The CVET guides your business through a proven, best-practice method to measure the value of your products and services to customers and then generate sales tools to persuasively demonstrate their superior value to target customers, which improves your sales win rate and the profitability of the business won.

Best practice firms use customer value models to:

• Align your product development priorities with customer value requirements and preferences
• Identify and eliminate value drains and value leaks reducing costs without impacting customer preference
• Segment customers based on value delivered creating more effective targeting for more efficient utilization of resources
• Formulate pricing strategy & tactics to improve long term profitability
• Craft persuasive value propositions with a resonating focus
• Enable true consultative selling by bringing new knowledge (e.g., market benchmarks in the value calculator) to the customers

Spreadsheets are a blank sheet and do not provide guidance in structuring the customer value research. Spreadsheets often become a very complex patchwork set of calculations that only the author can fully understand and easily modify. Thus re-using knowledge stored in past spreadsheets is time consuming and prone to misinterpretation errors. CVET guides the user to conceptualize value in a way that focuses data collection and analysis on the sources of value that drive customer purchase decisions. A customer data request is automatically generated to facilitate customer conversations about value. Once the data are collected, alternative value models can be defined with a few clicks, and the results are automatically displayed…no need to learn pivot tables or other more advanced Excel functions. As a result, CVET reduces the burden of data collection and saves time.

For the value-based sales tools, spreadsheets are still more problematic. Typically, each product manager tries to improve the value calculator spreadsheet design for their product, burdening the sales force to learn multiple formats. Many of these "new and improved" spreadsheets become overly complex and difficult for the user, let alone the customer, to understand. Pressed for time and lacking comfort with any one tool, account managers don't use any of them. Even when sales people use a spreadsheet calculator, the data captured in each spreadsheet resides in separate files. To leverage that data, the files must be gathered and consolidated. In our experience that rarely happens. With CVET, the value calculator for every offering works exactly the same way. If account managers learn one, they know how to use them all. The data gathered during the sales process is stored in a MySQL database, so the product manager has instant access to the latest value measurements in the field.

Some competing software merely recycles supplier or customer opinion. Instead of generating new knowledge, users simply ask the customers what the elements of an offering are worth. In contrast, CVET leads the users and the customers on a process of joint discovery to measure the monetary impact of the offering in the customer’s business relative to the next best alternative. In our experience, neither the supplier’s nor the customers’ existing perceptions of value are entirely correct.

Other software tends to be “assumption heavy.” No benchmark data is gathered, and therefore, value calculations demonstrate what the supplier assumes it to be. Customers easily dismiss these calculations as not being an accurate estimation for their businesses. In the research tool, CVET facilitates the gathering and creation of benchmark data as the basis for the sales tools. When the sales person shares CVET benchmarks, new knowledge is brought to the customer enabling true consultative selling.

Achieving self-sufficiency was the inspiration for CVET. With its step-by-step guidance, your organization can achieve best practice in customer value management without consulting support once the CVM structure and culture are in place. CVET provides the guidance, rigor, and leverage of a consultant to your experienced users.

With a cloud based solution, we can get your team up and running in a day without involvement from your IT function. Hosting new software on your server typically takes weeks or months for even the most responsive IT organizations. In addition, improvements to the CVET software are automatically and immediately available on the cloud version; whereas, those updates would require installation on your servers by your IT function. Lastly, a cloud based solution's annual subscription requires no capital investment and can be cancelled at any time without negative accounting implications.

Despite these advantages, organizations that still want to host the software and database on their servers may purchase a perpetual license for the current version of CVET. With the purchase of an annual maintenance contract, modest revisions and enhancements will be sent to your IT function for installation on your servers, and you will be eligible for a discount on upgrades to subsequent full versions with new functionality. We will only support the current version and the previous version at any time. Older versions will not be supported.

The CVET utilizes best practices in Internet security to keep your data safe and secure. Both the application and database are hosted in a SAS 70 Type II data center. The server is protected with biometric access and cameras and has multiple firewalls with attack detection. The database is backed up on two additional servers. The application itself uses best practices for securing a web application. Security controls such as user timeout window and account lock after a number of failed password attempts can be adjusted to meet your corporate standards. All data is transmitted to the CVET using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for maximum security.

If you have any security questions or concerns, please contact eric@CustomerValueExpert.com