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hello and welcome to pragmatic life pragmatic marketing's webinar and podcast series where we tackle the biggest challenges facing today's product teams my name is kerstin Bhutto and I'm an instructor with pragmatic marketing and I will be your host for today's event before we get started I would just like to quickly review a couple of housekeeping items first a recording of this webinar and a copy of the slides will be available tomorrow at pragmatic marketing.com /live and we will send out an email with a link to this recording second questions we love questions if you look to the right of your screen you will see a Q&A box feel free to enter any questions and we will get through as many as possible at the end of today's event with that let's dig into the real reason why you're joining today's webinar and that to discuss mastering the complex sale and how to get paid for the value you create you before I get into the subject matter and introduce our speaker Jeff tool for the day I wanted to give you a little bit of background to pragmatic marketing one of the most persistent questions I hear when working with clients is how do I create successful products and go to market strategy that deliver the biggest return on my investment as experts in technology product management and marketing its pragmatic marketing business to study this question we have a rich history in helping companies succeed by implementing the pragmatic marketing framework a practical results driven blueprint of the 37 key activities required to bring remarkable profitable products to the market and to help you master these activities we offer comprehensive curriculum real-world insights and proven tools to help you succeed and with that I'd like to go ahead and introduce today's speaker Jeff Stowell Jeff tool is the president and CEO of prime resource group he has designed and implemented business transformation and professional development program for companies including shell Siemens 3m Microsoft and many fast track startup companies Jeff is also the author of several best-selling books including mastering the complex sail how to compete and win when the stakes are high welcome Jeff Thank You Kirsten it's good to be with all of you today let me let me start out by just maybe taking us a little bit through an agenda a bit of an overview here I want to talk about first of all the three eras of selling and how selling in business development has progressed over the years and in parallel look at how the marketing tools and support has progressed over the years and maybe help folks get an idea of are they in line with the progression what do they have what may be missing and then we're going to look at three challenges that I think people are seeing today and and those are decision change and value in other words we're not really talking as much today about a sales as we are talking about guiding the customer through a decision process and finally how do we get the customer to really believe their business their situation is missing the value we could provide and then believe we have the capability of helping them achieve that value so it's a matter of belief and how do we guide them through that so let's start out with the definition of what really is a complex sale and I'm sure that definition varies across all of your minds but I think about it first and foremost as a decision and it's obviously a business decision in in the case of b2b sale but it's always a personal decision that we're always looking at this decision as to how it will affect our personal goals be it business or personally related then it's probably a technical decision in the case of many of your solutions and in the healthcare world we can count a clinical decision as part of that but the fundamental reason it's complex is that the customer doesn't have the capability the experience the background to really make this decision by them this by themselves they require outside assistance and and I think about that very much as the same as a doctor-patient relationship we're all very capable people but when it comes to that particular area of expertise we really need a healthcare professional to help us collaborate with us as we go through it so I want you to think about these areas of expertise where it's required and then we're also going to think about what type of marketing support marketing tools collateral really are required to do each of these so we're saying the customer needs outside assistance or expertise in the area of diagnosing their situation or diagnosing their their problem their lack of opportunity they may not even know or recognize they have a problem that's something we refer to as normalize pain they think things are going quite well they may be even improving in some of their metrics but if you look at it in terms of what your solution can provide there's quite a bit of a performance boost you could give them so so how do we help them diagnose and understand the exact nature of their situation secondly even if they could diagnose the situation completely they probably don't have the expertise to actually design a optimal solution they don't know the options that are available the the alternatives they don't know how it may interface or interact with their current situation their current systems and and processes so they need that expertise to help design the solution and then finally even if they could diagnose completely and they could design the optimal solution they may not probably don't have the expertise to actually implement the solution effectively or optimally they may not be able to deliver the results by themselves and that's where things like customer success and professional services and so forth come into play but basically thinking about how do you provide that expertise in in those three areas as we proceed here now taking a look at the three eras of selling we did this survey number of years back when we wrote the first book on mastering the complex sale and when you look at the sales in terms of the types of tools the salespeople were given the skills they were taught the role they were asked to perform for the company it becomes very distinctive as you start sorting through the literature the books and so forth it fell into these very interesting three piles so to say and we kind of start era one looking back in the middle 50s which seems ancient of course but at that point in time corporations started treating selling more professionally more as a process more education came around it and so forth but the tools the salespeople were given at that time were primarily the sales script there was here's where I want you to go here's what I want you to say and if you say this the customer might say this back to you and if the customer says this I want you to say that we don't want any creativity we don't want any thinking here if we wanted innovative people we would have hired someone else that's the saying goes the skills were very much focused around presenting and of course closing the ABCs of selling always be closing and what we wanted the salesperson to do was to be a persuader now back in air one I'd also suggest to you that value was very obvious you typically had a solution that was very new to the marketplace and when the customer looked at that solution they quickly understood it could be helpful but basically era one was about bringing brag show-and-tell spray-and-pray cram and jam you know grab them by the tie choke them till they buy it was a very aggressive approach to selling and it didn't take customers very long to get fairly annoyed with the whole process that gave rise to error to really starting around the the early 60s when you saw books like councilor selling and consultative selling coming out and the thought was we ought to be paying a little bit more attention to the customer we ought to start listening we ought to start asking a lot of questions doing a needs analysis building trust building relationships and be more of a problem solver so now you saw the tools of marketing move to or those activities so salespeople were given a list of questions to ask they were given needs to look for they were taught how to teach and and so forth there's a very interesting assumption that underlies there are two because when you look at those behaviors you could easily say today well what's wrong with that why should we be changing away from those behaviors and I will suggest we we shouldn't necessarily be changing away obviously from the art of asking good questions and understanding a customer's needs and listening and so forth but there's an underlying assumption in era too that I think most people most organizations miss and and that assumption is that the customer understands the problem to be solved and the customer understands the best way to go about solving it now obviously that assumption was very true early on in era too but as problems became more complex and solutions became more complex that assumption begins to not hold true and I would ask you to think about that in your own organizations with your own solutions but if that assumption no longer holds true then the way we approached era 2 becomes very inefficient so for example the questions most sales people were taught to ask were questions that were basically calling for the customers self diagnosis it was it was questions to understand what the customer believes the problem actually was and I wouldn't say that is something you don't want to do the question you want to be looking at is how capable are the customers from performing a self diagnosis it's almost again if I think about doctor/patient if I were to go in for my annual physical and the doc says Jeff how you how you doing I'm going to say fine because I don't want to have any problems that would cause any poking and prodding and cutting and so forth but the doctor will kind of persist and say oh anything concerning you anything keeping you wink at night and after a few of those questions I'll probably respond something like well you know I'm getting to the age where I've had a few contemporaries of mine that have had heart problems and and tragically one of them recently just just passed away and it was it's like I just don't want that sort of surprise happening to me doc is is there something that you could do is there something you could help that prevent that that's sort of a heart attack thing and the doctors will sure Jeff we can do that tell me you're thinking about angioplasty or more towards the area of open-heart surgery now that to me that's the example of there are two that the doc immediately is asking the patient what they think they want to do for a solution and obviously that patient I'm not capable of answering that question properly so that's really what takes us to error three if you're looking at your customer base and saying yeah there probably isn't a complete ability to self diagnose or self designed or self prescribed and deliver then we maybe need to be looking at error three and so what we're saying in error three is the role of the sales professional is to be a source of business advantage and and what that means is is how do we help that business grow how do we help it become more profitable in order to do that we need to have tools to be able to diagnose we need to be able to look at the business process analysis in a sense of how does that customer make money what are the processes in those businesses that enable them to make money and how does our solution specifically impact those processes and like a doctor's diagnosis what sort of symptoms or indicators would we expect to see that would tell us there's an inefficient process taking place there's a lack of the value we could provide and of course the skill is we're saying the sales professional needs to understand the business and of course hey hey just listen Kirsten I just have a quick question here I think this is really great how you break this down on the timeline and give the a sense I think of I think of Glengarry Glen Ross who doesn't love the scene from the movie for always be chosing moving into really thinking about how we can actually advantage a business what do you see on the horizon for era for I mean this stands a pretty significant chunk of time what do you see on the horizon what's next well it's an interesting question we got from the first day we offered Era 3 everyone wants to know what's next one one interesting thing I would say is the percentage of companies and sales percent professionals operating at a level of error 3 is in the single digits of percentages so so one could argue with so few people doing at this effectively there's plenty of room for a additional performance however in the last few years with the advance of technology what what I would say Christmas for for Air f4 is to be thinking about the types of technology that can support what we're talking about here so we're working with clients and we're developing diagnostic tools that that guide the diagnostic process guiding the sales professional to collect those symptoms in more or less like the lab tests medical diagnosis or an MRI scan and and put those pieces of data into simulation technology which really gives the customer a very clear picture of their if you will absence of value and the pathway through the processes and how they're going to be changed and affected by the solution it's it's really giving your customer an MRI scan of their business and a before and an after projection from your from solution soap so that's my current answer for what is therefore look like being able to apply artificial intelligence and simulation technology things of that nature into the process great thank you sure and a on some when you're when you're looking at your current sales operations what might you expect to see if you're operating in an era one or two and you really should be in error three and and some of the things have been around for a long time but they're very very telling about the absence of the air three approach you're going to have a longer sales cycle the forecasts are going to range all over the place with that longer sales cycle and increased activity of a higher cost of sales and you find yourself losing the competitors with much less valuable solutions in the sense that the customer is not able to distinguish or understand those differences in value like one of the most alarming statistics we're seeing on the increase is the number of sales opportunities that are projected to win and they actually end up losing to no decision in other words the customer doesn't buy from a competitor it doesn't buy from your organization in fact they they do nothing and that percentage has gone over the last seven years from in the low 20s to the high forty percentile so when you think about forty plus fifty percent of sales activity ending with no outcome it's it's very costly and then of course to compensate for all this we find ourselves having to discount at the the 11th hour and that kind of leads me to a question I'd be curious as to the thoughts from the audience here as you look at your proposals that are going out there in your sales organizations what percentage would you say are falling into that no decision category in other words the customer does not make a yes or no decision within what you would consider a normal cycle time and want you just jot your thoughts just a quick number in the chat box when kind of see what you're all thinking Jeff will what people think about that and give us a little bit of feedback there I'm assuming that there's maybe a bit of a drain on the efficiency of a sales organization when it comes to these new efficiencies we've done all this or no decisions we've we've done all this work we think we're going to move the ball forward and then for some reason it just a no decision happens what do you feel like are some of the common things that you see are a primary cause of underlying activities that lead to that no decision-making on behalf of the client I also think it's interesting we're seeing a little pretty wide swing over there from 10 percent to 25 percent to 40 percent in the chat box so maybe you can touch on that as well yeah well you know when you when you think about the someone not comfortable making a decision you can really go back and think about the basics do they not believe they have a problem and that's a frequent cause because no one's really helped them dig into that problem in detail and and determine for example in business the financial impact of that problem so they they could perhaps not be feeling a strong impetus to solve any problem and the sales person is coming along offering a solution to someone who hasn't decided to solve a problem then you can also look over to the solution side and say well I have a problem here but I'm looking at the solution and I'm not sure that that it would work and if I make a decision to invest this sort of money we're going to have to see an outcome or you know my job is going to be at risk so you're looking there at a fundamental fear of changing and that really is behind that no decision but let's carry that that question further because I want I want to look at a couple of these items and as you say we had quite an interesting range across this and then I would suggest all you kind of keep thinking about how that is is stacking up in your organization and if you're probably in the 10 to 15% it's it's not a problem you're going to need to solve if it starts going beyond that 20% and up it's a very large drain on your organization so looking at again this there's no decision the three challenges we see related to that the first challenge is in fact the decision and then an additional reason here is the customer actually doesn't have a thorough or a cross-functional and objective process for making this sort of decision you know they're they're very effective successful business people but but for example they they may never have bought a sophisticated software system for their accounting so to say and I obviously were in our fourth fifth generation of accounting but the point is they may be doing this for the first time and when when they buy something think about accounting or CRM or ERP systems when they buy one of these sophisticated software systems they're not likely going to make a decision on buying another one for you know three five six 10 years even and when that decision rolls around the people who are involved in the original decision process probably aren't around for the next generation decision so a key question to be asking yourselves as to what degree is your organization helping the customer through this decision process and if you think of other professionals that we call trusted advisers like doctors CPAs architects engineers financial advisers even these people are all coming to their clients pretty much with a well-organized decision process and they guide their client through that decision process in a very open and objective collaborative process so the second challenge here is about change and I mentioned a fear of change so buying involves changing and changing is very painful and it's a fundamental tenet of human behavior that people will not change unless the pain the discomfort the risk frustration of staying the same is greater than the pain the risk the frustration of changing so there's pain on both sides of that equation and the important thing to begin to think about is this thing we call a sale the customer is not making a decision to buy they're really making a decision to change and if they decide to change in a business they're likely going to buy something to facilitate that change so when you start thinking about your tools in terms of is this really focused on a buying process or is it focused on a change process it takes on a different dimension so the customer is making a decision to change and the third challenge is in business that decision to change is based on the net value or net profit we talked about value equals net profit and we should always think about value as profit as a financial measurement in other words if you can't quantify the business impact you probably shouldn't be calling this thing value so the customer because of the complexity is unable to recognize and quantify the value or net profit that's at risk in their organization without your solution and therefore is not able to really recognize the impact the solution will have post sale and therefore I'm not comfortable making this decision so to what degree are you helping the customer through this change process with your tools to what degree are you helping them measure the value the financial impact of your solution it's at the interesting Jeff you know that we have a question for one of the participants that I think kind of Lindner into what you just talked about understanding the value and helping the client understand the value and the question was isn't it also isn't it also that the customers not willing to pay that price for the value he sees in the solution so I think it's a little bit of a flip of what you just said is well maybe he just simply doesn't see the value or maybe the value is not there well then those are two very different things so if the value is not there I'm saying my solution is does not have a significant business impact that would justify making the investment and by the way we do come across clients where we help them quantify the value and we have to you know bring them to the realization of their solution is not providing a good business return a good business equation not willing to pay the price takes us into a number of categories because again I'm always going to say does the customer understand the financial impact so let's say they understand the financial impact and it's $100,000 and your solution is $200,000 that means I'm going to get a two-year payback and maybe that's not enough in my business and therefore on a financial equation I'm not willing to pay that price now you could look into the common examples of vehicles and say I understand the value of a BMW of a Mercedes but I'm not willing let's go with I'm able but I'm not willing to put that level of money into my transportation that's just something you deal with in market segmentation of understanding who are the people that are more willing to invest that I think the critical point we always work on in in the complex sale is that you have to help the customer clearly understand the financial impact the absence of your solution is having on their business and we call that the cost of the problem I think if if you're if you're sitting there with the cost of the problem and the customer is saying I'm not willing to spend that much to solve it it's that's a very simple end to the conversation great okay so let's let's take a look at I'm not advancing here so there we go thinking about this decision challenge and what I'm laying out here is looking at a left-to-right progression through the decision process and a bottom-to-top sort of measurement of knowledge and many times when you think about when you're engaging a customer with your with your tools where are they in their decision process and there's quite a bit of statistics that are telling us that many folks are about 60% through their decision process before they want to talk to a sales professional and I think a very interesting question to remember here is are they 60% through a high-quality thorough decision process or they 60% through a less thorough incomplete decision process on the vertical axis we're looking at what's their level of knowledge relative to the problem they have in the solution that could fit there and and just as a point of discussion let's put a four up there and say there they're about 40 percent we're a hundred percent isn't it they know everything they need to know to make a fully informed quality decision so if you take a look at that as an example you bring those two together we're finding this particular customer has an area of comprehension of around 24% of the whole and the whole being what's required to make a quality business decision and so what's missing at this point you could think of all the questions they're not asking themselves about their current situation and the questions they're not knowing to ask a potential supplier about the solution and so obviously the scenario here is we need to we need to increase this area of comprehension to bring the customer to the point we discussed earlier that they fully can understand the value that is missing and be more appreciative and interesting and making the change to invest in the value we can provide but what happens all too frequently is at this type of a situation the salesperson basically goes off with a premature presentation and so you're presenting valuable solution aspects or content to a customer who doesn't have complete context as to why that's important and that's kind of carry over from error one and two you know it's a it's an interesting point that you're making it it also leads into a question that we got in the chat group talking about the fact that we've talked about these sales eras but there is a is there a corresponding quote-unquote buyer era and so the question is is is there not a danger of vendors attempting to change how they sell yet buyers are not changing how they buy and how do we is that a challenge and how do we reconcile that if it is no it's it's a very important question a very important challenge I'm going to talk in a moment how we address that and of course it's the age-old desire to call higher in an organization but basically if you set the proper context for the interaction that this is not about you buying something it's about making a decision to change what we find with our clients is most customers recognize the inefficiencies of let's call it the air one and two buying styles and they're very much looking to to improve that and so when you're coming to them with an air three approach we're finding the customers very receptive to that because here's an important question to maybe ask yourselves about your customers it's do you believe they are buying the way they buy because they've sat down and figured out this very efficient process that assures them a quality decision or are they buying the way they buy as a reaction to how they've been sold over the years and most people believe it's the latter and not that interrupting the accurate and and so they're buying as a defense against those types of inefficient sales processes great it's a great point to keep in mind so let's take a look at the second challenge which is the challenge of change and and looking at this from a perspective of where's the customer where do they need to move to in order to change so if you think about present to future positive negative the point would be that most customers you're sending marketing pieces to are probably sitting in the positive present they're they're pretty well content with their situation and and they're not necessarily looking to make any changes but where would you place the content of most of our literature our websites or brochures and collateral and so forth if you think about what's the content about the aboutness is pretty much about the solution and about the future to be attained and and you obviously can judge your your material your own material for yourself according to that but let's stay with that that as sort of the the majority that we're seeing out there and essentially the the traditional direction of sales and marketing has been I'm going to meet the customer in the positive present and I'm going to show them a much better future we refer to that as a value assault and it's back to the question earlier the customer doesn't see the value they may be very happy with their current situation because if you all sudden start showing someone that life can be much better yes many people will be attracted to that but there's a high percentage of people that no no I I don't think it will be that good and as a matter of fact I think there could be a lot of mistakes a lot of disasters I don't believe it's going to work I understand it works for your other customers but we are different here and so the customer actually goes down to the negative future basically looking at all the reasons they shouldn't buy and you have an immediate conflict so what we want to recommend is the journey is acknowledging the customers in the positive present you're coming in for your annual physical you're feeling well you didn't come because you were ill and the doctor begins asking questions taking tests and all of a sudden uncovers some negative symptoms that it might it might be shortness of breath it might be so I might be a color of the skin it might be a new mole that that you hadn't really noticed but the doctor begins to note some evidence that the patient also recognizes and so the patient moves from that positive present and begins to go into the negative present and the negative present says these are things I may not want to continue to endure and so obviously as the negative present gets worse at some point the customer decide take this any longer we're going to need to make some changes and they decide to change right at the the lower right corner there and then the point about the negative future is is that is your customer ready for change and most salespeople will not have that conversation at all they will let the customer have that conversation by themselves because the salesperson is wanting to get up to this positive future as quickly as possible to to basically get to the close and so to give you a little more detail on this journey we have something we call the progression to change and what I want you to begin to think about is is what are the marketing tools that you're providing in each of these areas to support each of these areas if I look at the previous slide here what types of tools are you providing to help the customer diagnose to help the sales professional help the customer diagnose and these would be the types of tools you see very common in in the medical industry they're like the seven early warning signals of insert the major disease here and this really should be a very critical part of any early marketing that that the customer reads through that particular brochure and notices they're experiencing these symptoms these occurrences these phenomenons in their business obviously the creator of the brochure understand this we should be in touch with them and have them help us look at it a little more deeply and if you think of your case studies for example what percentage of the content of the case study is about the positive future what percentage is about the negative present what you tend to see is a high percentage of the case study is about the outcome and maybe it's 80% of the content and what we're suggesting is that should be considered to be reduced that the customer reads the before situation they relate to that because that's their present situation and when they recognize they're in that situation and you obviously help someone out of it now they're calling basically with we have this problem we have this situation would you help us take a look at it so it's very important to recognize our the tool set for the stage the customers going through and again the detail on this stages is a common progression to change these are stages people go through as they go from being very satisfied there's no way I'm going to change my behavior to crisis I've got to change right now we've basically adopted that human psychology for for business so if you think about the satisfied on the left this someone who's going to be telling you how great their current supplier is neutral would be characterized by obviously really not saying much one way or the other aware the person who's recognized this topic the situation you're talking about or writing about happens to people like me directors of manufacturing CFO's I recognize my fellow professionals experienced this type of thing I'm not ready to admit I'm not sure that I haven't yet concern is characterized by the customer acknowledges this is happening I am experiencing shortness of breath we do have very long sales cycle we are experiencing a high percentage and increase percentage of no decisions I wonder how bad it is and that takes us to the next stage critical where you're working with your customer to help them determine the financial impact of the absence of your solution and if it's bad enough for a business we're going to make the change we're going to invest and that's basically what the crisis is we decide we're going to look at a solution so are your tools basically set up to address each of these stages aware stage would be that seven early warning signals of the problem concern is they recognize those those signals critical is the ability to measure and calculate the consequences of the absence of your solution and if you overlay these two you're looking at the progression to change running from the positive present upper left satisfied to the negative present lower right I'm very frustrated I need to change what can you do to help so let's let's talk about the last item here value leakage and the major point I want to make here is most companies do not understand the full value impact of their solution these are nine different clients that we've worked with recently and they're all very sophisticated companies the medical devices Boston Scientific the industrial chemicals georgia-pacific jet engines was rolls rolls-royce and basically what they found is is their business case there are Oh eye models we're capturing less than 10% of the total financial impact that their solutions had on their respective customers and if you want to think about that or look at it little detail I won't spend a lot of time here you can review it when you look at the slides later but essentially if we looked at the clients ROI model the business case they had this was the original amount to call him on on the left the next column showed the amount of value that was quantified after they went through our certified value process and the percentages represent the amount of their total value that was understood by the customer through the business cases presented at the point they were looking for a decision and the average you can see is is under 10% so if you really think about someone only understands 10% of the value they're going to receive it's quite predictable that that would be a point of no decision they're not seeing enough of what they actually could accomplish as a general result here now how do you how do you get from 10% of the value to 100% of the value and it's really looking at value in different dimensions so the first dimension we want to talk about here is the product dimension and so you're you're seeing the shadow representing the 9.7% average of quantified value but most people understand the product what the product does it's this fast it needs this amount of maintenance and so there are many tangible financial impacts that are usually present in the business case the second level or dimension of value we talk about being the process level now here we're talking about the processes in your customers business that are affected by your solution and what we see companies doing really well is let's call it the landing process of the installed process in other words your solution might go directly into a particular process and we usually measure well the changes in that process and the financial impact of those changes but there's a large indirect effect for example if you change process B can the customer change something in process a or process C downstream from it the answer is typically yes but most of our analysis most of our business cases do not include what we call that ripple effect of value throughout the organization and then the final dimension of value is the performance level and this is really the business impact to the organization the high level goals the market share the profit the revenue and in return on investment and so forth and so it's it's expanding your view of value to look at these different dimensions you'll find yourselves moving from what you believe is the total value impact today to a more thorough portrayal of that value and I suppose that it's an interesting question just based on with what we've talked about briefly here what do you think the current level of value you have captured within your marketing tools and business cases that you're equipping your salespeople to go out and basically reproduce that that story that interaction with the customer any thoughts on that we could enter them in the chat box yeah well we have some people putting that in the chat box um you know I've got a couple questions we've got a couple question from the audience that asks what are some of the tools to help companies better understand the total economic value delivered to customers and thus reduce value leakage when customers aren't forthcoming with information so that was an audience question and maybe you could take that while we look for these percentages to come in on the chat box well if you if you think of the tools I'm going to I'm going to start at the basic with a fishbone diagram sort of a decision tree and so if you think about your customer excuse me your your solution on on the right side of that decision tree and and then moving back to the left saying okay what are what are some of the symptoms that we would expect to see in the absence of our solution so if you take a benefit from your solution of value from your solution and say if that's not here what's happening oh and it might be a customer retention is is lowered or it might be manufacturing costs you know all of those types of items and if the symptom is we're producing less items per day the symptoms are were having less retention of our mobile phone customers and so forth so you have your value then you have the sim them that they would expect to see in the absence of your value then you're going in to see well what would be the consequences of that okay so if it's a lost customer there's lost revenue then it's how many customers are you losing what's the average revenue you're basically going through a manual calculation at its simplest level to do that now back to the point of tools there are very sophisticated tools where you can well then obviously the Excel spreadsheet is is a tool that allows you to capture these calculations and if the number of calculations becomes really large and the visibility into where you get where did you get that particular number becomes really important we've gone to these simulation type tools where you can basically manage a massive amount of data and information and make it very simple for the sales professional and the customer to navigate through to look at those so that's I know we're going out to do yeah I just can't take that that sounds great I know we're getting a little close to the end of our time together Jeff and I know there's a couple more things you want to discuss or maybe we should make sure we get through the I know you want to get some other items as well yeah we'll do that and I'm going to just last thing I want to take you through a sort of a sequence of value we refer to it as a value lifecycle or the value clarity lifecycle but fundamentally obviously to get paid for the value you create the customer is going to have to believe they're absent that value and they're going to receive it from your solution so if you think about sort of a standard sales process and we talk about four DS discovered diagnosed design deliver and a brief agenda for each stage but what I want to walk you through is the evolution of value again thinking about this as a decision process not a sales process all organizations have value positions and you know valued the word value proposition was coined by a next Mackenzie consultant Michael laning back in 1984 and he really defined it as a combination of resulting experiences or outcomes and I think unfortunately what happened over the years is a value proposition really became sort of a declaration of value here is our solution here's why it's valuable more characteristics of the solution described than characteristics of the customers experience so so here's the flow we're talking about you think of your value proposition as a statement of a capability of the of your solution it's like the drug lipitor it has a capability of reducing cholesterol in someone with high cholesterol and will is willing to take it every day so there are some conditions to that value being received the actual lipitor pill in the palm of your hand has no value the value only exists inside the customer the patient so what we're suggesting is during that early engagement stage you you create what we call a value hypotheses which is basically taking the proposition looking at a specific prospect looking at some evidence that we see in that specific prospect and suggesting because we see that evidence they may be at risk and when we've seen it in other customers their size it's had this percentage of revenue this percentage of manufacturing costs one of those types of items and extrapolated to their business it looks like three to four million dollars per year and what you're saying to your customer is based on this bit of evidence would it make sense for us to get together to look at it more closely now back to your question about the attractiveness of air three we're finding our clients getting a 90 plus acceptance rate from senior executives for that appointment based on that value hypotheses premise to engage so now we're in meeting with the senior executive and what we're offering to the senior executive is we will go down in the organization with tools we have and we will diagnose the processes in your organization and we'll come back with a number that basically is the cost of the problem the value at risk and the question to the executive at that point is that enough incentive to make a change where does that sit on your business priorities and if it's high on the priority list we then move to the next phase which is designing the solution and value further enhances to the amount of value expected to be achieved by the solution so you think when the customer has a belief in the value that's at risk the major question is how much of this value would you like to recover and how soon would you like to recover it and that question is answered during the design stage where we create the solution in collaboration with the customer get the customers organization aligned around this is going to work we are going to achieve this value and it might not be 100 percent it seldom is 100 percent of the value at risk but now the customer team the executives have the confidence to invest and we move to deliver or install and the value is obviously being achieved during the implementation and it's being measured very accurately because recall during the diagnosis we had data from the various processes basically your your starting as is state defined and now we're making the measurements what has changed in those processes those measurements to measure the value that has been achieved so the customers now making the decision on the success that that they've accomplished here so I think that kind of covers christen what I wanted to get accomplished today so if we have great a ever doing ever yeah I think we're it do you have a slide you wanted to mention some resources just shouldn't we go back that will be in the deck as far as if anyone's interested in carrying forward any additional questions and if we still have the questions on the line Kristen after we go off the air I'll go through that and make sure we've gotten everyone answered yeah and maybe you want to share a little bit of some of your books that you have and then I can just let people know how we'll be able to get to questions that we weren't able to get to through the course of the presentation and reminding where they can find this information yes the three books that I have out we've been talking about mastering the complex sail but basically the prime solution is is about the strategy and how to close this value gap we've been talking about and there's quite a bit about marketing in that particular book mastering the complex sail is about the overall process and having the inner internal team of marketing sales pre-sales customers success management so forth working together and then exceptional selling is about the mindset and the one-to-one communication skills for executing the process great well I just would like to thank everybody for participating today really enjoyed the audience interaction and a lot of great questions we got throughout the course of today's presentation unfortunately we weren't able to get to everybody's questions but I appreciate your offer to help go through those notes that we've got in our system here and make sure that we get your questions answered offline I'd also like to just give everybody a quick reminder that a recording of this webinar and a copy of the slides will be available at pragmatic marketing comm /live starting tomorrow and you will also receive an email with a link to that recording as well and then finally I just want to remind everybody we do these webinars on a monthly basis and we hope you'll join us next month we're going to tackle a presentation called the key to building better products from Peter hue to the UX UI expert and I think that about does it for today so again thanks for joining us and have a great rest of your week