Value Based Selling

The Celera VBS Solutions Group Helps Companies Achieve Superior Growth

The Celera Partners VBS Solutions Group, unique in today’s marketplace, specializes in providing best practices focused on jump-starting your company’s VBS capability to achieve faster organic growth. Specifically, our VBS sales/marketing experts help you create a VBS go-to-market model, an “ecosystem” that institutionalizes knowledge transfer, expertise, and skills to the rest of your company so that it can, as a whole, adapt and execute repeatable and scaleable processes that deliver timely and growing revenues. A laser focus on creating value for customers drives everything at best-in-class organizations dedicated to making VBS a part of their company DNA.

The Celera VBS Solutions Group has a credible, proven, field tested VBS go-to-market methodology. We help you focus on building business around the customer, rather than just the products/services you sell, and leverage the full range of potential solutions your company can provide. Drawing on the expertise of our VBS Solutions team, together we design and build your sales/marketing organizations’ VBS capability to utilize ground breaking thought leadership and intellectual property and knowledge management around best practices in proven value drivers, TCO models, and Key Performance Indicators. Finally, we help you identify and recruit the world’s leading VBS sales/marketing executives.

Celera comprises professionals with deep industry and functional business experience as well as top academic credentials.

Why is Value Based Selling important?

One of the biggest challenges, especially for global 3,000 companies today, is that they do not have an integrative, top-down system to deliver the whole company to the customer. Traditional siloed organizational structures inhibit collaboration which is critically important to drive organic sales growth. Today’s post Internet hyper-competitive marketplace is more volatile, faster and vastly more complex. Since 2001, there have been ten out of the largest fifteen bankruptcies in history. The topple rate at which incumbents are loosing their leadership positions has doubled in the twenty years leading up to 1995. Extreme competition in the market has changed the way in which companies interact with customers and prospects. It is all about sensing and adapting to the market faster and better as well as assuming responsibility for driving value in customer operations. The substance of selling is itself in flux…and mastering Value Based Selling is the next big thing for companies seeking to build a robust and sustainable go-to-market model.

What is Value Based Selling?

Value Based Selling is a sales/marketing methodology based on (understanding) customer specific operational and financial benefits to be gained from selling a “ business solution”. The operational and financial benefits are predicated on customer specific strategic challenges and (enabling strategic) objectives related to growth, profitability and capital utilization.

As companies market their service offerings in today’s tough business environment, they face clients who must, more than ever before, be able to fully justify every dollar spent. To sell successfully, therefore, companies must powerfully demonstrate that what they offer adds real, verifiable value and increases return on investment. Lacking such compelling evidence, customers facing tight budgets and higher levels of scrutiny will simply not make the purchase. In this environment, companies that fail to demonstrate the value of their products/services will lose business to those that have embraced VBS best practices.

Successful VBS oriented marketing and sales organizations earn their success by clearly identifying customer-specific operational and financial benefits to be gained from a given business solution, then creating the value-based solutions that address the challenges at hand.

In developing value propositions for solutions, a different approach is required. VBS managers start not with a product but with a desired outcome for a customer—an outcome that could encompass a whole range of service offerings. The new VBS model is a holistic, all-encompassing, altogether different go-to-market approach. In its full form, VBS affects and integrates everything from product development and marketing to the positioning in each cycle and providing services to go with them.

VBS leaders take early ideas and solutions developed on strategic accounts and make them repeatable, more modular and scalable so that they can be marketed to customers in many more sectors. This approach drives organic revenue growth as it always moves from one-off solution offerings to more broadly productized ones.

What can VBS achieve?

In the 2003 time frame, a global market leading technology company built a VBS capability. Our client is in the third and final phase of rolling-out their VBS go-to-market model. VBS is proving highly lucrative. During the past 10 quarters, the company has sustained a 92% sales success rate, dramatically increased deals in the pipe line, accelerated the sales cycle by 30%, and decreased SG&A. They have created an additional $41 billion of market capitalization, with value growing from $10/share in October 2002 to $43/share in July 2005. The market has generously rewarded our client because their VBS go-to-market model is seen as creating durable shareholder value built upon a hard to copy VBS capability that is highly differentiated and resists commoditization. Our client is on track to grow revenue by 400% in less than five years.

Contact us directly to learn more about how our VBS Solutions Group can help you jump-start your company’s VBS capability.