At Salesforce’s recent Dreamforce event, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, announced Agentforce, their suite of AI-powered agents, which automates tasks across Salesforce’s platform. With this release, Marc Benioff also announced a move to usage-based pricing, also known as consumption-based pricing. They believe this shift to consumption-based pricing will more authentically align with their value delivery. This move also requires Salesforce to now demonstrate their value on-demand within the product.
As Salesforce goes, so does the market. Organizations on consumption-based pricing scramble to demonstrate value within their product at scale. Our Customer Value Community Value Disruptors, an elite group of progressive leaders in value for top B2B companies, workshopped the move to building value realization in products, and these leaders shared their top insights and strategies to align product and value.
1. Look at the Long-Term Versus Short-Term
One of the common challenges that value teams often face is getting your organization to think about the long-term versus the short-term benefits of integrating value realization into the product. When you come to the product team with big asks about historical data, also known as telemetry data, such as adding specific tracking information to a product or service before launch or asking for historical data on a product, you may receive pushback. In the short term, this is a time-consuming and strenuous task, like any big change in an organization.
Communicating the market-shift to consumption-based pricing and therefore value is required to remain competitive. You need to educate your team about how this will make the process more efficient and effective over time, thus increasing the growth of the company. One of the best ways to demonstrate and support your claims of long-term success is by looking at the data.
2. Focus on the Data
The easiest way to gain buy-in around value realization alignment is by looking at the metrics. If you can show your product team that by utilizing telemetry data about your product from customers, you can demonstrate value realized to help increase renewal rates and falling GRR and NRR rates.
When engaging with your product team on value, bring the data to them first. If you do not have much data, do it anyway. It is better to start with small data pools than to delay stalling for lack of data. You have to start somewhere to gain buy-in around the importance of aggregating data to create benchmarks for success.
3. Make Data Collection Easy
Once you gain initial buy-in from the product team, the next step is to focus on collecting more data. The easiest way to start is by using what you have already to create the first benchmarks and present these to the customer. Explain to them where they currently benchmark against their competitors and ask them to opt in their customer data for anonymous benchmarking.
From here, focus on the products that will be easiest to collect from the start. If you have online products that store customer data, focus on these first. You can then work with your product team to see how you can improve your current data collection system to give you more information to collect.
4. Implement Value During the Product Release
By aligning with the product team from the beginning, you can establish what data would be best to collect and make it part of the initial launch, versus asking the product team to go back and change existing data collection systems or asking them to dig through and aggregate old data. You will most likely receive more pushback when trying to change existing systems versus helping build them out from the beginning. If you work with the product team on upcoming launches early, you can create a robust data collection system that will make it easier to demonstrate value.
Ecosystems’ Eco Web Services (EWS) helps you transform the way you deliver value to customers by allowing you to couple product consumption with quantified business value. You can leverage pre-built cloud services and APIs to convert the telemetric feed of product usage into customer-centric insights on value realization. To learn more about the EWS, contact us.
