Continuing our conversations with Visualize alumni, we recently spoke with Scott Blanc, a Strategic Account Manager with VMware, regarding how he leveraged his ValueSelling training to close a large deal within a multinational organization.
Due to Scott’s successful use of the ValueSelling framework, he was able to, over an 18-month period, increase wallet share of an account that traditionally spent 550k per year with VMware to $4.5 million dollars!! All stakeholders, including: Sourcing, line of business CIO’s, CFO’s, Engineers, and the VMware Account Team were “winners” in this deal!!
Scott’s first exposure to ValueSelling was in 2007 when he was with Cisco. Since then, he’s been a believer in the methodology and has also completed a class that focused on the Framework with Visualize since joining VMware.
At VMware, Scott supports organizations with 45,000 or more employees across four industry verticals. The deals are often very complex and involve an institutional sales approach across functional groups within his customer base. Each stakeholder Scott interacts with has different levels of experiences, perceptions of VMware and personal values drivers that influence their decisions. Scott leverages his ValueSelling training and tools, such as the ValuePrompter, to help him cohesively bundle work streams around Business Value and Personal Value; which he tailors to each individual. He regularly shares ValuePrompters with the institutional team to validate that the team is aligned and in agreement with the Plan. Scott believes the ValuePrompter has proven to be an excellent tool in helping him capture individual work streams and document personal value drivers for each stakeholder.
Recently, Scott successfully leveraged the ValueSelling framework in a large, global advertising, marketing and corporate communications holding company with annual revenue of over $10 billion. In his opinion, the ValuePrompter helped him answer the questions inherent in the deal and provided an ongoing checkpoint -a guardrail of sorts – to keep him on track. Scott summed this up by saying, “As the deal becomes more complex, the tenants of ValueSelling become more important and the ValuePrompter becomes a critical briefing mechanism.”
In this deal, Scott meticulously mapped out ValuePrompters for each individual stakeholder. He developed these ValuePrompters to highlight each individual’s Personal Value, which ranged from VP of Finance to Engineer. Scott first worked to identify the Personal Value and then reverse-engineered the process to identify the Business Issue and Business Value for each.
Scott leveraged the ValuePrompter and credits it with assisting him in successfully closing this deal. You can do the same by following these steps:
- Summarize your understanding throughout the lifecycle of the opportunity by communicating it back in a Mutual Plan to your prospect
- Use the ValuePrompter to cohesively bundle work streams around Business Value and Personal Value
- Use the ValuePrompter as a tool to help capture individual work streams and personal relationship mapping
- Use the ValuePrompter to help answer the questions inherent in the deal and as an ongoing checkpoint– a guardrail – to keep you on track during the deal negotiation
- Use the ValuePrompter as a deal briefing mechanism
Scott’s success stems from his consistent and repeated use of the ValuePrompter, which has directly increased his wallet share. This tool, while simple to use and implement, is powerful. We suggest taking Scott’s guidance and use the ValuePrompter with each key stakeholder within an account to increase your wallet share. Perhaps, like him, you could grow the account from $550K to $4.5M in 18 months.
