Rob Howes (Co-founder of Enterprise Sales Club) recently interviewed Jayd McFerson; Jayd is a veteran Value Consulting Leader in the software industry. Currently the Head of Value Consulting at Collibra, a leading data intelligence software company.

Previously he held similar roles at ServiceNow, Workday, Pivotal, and Oracle. The Value Consulting role is important to help customers & prospects to identify, define and quantify the business value of implementing a software solution.

Jayd shared great insight on how to succeed and close large deals during a pandemic. This episode is a stellar guide on how to use value consulting to identify “business outcomes”, the process of unlocking funds and a new take on how to position and maintain credibility.

What is the process you follow with a prospect?

· Rarely get in front of the actual C suite audience, we rely on our sponsor or champion to make the pitch on your behalf.

· A key unlocker for Jayd - How do I leverage this relationship to get to the right level?

· Someone has to carry your message – your narrative and data proof points.

· Focus for Jayd is to prepare the individual to sell when you are not in the room.

· Quite often we have no choice, and this person has to do the job for us.

· Our role is to be resourceful and make the most from the situation.

What are the key steps?

· Usually our contact has a technical perspective, not articulating it in business terms.

· When you have given enough of the solution, we need to pivot and engage the business to ask what commercial impact our solution could have.

· Structure the pitch early.

· Framework to give people structure, that speaks to that final conversation with the budget holder.

- Test it – say your CEO walked in here right now ‘why would this be important to them’?

· What is the problem we are trying to solve?

· What is the root cause?

· Why can’t we solve it today?

· When the problem is well defined and jointly owned – you are off together.

· Provide value by focus on growing the top line, margin, or mitigating risk.

How important is it to know when the customer perceives ‘enough value’?

· Law of large numbers, even small element of value when scaled becomes obvious.

· Before you talk numbers and spreadsheets:

A) Establish there is a priority problem

B) Customer is confident we can solve this problem

C) Have you jointly visualised the material difference solution will make?

· Real ‘conceptual lock’ on desired outcome only then throw some numbers at it.

· During a recent ‘swing deal’ won by Jayd and Rob they got to a point where the customer said that is big enough value for us to move ahead. The numbers are not perfect but reasoned and conservative.

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