Customer Value Management

Awareness of Customer Value Management, or differentiated value selling, has not happened overnight. For people who have been in sales long enough, there has been an evolution leading to the ultimate goal of Customer Value Management, as illustrated in the figure below.

The evolution began with Technical Product / Feature Selling decades ago — when there was a relatively
straightforward way to map a product capability to a specific problem.
As problems became more complex, buyers and sellers increasingly relied on Solution Selling to define and scope requirements and design more sophisticated solutions.
As competition stiffened further, a Generic Value Selling framework appeared — where sellers provided buyers with generic examples of the value achieved by other organizations. But these generalized value propositions were not specifically relevant to each organization; they did not always account for industry, geography, size, or use case variations.
This led to Specific Value Selling methodologies that enabled value to be quantified and customized for each opportunity.
Agile Customer Value Management completes this evolution. Specifically, CVM brings organizations to the level of Differentiated Value Selling — where value is quantified for a specific project including differentiation from other alternative uses of budget such as direct competition or alternative uses of capital.