New Release of Next Generation
It’s an exciting time at Ecosystems as we have just released the next generation of our Outcome-Based Selling platform for the Salesforce AppExchange. While the purpose of Ecosystems’ platform is clear –empower ‘as-a-service’ providers to collaborate with customers on the value of attaining business outcomes– the focus of the new release is unique.
It’s not about the customer, it’s for the customer.
Ecosystems has enabled a shared cloud workspace through Salesforce that provides the end customer with capabilities near equivalent to the seller themselves. Customers are provided a full authoring environment to:
- Explore libraries of business outcome templates
- Activate and refine templates (or even create new ones) to maximize their relevance.
All the while, the customer’s activity and insights are broadcast back to the larger sales account team through Salesforce.
Latest Innovation
In the following, I outline the ‘Why?’ behind the design and focus for Ecosystems’ latest innovation:
- Need for objectivity In recent years, I have witnessed growing contempt from buyers for seller-provided value propositions. In fact, I have seen buyers formally refuse such deliverables. Many times this ‘fox-in-the-hen-house’ sensitivity is only solved by immersing the customer in the framing and refining of the full value conversation.
- Getting to the real reason An evasive but critical piece of information for sellers lies in a simple question: What is the real reason the customer is buying? While it is helpful to have default content to launch customer conversations, having the customer deliberately activate and modify relevant business outcomes surfaces the true ‘why’ behind their decision to purchase.
- Deal qualification There is no better way to identify deals that will come down to a pure cost discussion than give the customer every opportunity to focus outside of investment. By providing customers the outlet to exercise thoughts on desired business outcomes, Ecosystems helps our clients qualify real deals with customers capable of a partnership conversation. In fact, Ecosystems tracks customer activity in shaping business outcomes and feeds it back into Salesforce opportunities to qualify and validate sales stage progression.
- Customer experience Ecosystems’ clients remind me that our software is frequently the first software their customers see. I don’t take this lightly. We are an extension of their offerings and we need to replace webified spreadsheets and ROI calculators, with an elegant environment for co-authoring and modeling to provide a new level of professionalism and customer experience from day one.
- Customer on Customer A lot of times the best conversations are when the provider is not in the room. Ecosystems empowers the mobilizers and champions of the provider within the customer’s organization to self-identify and quantify relevant business outcomes and present them to the necessary internal stakeholders.
- Delivering customer insights to the larger account team Customer insights on desired business outcomes and perceived value are too critical to remain as a local conversation between a sales representative and their individual contacts. Visibility to the customer’s insights on desired business outcomes is provided for the benefit of the entire account team through Salesforce.
- Getting customer insights into the larger product team Centralizing customer insights on business outcomes are not just of value to the sales teams. Aggregating insights across accounts provide product teams with precious visibility to the desired outcomes driving customer buying behavior.
If you have Salesforce and you are looking to establish a repeatable, scalable process for customer-focused, outcome-based selling, come learn how Ecosystem can help.
