up at night a bit in terms of what's going on in the world of buying. The first one, 75. That stands for 75%. 75% of B2B buyers prefer to have a sales free experience. And this statistic is relatively recent and came from Gartner and, and that should just pretty much horrify everyone. You know that, that you know the highlighting, you know how the sellers and buyers aren't connecting so much.

Bruce Scheer: So where buyers prefer to have a sales free experience, just rough. Secondly, 88, 88% of buyers will only buy from a seller who they deem to be a trusted advisor. That means they show up trusted and they bring advice. And, and most, most aren't deemed to be doing that, hence why they prefer to have a sales free experience. And then 92, 92% of B2B buyers of high consideration solutions or bold solutions, they've got to build a business case. And this is another Gartner statistic. Meanwhile, gosh dean on the line procurement leader said, you know, rare was the day he's ever seen a seller show up with a business case to help the buyer. And statistically it's probably 1 to 2 out of 10 reps in that neighborhood that might make an attempt at supporting their buyers and shaping a business case so they can buy.

Bruce Scheer: Meanwhile, nine out of 10 buyers need that. So again, just some major, major disjoints on the buying experience. And then here's a huge, huge kicker for you. 60%, 60% of opportunities or deals, they end in indecision, meaning the status quo won over or they just went into a drift. New priorities, new executives, the ship sails onwards. 60% of opportunities ending in indecision. Can you imagine all that time and energy and waste on both sides, the vendor side and the buyer side that goes through an opportunity process to end an indecision? It's a colossal bummer and one that we're all committed to help solve for. Can you imagine the revenue based on that? So all of these stats that I've talked about really lead to this point of a broken buying experience.

Bruce Scheer: Now at the end of 2024, friend of mine was acquired by SBI Ray McKellar and I read one of the reports that they put out after their big huge buying survey and here's what really stuck out for me. 59% of the influence on a bold buying decision comes from the buying. 41% of the influence on the buying experience comes from the offering itself. So when I saw that, I was just like going, damn, that, that's, that's hugely impactful. And, and given all those other stats, the Bryant buying experience is broken. So this gives a huge opportunity for how to up level the buying experience. So I brought that whole logic into my Christmas vacation of 2024 with this big question, how can we help revenue teams improve the buying experience? And I drugged my partners Darrin and David through, through, through, through the trenches with me over Christmas, our Christmas holiday, literally, you know, trying to get away from our families to kind of stay connected to this big issue here. How do we improve the buying experience? So we had multiple dialogues on this and then we also decided to tap some low cost associates.

Bruce Scheer: We went to deep research across ChatGPT, across PERPL and also Gemini, using all three, triangulating, trying to, you know, figure out how do we improve the buying experience, but with the key question, what are the causal levers or causal factors that would influence the buying experience to help buyers buy and help sellers sell more? So we looked at all that and then we also went to Dean, Todd and Mike here with us to test all this, you know, just based on all our collective experience, which is over 125 years, it's pretty darn awes of selling based on value and buying based on value, looking at all the results. And that's what helped us set the stage for this, what we're calling the B2B Buying Experience Index. So the 10 causal factors actually fit very nicely into the progressions of the buying experience. Now we know no Buying experience is the same, you know, and things can go all over the place, but you know, in general, this, these are the progressions, the phases of that buying journey. And here's the 10 causal factors nestled under each phase that if you, if you master these and you influence these key levers, these 10 key levers, you're going to elevate the buying experience. You're going to bring more value to that buying experience in helping your buyers buy and to retain those buyers so they can buy more and more often. So those 10 key factors you can see here under the whole framing of gain trust, we got to do that. That's job one.

Bruce Scheer: You got to be trusted, you know, between that seller and buyer. Then we need to move to clarifying the requirements, you know, what are we buying and why are we buying it? Then we need to frame the value and have a concerted approach for doing that. Then finally we needed to accelerate impact. So this is all built from a buying perspective based on all this deep research. And the deep research compiled all the major buying surveys over the last couple of years and we were looking at those surve findings to, to net out what are these causal factors. So that's what we're looking at. So in the, the beauty in all this is it makes it simple. There's 10 key things we need to influence to elevate the buying experience so customers can buy more and more often from us.

Bruce Scheer: So what I'd like to do next is, you know, talk about how we can help in influencing the buying experience and how you can excel assess yourself in influencing that buying experience. So the team here, we created what we call a value ready ass. And it's also got 10 different levers that you can get good at to be value ready across each one of those buying phases. So I'll go ahead and highlight where you can find that. This is free for everybody to use. You'll go to the ValuePros.io website, click on the Resources tab, then head down to the Value Ready assessment. And here's what you're going to find once you're in there. And this also shows some beauty of what David Spiegel helped create here for us in this value Ready assessment.

Bruce Scheer: So you'll come in, you'll, you'll see a greeting like this, you'll click start and kind of get into it. So for each one of these dimensions, these readiness division dimensions, and right now I'm just showing one, the justification ready dimension, we've got a rating scale. You know, where would you rate yourself? In terms of being novice and being justification ready or being a master. And you'll learn a lot just by reading these rating dimensions. The scale, really, really powerful. So you'll do this 10 times. So it's not a lot of energy, but you'll figure out, you know, where you're good, where you're not. You'll have a radar graph that shows that.

Bruce Scheer: And then you'll see, you know, where your weakest links are in improving the buying experience and some recommendations. But if you click on the report tab here, then it generates a PowerPoint presentation for you that has a really meaty, meaty report. So within that report, what you'll do is look at the priority recommendations. But then, you know, when you're in presentation mode, you can click on these YouTube links and you'll go into some really rich information. Here's Todd and I talking about how to be impact ready. And if there's anybody I've ever met that knows how to be impact ready, it's Todd. So you've got this, you guru, talking about best practices, some science based, some, you know, based on what he's witnessed, but you're going to have some real, real pithy, good content to start working on that dimension and improving your impact readiness. So it's powerful.

Bruce Scheer: And then if you go to the, you know, value pros website, you can see all that content all in one spot. If you click on, you know, where it says show one of the top tabs, you'll have all the episodes that relate to these value readiness dimensions that are featured in that assessment. So just a rich, rich resource for how to improve your value readiness to influence that buying experience across that full journey. So from here, what I wanted to do is just talk about each one of the phases of the buying journey here and how we can influence that experience across each phase. You'll get some high points from the team here on how you can do that and do that well. So I'll go ahead and lead off and just talking about how your buyers gain trust. There's three key dimensions for being able to do that and do that well. That's showing up credibility ready, customer ready, and narrative ready.

Bruce Scheer: So credibility ready. That's where, you know, gosh, you know, how do I show up online? If it's an online meeting, how do I show up in person? How do I Show up on LinkedIn, my profile so that buyer can say, hey, is it worth meeting with this guy? You know, and what have I published, published? Am I relevant? What's the messages I've sent to them, you know, am I making that powerful first impression that drives credibility and trust? That's kind of job one. Second customer ready. Have I studied that their, their organization? Have I used my AI tools to, to spider, you know, their 10K, their annual report, you know, their quarterly earnings call, you know, what's the CEO think is most important? Have I loaded up? Am I ready to add value in terms of being customer ready and then narrative? That that's something that's incredibly close and passionate to my heart. How do I have my first meetings with these guys? So in terms of being narrative ready, I'll just double click there just for a second. A lot of the wisdom that we bring to our clients comes from a best selling book that I wrote called Inspire your buyers go to go to market with a story that sizzles. I'm super proud to say it's been on Amazon's top four list for sales and selling management books four times over the last two years. It really works and it delights me that people get a lot of value from that.

Bruce Scheer: But within that book it lays out a very simple framework for being narrative ready. First, we need to design our narratives for the buyers we're speaking to. So thinking about the targeting the right buyers, then are we doing a good job of spotlighting the problem in their world in a way that they appreciate it, they see the cost of that problem. Then are we doing a good job of envisioning the desired outcome and all those associated benefits and the business values associated with that? And then are we doing a good job of showcasing the big solution? What's the the buyer need to do? And then how do we fit into that big solution? What, what's our solution piece to that puzzle in helping that buyer being successful and overcoming their problem and achieving their desired outcomes. And then does our narrative really prescribe next steps? It doesn't leave it to chance and, and helping that buyer buy. So that's all part of that first phase of gaining trust. And does anybody have anything they want to say about being, you know, gaining trust before we move on? Anybody have a point of view on the team?

Mike Wilkinson: Well, you certainly have a point of view on it. If you don't have it, if you don't have trust and credibility, you're never going to have the quality of conversation with your customer that's going to allow you to understand the things that are important because they simply won't share it with you. So trust and credibility is your entry point. It's the key.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks so much for mentioning that, Mike. Dean, I know I'm spotlighting you. Did you have a point of view? I know you've seen so much.

Dean Edwards: It's an area that is skipped over. And I see a lot of salespeople have one, maybe two meetings and they have an assumption of trust. And trust is built over a much longer period and it's a much softer process than they might think.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Well, thank you, Dean. Well, let's move forward here just a little bit. So clarifying your buyers, there's, you know, requirements that's kind of the second phase in the buying experience. And there's two, you know, major things that you can be doing to do a great job of that. It's showing up being buyer ready and then discovery ready. So in the buyer readiness dimension, you know, are, are you really, you know, putting yourself into the context of the buyer you're meeting with, you know, based on the role they play in their organization, based on the key metrics that they're trying to hit, how they're going to be promoted, the problems they're trying to solve? Are you really honing in to have conversations with those key stakeholders? Especially as you're multi threading across some of these bigger deals, making sure you're resonating with each one of the buyers that you're meeting with. Are you buyer ready? And have you studied not only their Persona, but literally them, you know, going off to their profile and what they care about, talking to others about that and just showing up buyer ready, discovery ready.

Bruce Scheer: That's something that Mike will speak to us about, you know, who's just absolutely a master in that dimension. So, Mike, you know, I was looking at some research. You know, buyers do want personalization. 72% want communication that respects their specific needs. And I saw, you know, another stat, 56% have walked away from deals that felt irrelevant. So, you know, I would contend discovery done right isn't optional. It's very, very intentional. So question to you is, what's the biggest opportunity most sellers miss when trying to understand, you know, the buyer? And how do you connect great discovery to relevant a high impact demo?

Mike Wilkinson: It's a very interesting question. I go as far as to say that it is in the discovery stage that we actually make the soap and we make the sale then, because, you know, the quality of our questions will help the buyer articulate what it is exactly that they're looking for. So for me, that sales pro, the discovery process is key. But the stats that you quoted, Bruce, I find horrifying and you will remember that I have one stat that I absolutely love and which comes from some Forrester research some years ago. And it was a verbatim quote within the report. And the report was all about senior buyers perceptions of the salespeople that came to see them. And for those salespeople who are watching this, I have to tell you that they weren't good. But it was the verbatim quote that got me.

Mike Wilkinson: And the quote was, only 12% of the meetings I have with salespeople has any value. And I just find that I really like to feel that the buyer was having a particularly bad day when he came up with that stat. But unfortunately, I suspect it's not uncommon. Does he demonstrate?

Bruce Scheer: Yeah.

Mike Wilkinson: Isn't that absolutely terrifying? That means 88% of the meetings that buyers have are of little value to them. And we talk about the need to be credible, to build trust, to show interest. And I think much of it, it comes down, I think, really to a failure to really engage with customers and really get to grips with both discovery and recognizing how important it is. We still have salespeople going in and talking about how wonderful their products are before they had any idea about what the customer is looking for. And I think when it comes to great discovery, great discovery conversations are exactly that. They're a conversation. They are not an interrogation. And I say to people, try to think about it as having a chat, chat with your customer and showing genuine interest and genuine curiosity in learning more about what they do and how they do it.

Mike Wilkinson: And I think that is a great way of building trust and credibility. And obviously the one skill that a lot of sellers really need to work on is listening. That's critical because that then leads you or allows you to do the other thing. Thanks, team. I think sellers are in too much of a rush. They are so keen to get to what they see as they end. They don't dig deep enough, so they never really understand what the problems are. They get a sort of surface level perception of what might be wrong and what the business goals are, but they don't really understand and they don't listen.

Mike Wilkinson: And I think actually that is probably the biggest opportunity sellers have. I think because so few sellers do it, those that do are going to stand head and shoulders above the vast majority of salespeople. I saw a great quote fairly recently and that was a great demo. Isn't just a tour, it's a response. So it's not a tour of all the things you can do, it's your really good tailored Response to the things that you know, are an issue or challenges for the customer. So that's it. So for me I just sum it all up up Bruce by saying I think weak discovery equals wasted damage.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Such wisdom there, Mike. Thank you so much folks. One, one quote that Mike's given me that just stuck in my head. It's in his books as well on Amazon. But his definition of value is value is a mystery and a great mystery. And I love your notion Mike about you know, really showing up with curiosity and collaborating with your buy to find and define that value.

Bruce Scheer: And the listening skills are certainly critical to that. So thank you Mike. That's awesome. I just know we could talk about all these things for so long. But I'll move on here. I want to next talk about how do you help your buyers frame value because they've got to do that in order to justify the solution that you're bringing to them them. How do they frame value and get that in front of the, you know, the decision makers who, who need to, you know, check off on that value. So there's, there's two key things, two key levers that you can pull that are part of that value ready assessment that we showed showing up demonstration ready and then justification ready and so on these two questions.

Bruce Scheer: I've got some questions that I'll probably start. Let's see here. Darrin, I'll start with you. So in terms of framing value, you know, how do you help sellers move from talking about features to fram financial impact in a way that resonates with the C suite? What do you have to offer us there? Darrin?

Darrin Fleming: Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I'm going to, you know, go back to kind of almost reiterate what some of what Mike said. You know, I like to think about that journey of discovery as you're becoming a student of the customer. You're trying to understand their business, understand how they make decisions, understand how they make money, understand their trade offs and then translate that a really good value pro. And that's what why we call it the company value Pros. A really good value pro is able to then say, okay, based on what our solution does, what offer our offering does, how will it create value based on how our customers will use it. And that's, that's the key thing is translating it not generically to you know, that it's going to, I'll just use an example. It's going to improve productivity of your knowledge workers.

Darrin Fleming: Okay, well fine, you know that's, that's all fine and good. You know, it's very generic. Well, is this company a hospital and your knowledge workers are doctors and nurses? Well, that's a very different type of value proposition. If you're talking about doctors and nurses and what they're going to do with that time versus if you're talking about an R and D facility in a manufacturing company where they're going to be more productive on maybe accelerating time to market with new products with that additional time or in a, you know, some, a professional services environment, it may be that they're able to do, to learn more and to, you know, gain more knowledge. So translating the fact that you're going to save time into what does that mean in their context, specifically in their business? And that's, that's not an easy task. It sounds easy, but it's not an easy task. And that's part of the reason. And we'll talk, talk some more.

Darrin Fleming: And actually we'll be doing a live demo tomorrow of a tool that actually helps to make that translation. You know, we call it Value Navigator to help make that translation to say, okay, well, our, whatever you're offer, offering is, it has these features. Customer doesn't care about features. Customer doesn't want to buy your product. And Dean can probably resonate with this. No one wants to buy your product and no one cares what your features are. They want the impact that your product's going to give them. Well, if you don't understand how they make money, how they do business, what they're going to do with your offering, you can't translate that into how it's going to create impact for them.

Darrin Fleming: And what you have to do is kind of, kind of intersect what you're going to help them do with how it's going to impact their business. And it's that discovery process of saying you're going to save time in this category of people, which means you're going to be able to increase your sales revenue. If you're talking about a sales team, you can spend more time talking to customers, less time doing other things, and you can increase your sales again. Another way of achieving that value, a hospital, a doctor or nurse can focus on more patients or spend more time with more patients, or get better outcomes from patients, patients, all ways of using that time that they're going to get. Each one is unique to their own circumstance and situation, all based on the same basic value driver of saving time. But that's not enough. You have to take it to put it in Their terms, in their context, in their business. So that's kind of how I think about it and I think it starts with as Dean said, that whole or Mike said, the whole discovery process.

Darrin Fleming: You got to understand what their problems are, how you're going to help them, how they're going to do things, things before you can translate it into how it's going to create value for them.

Bruce Scheer: Yep, perfect. Darrin, you know, you nailed it. You know that is so important what, what you're talking about. Yeah, I'm sure you know, from geek speak to C Suite, you might find other geeks on, on the buying side but very often they won't be the decision makers. Sometimes they are, but very unlikely. You need to translate to C Suite and you know, where is that impact and how do you even quantify that? And I hope everybody can attend the webinar tomorrow that features this new AI powered tool called Value Navig. Does a brilliant job of helping people, you know, look at that value, connect the value dots and showing where that impact lies. All AI powered.

Bruce Scheer: It's phenomenal. So switching horses here. David, got a question for you. So buyers don't just need to understand the value, they need to, you know, really share that internally with, with all the key stakeholders. So you know, big question that I get a lot and I'll ask you is when's the right time to introduce ROI tools or justification assets, Some of that, you know, ROI studies or case studies that based on business value and how do you make sure they actually get used inside that buying group? Do you have point of view to offer the team here?

David Spiegel: Yeah, sure thing. So you know, the, the rough time to do it is right in the middle of the sales funnel. So you know, as a seller you want to go through your discovery process, start to understand your customers status quo environment, you know, what are their challenges, what are their pain points and start to take that a little further to understand, you know, what your customer measures, what outcomes are they looking for, what KPIs need to improve for them to consider your solution a success. So you need to get all of those, you know, building blocks done first because it's essentially impossible to build the financial justification without having that information. But you also want to make sure that you get your business case, the financial justification built before finance or procurement gets involved, before, you know, you create your proposal. So you want to establish the value of your solution as it's meaningful to the customer before you submit a proposal. Some of the trigger points to listen for are, you know, if your Customer starts asking about payback period or they're asking about price or they're asking for a proposal, that's the time to get the financial justification ready. Or if the deal just seems stalled out, you can use use the financial justification to reinvigorate it.

David Spiegel: As far as your the part of the question Bruce around you know how to help buyers use the financial justification. Sellers, I think, you know, sometimes fall into the trap of assuming the buyer knows knows what to do next. And that's often not the case. You need to be able to help them understand the financial justification, be participants in building it so that if they get questions on on it, they understand the assumptions, the logic behind it, how it was built, is it meaningful to their organization. There's answers to those kinds of questions that they can provide. And then you want to help them shape the conversation. You realizing, you know, buying committees typically have, you know, five, six, seven people. So tell them, you know, your colleague from this department is going to care about these metrics.

David Spiegel: So you need to shape your response and your discussions with that person around those metrics tricks. So that's really how to do it is involve your buyer aim for the middle of the sales process once you've established, you know, your discovery the outcomes that are being looked. But then before you get into the financial discussions around price payback period roi. So I, I hope that really helps the audience here.

Bruce Scheer: I think so. David, I'm going to just show a mic drop. Really well, well done on that man. Really well stated. Well I'll move forward for us here just onto the, the fourth phase of this accelerate impact so you can see what the buyer's trying to do there and, and how you need to help them. But there's a, you know, three key things, three key levers in terms of being value ready that, that you can pull here. So and, and to think about, premeditate about and influence. Are you showing up approval ready? You know, are you helping, you know, the, the buyer connect all those internal dots stakeholders and who needs to say yes or at least, you know, not say no to move through the that that approval process negotiation ready.

Bruce Scheer: You know, taking Darrin and David's advice and, and Mike's advice so far to frame up the pro the right value proposition based on real business value to prepare you to have that negotiation. I'll tell you I was just talking to one of my old clients who had mentioned that seller came to the executive team and said hey, you know, would you guys be willing to give my client at 80% discount and you know, my client was, you know, my stakeholder was saying hey, you know, could you explain to us, you know, what, what the problem they're trying to solve is and you know, what that might be worth to him. And he's like, you know, the seller was kind of, you know, flat footed, didn't know. So went back and did some of the discovery work that Mike advocates for and was curious and hunted around and came back to the executive team, said hey, I think we should be chargin them more, you know and, and you know, no, no 80% discount and just got the whole value train set up properly. So you know that that's what I mean by showing up negotiation ready. When you get, you know, some crazy requests, you're really working the value part of that equation versus zero sum gain. Then 10 impact ready. Now this is, you know, only the few do this but you know, have you set up emotion for even for what we call first impact.

Bruce Scheer: But have you set, you define the metrics that you're going to influence the business value associated with that and, and, and some critical few measurements that can be captured that you can look at with your buyer and, and hopefully have a celebration and or identify some areas for improvement to achieve that promise and the value associated with that promise. That's what we talk about being impact ready. So I want to ask my, my gurus on the line here. Just one sec here, Dean. I had this hooked up for, for your good looks so much here. But Dean, we'll start with you and what can sellers do earlier to ensure their approval ready? I know you and I have talked about that quite a bit and don't get stuck in procurement finance, legal or infosec. How can sellers help influence that? Based on your, your experience from procurement,

Dean Edwards: there's a lot they can do and the guys touched on some of it about building the trust, asking the questions. First thing is diagnose the approval landscape at the outset. Map out who are the approvers. It's not just the stakeholder, the economic buyer, but also the functional gatekeepers, whether it's procurement, finance, legal, infosec. And you need to be asking questions of procurement or other stakeholders. What are the groups that are in the company that typically need to review a deal like this and even ask. Ask them where do they see deals like this usually getting stuck because that's where you can help concentrate your efforts to support them. Then you need to preempt the internal objections.

Dean Edwards: And this is going to be a bit alien to a lot of salespeople, but you need to think like a procurement person. You need to shift from being close ready to approval ready. And sellers are often coming in, trying to prep for a close and then neglecting to prepare the internal stakeholders and ready the internal approval gates. So you need to anticipate pushback, thinking like procurement or legal and saying, what would this contract pricing model or this risk profile pass? My own sniff test, my own scrutiny. And what you're trying to do is simplify their job, make it easier for those teams to say yes and move the deal faster. The third thing is come with approval assets. And it's the type of stuff that Todd does so well, not just sales data. So bring procurement ready materials, a standard MSA or redlined contract template that the customer has, have the security and compliance documentation ready.

Dean Edwards: That becomes an interminable delay because there's too much to and fro. Get it out of the way early. And for your pricing, have a breakdown with justification logic. What David was saying about having the value in mind as you come in and emphasizing that, and this is something I really emphasize, come with case studies where you've addressed similar concerns for procurement or legal around risk performance and so forth. So you need to frame the risk as being managed, not implied. And you need to offer frameworks that quantify risk mitigation. They don't just assert it. And too often it's, yeah, we have a risk management now, what is it? How does it work? How does it come together? The fourth, and I know you do this with Value Navigator and I know Todd's on top of this, is quantifying the cost of del approval.

Dean Edwards: Teams are wired to avoid risk and many cases avoid a decision, which is why you get your stat on the number of efforts that end in indecision. But that's partly because they're not aware of what the risk of inaction is. So come armed with impact projections every month of delay cost x comparative benchmarks. Others in your space have seen these results in 60 days. This is what it's costing you by delay. Then fifth, involve procurement as a strategic ally, not an obstacle obstacle. Reframe their role and look at it as your goal is to support them in helping their internal teams achieve their goals, which is an internal alignment that procurement's really driving for, whether it's compliance, savings, delivery, performance. So position your offer as enabling procurement's goals.

Dean Edwards: Use their language, total cost of ownership, supplier resilience, service levels, and use that language to align your solution with their success matrix.

Mike Wilkinson: Success 6.

Dean Edwards: Build a proactive approval narrative. You're not in the room. When procurement or legal is presenting their perspective on the offer, you need to give them the tools and equipment to be able to go in. Because a bit like from the musical Hamilton where the character wants to be in the room when it happens, you're not in the room when it happens. If you're in sales, typically you've got to equip procurement finance leaders, legal to be able to represent your case clearly, articulately and be able to defend positions. Lastly, set expectations early. Let the buyer know that you're going to support the internal approval journey and really partner with them. So you see often legal or infosecures where there's delays, come up with resources, checklists that you can share with procurement so they can review the stuff in parallel trial, not sequentially.

Dean Edwards: And I'm a big proponent of sales engaging with procurement early on to get the contract in front of them. That's probably, along with infosec, the biggest cause of delay in a sale actually happening. Extending the cycle time. If you get it out, the way to start it makes it so much easier and it makes it more comfortable for the organization to approve the sale because they're confident that you've agreed to their terms of nitpick conditions.

Bruce Scheer: Wow, Dean, there's so much there. I won't unpack it. That, that's just huge, Todd. I, I, I, I dare you. How do you build upon that? So I've got a question for you, Todd. You know, Todd, you pioneered value guarantees, which I've just been blown away, especially your Harvard Business Review case study on that. Oh my goodness, really powerful work that you've done. So how do guarantees change the dynamic for risk averse buyers? And how should sellers set them up without over promising what would you have to offer us there?

Todd Snelgrove: Best thing I can do is give you a story which that article was based on and maybe it'll tie into some of the comments we've had as we've gone along here. I did about 200 and something of these agreements with Fortune 1000 companies, these B2B companies around the world. So it's not industry specific. But why did we do it? A lot of customers were pushing back saying everybody's in here saying that they bring value. You're all the same, you're close enough, why bother? So that was the market we were in and we believe we were better. So came back and said, look, we'll guarantee value. This goes back to the discovery conversation. But once we agree on what is a value, you, for example, do you care about energy, we don't care about labor cost.

Todd Snelgrove: I'm making these up. But what you care about, what's the priority? Let's do these things and then if we agree on what's the value, I will guarantee you that I will find you a 10% annual improvement totally dollar wise in that area. Then we had to do a little bit of the education, getting the customer to say, well wait, 10% price reduction is easy. I can scream and threaten and leverage. And I said, but 10% value every year is better. And we won't go through the math. But real quickly, a 10% price reduction is a one time hold on a five year contract. So let's say you're selling a million dollars worth of software or product.

Todd Snelgrove: You know, 10% of a million is 100,000. So five years and a million would be, a 10% reduction would be $4,500,000. And the customer said yes. And there was the functional buyer, there was procurement in the room. I said, but we're willing to give 10% value per year that we've agreed on that you care about. So the first year you're right, it's $100,000. So price and value aren't any better off. But I might be able to exceed 10% and if I don't, I'll write you a check.

Todd Snelgrove: I think that's probably where we started to get some interest. Okay, so my risk aversion's gone down. There's a chance I could do better than 10%. But the next year I'm going to do another 10%, another $100,000, the next year another $100,000. So inventory, downtime, energy, people, whatever was agreed to, to it turns out, and we drew this on a board that a 10% price cut on a million dollar contract over five years is $500,000. A 10% per year value is $1,500,000. It's worth three times as much. And I remember them going, wow.

Todd Snelgrove: And this is where some of the credibility come in. I had some procurement expert relationships, some of these professors and say, that's right. So it wasn't just a salesperson with a, you know, doing magic numbers. I think that's where the trusted advisor stuff might have come in. And a tie into that, which I think leads to the trusted advisor was the passion because the customer said afterwards, you actually believe this. You truly are in here saying this is a better way for us to partner and work together. It's not just a PowerPoint slide that says you Know our company brings value or whatever then, which I've gotten better at over the years, was a process to implement because maybe the first time was we'll find value. Well, wait, we define what value is.

Todd Snelgrove: We prioritize what it is. Here are my four ways to find this. I need access to these people. We'll do an interview or a survey. You need to share certain KPIs with us. You need to give us your top. I mean, because in the early days, sometimes the customer would say, you go. And my team would go. Nobody will talk to me. They won't give me information. I don't have access. I can walk the plant. And you ask somebody, do you have any problems? Problems? Everything's fine. It turns out the term fine is relative if we're used to our pumps lasting two years. So if we don't have data, we don't have. So we put a structure in place for that.

Todd Snelgrove: And then we said, okay, we're going to have ongoing meetings. What's in the pipeline, what's working? Where are we when there's a win? We're going to have it signed off, maybe a case, then we're going to replicate. And out of 200 of those that were signed, we never wrote a check. And the best part of it is when a chief procurement officer would leave one industry or company and go somewhere else and they'd get an E email. It didn't mean anything to me. It's like, hey, we met once here. You did this for this company. I met this industry.

Todd Snelgrove: Do you have the ability to do it here? Because procurement wants to bring value, but they want it measured real, not warm, fuzzy. Relationship. I'm nice, I'll take you for dinner. Doesn't quite cut it. Relationship's important. I won't buy from somebody I hate unless I have to. But at the same time, you have to bring more than a few funny things, jokes. So hopefully that ties some of the stuff the team pull together. How many jokes help? But, I mean, you need a little bit more.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah, no, good. Good point. Sorry to cut you off visually there, Todd, in systems here, but yeah, that, that was wonderful in terms of quantifying with them. You know, what, what's the, you know, instead of discounting what's the value that you could gain? And. And how. How do you again, talk about being negotiation ready and impact ready, you know? You know, all in one sweet whoop in order to help that buyer accelerate their impact? So. So perfect play. I'll just review real fast.

Bruce Scheer: So we covered you know our B2B buying experience index. We went phase by phase mapping together those value ready dimensions that you're going to find in that value ready assessment off our website and all the resources behind that. If you go to ValuePros.io the show, you'll, you'll see all, all this rich content where we go, you know, way deeper into these dimensions. And it's interesting, you know, the, the accumulation of all this is what Darrin David and I have coined as a total value experience. And you can see the B2B sales isn't easy. There's so many disciplines and that you need to be really good at. You know, combined with, you know, telling good jokes Todd and being likable. But you know, you, you, you know, there's just so much that goes into driving a.

Bruce Scheer: A better B2B buying experience point that SBI had. 59% of the influence is based on the experience. That's where we can stand apart and, and gain the edge, you know, and, and win more and win more often. You know, gosh, right now in the market, a stat I saw across software firms, their win rate is 15% to 22% and I've talked to organizations that are way worse than that. You know, winning less than 1 out of 10 deals. This is really a way to, you know, get the ship sailing straight and, and, and win more and more often by, by thinking about the disciplines across this. So I want to thank the guys here for showing up and just creating so much value in this webinar. This has been so fun for me.

Bruce Scheer: Everybody just see seeing us all come together at once to, to lay this out for, for the world. It's so powerful, full and just three things that I'd love to leave you with. Three, three ideas take advantage of the resources that we've got. If you hit our website under resources, there's, there's so much there that are going to help you to improve your buying experience for, for your organization. I'd say double down on building business cases and just another, you know, call to action. There's a webinar tomorrow on that with our new AI powered, you know, Value business case building tool. You'll also have a link to it off of our, you go to Solutions Value Navigator, you can get into that world if you can't make the webinar tomorrow. And then third, you know, we the team here, we're here to help.

Bruce Scheer: So you know, if you need any help on business value content and messaging, you know, getting your narrative straight, getting your story straight and get Everything heading down the tracks the right way. We can help you with the content or like what Dean was saying. Do you have those case studies, value stories that are going to help substantiate what reduce risk and build confidence on that approval side. So we'll help you with your content and messaging. Secondly, we've got the tools that are there to help you and tools that are buyer friendly, buyer facing that you can use assessment tools like what you know you saw with the value ready assessment or value calculators, et cetera. We build tools that support those buying journeys and help that buyer buy and then thirdly enable so we can help you, you know, if you're trying to do this at scale across your revenue team, we can help with the, the training and big deal support and, and coaching and, and really help them have these disciplines that are going to influence that buying experience and help help you guys grow your revenue. So that's what we're all about. And I just want to, you know, thank everybody for, for being here, you know, as part of this whole, whole thing.

Bruce Scheer: It's, it's been really, really rich for, for all of us. So thanks attention and helping us with this mission and helping everybody be value ready and you know, influencing that buying experience. On that note, we'll go ahead and end the webinar here. Thanks so much. What a rich conversation that was. A few key takeaways stand out for me. First, trust isn't earned in one meeting. It's built through relevance, preparation and presence.

Bruce Scheer: Second, discovery isn't optional. As Mike Wilkinson put it, weak discovery delivery equals wasted demo, bad value justification, bad negotiations. Just all the way down the line. So think of it this way. As coined from Mike, value is a great mystery that you must cover, uncover together with your buyers. And finally, buyers don't just need to see the value. They need to justify it, approve it and realize it. That means showing up value ready at every step, giving them the information they need and the tools and just making sure they are quick equipped to have that internal battle for you.

Bruce Scheer: So for me, the biggest insight was the reminder that 59% of the influence on a bold buying decision comes from the experience itself, not the offering. That's both sobering for many vendors and incredibly empowering for those who want to stand apart and deliver a better total value experience. So if you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the ValuePros Show. And if you're feeling kind, leave a review view so others can find and enjoy it too. Thanks.