The purchasing process in today’s B2B SaaS environment is heavily scrutinized due to budget constraints and the desire to reduce the size of tech stacks.
Value selling has gained popularity by helping alleviate budgetary concerns and ensuring customers receive and recognize benefits from solutions, leading G2 to launch its new Value Selling Tools category.
While many different GTM teams are responsible for ensuring value is realized by prospects and customers, this category is currently housed under the Presales Software parent category, as solution consultants are often the first drivers for showcasing value to prospective customers. Although presales or solutions departments aren’t the only business units that drive value, they are key in helping quantify a solution's potential and realized value.
What are value selling tools?
Value selling tools, also known as customer value management (CVM) or value realization tools, enable teams to quantify the business impact of a solution better. They help ensure that the value is realized. These tools automate the creation of business cases and return on investment (ROI) calculators.
Infusing value selling throughout the customer lifecycle
Solutions in this category help infuse value throughout the sales cycle by providing quantifiable data to showcase a solution’s impact.
Value selling tools enable organizations to adapt value-selling methodologies and frameworks by aligning value throughout the sales process through renewals. These tools enable teams to focus more on driving value and business impact a solution may have instead of purely selling a product based on features.
Value selling tools can and should be used by a variety of GTM teams, including:
- Sales teams: Uncovering prospect’s pain points and desired outcomes and aligning a solution’s capabilities that can solve specific problems.
- Solution consultants: Supporting sales teams by building business cases and ROI calculators that quantify the value delivered compared to the investment.
- Marketing teams: Infusing value in all personalized messaging, ensuring it’s tailored to that persona’s, or industry’s, unique needs, and enabling a prospect to build a value case on a company’s website through an ROI calculator.
- Customer success: Understanding the value that was ‘sold’ to the customer, what outcomes they want the solution to deliver, and creating a plan derived from actual outcomes to recognize value received throughout the customer relationship.
G2 users review value selling tools
Although the Value Selling Tools category is new to G2, buyers and reviewers alike have realized the benefits of leveraging these tools. Below are a few excerpts from reviews of different products in the category.
“It is redirecting the focus of the conversation from features, to the value and creating the business case for the prospect. It is giving a clear hard number, or hard savings, making it easier for the potential buyer to understand the positive impact the product would have on their business.”
A reviewer of Cuvama
“Without Minoa, there are countless hours wasted personalizing templates. Plus, every customer of ours has to ask the question - will our tool provide a tangible ROI? The answer we can now share with them is YES. It can, and it will. The ROI calculator offering is very clear cut, and we love sharing it with our customers.”
A reviewer of Minoa
“It’s a complete solution for ROI. I’ve been using it in my daily basis to create Business cases…Create ROI, Business case. It supports our sales team to deliver a proposal that matches with customer expectation.”
A reviewer of Mediafly
“The simplified, easy-to-use interface that allows you to put together an entire ROI presentation with a few inputs is a gamechanger for a sales org. Allowing reps to showcase a proper professional business case to a prospective client is key for all late funnel opportunities. This tool helps increase win rates nothing else needs to be said.”
A reviewer of ValueCore (Formerly VisualizeROI)
Although value selling isn’t a new concept, there’s been a surge in products in recent years that are aimed at driving value selling methodologies.
As shown below, some products have been in the market for many years, whereas, since 2022, many new products have come to market to increase the efficiency in creating business cases and ROI calculators.
When budgets are constrained, lead with value
Given the increasing scrutinization of new tech spending, it is imperative to lead conversations with value rather than features and showcase the quantifiable impact a solution can have.
Value selling tools increase transparency, and thus trust, with a customer by demonstrating the value a solution can have quantitatively and then aligning outcomes and realized value throughout the relationship to reduce churn risk.
Explore the latest trends in digital sales room software and the increasing focus on buyer enablement.
Edited by Jigmee Bhutia
by Priya Patel
by Emily Malis Greathouse
by Subhransu Sahu