26. Splunk ValueStory
• $400k in bookings 1st 3 months
• Better adoption of value selling
• Reduced new hire ramp up time
• Enabled earlier Executive engagements
• Accelerated buyer decisions
27. For More Information about Alinean ValueStory®
Please contact:
Alinean Sales
sales@alinean.com
(407) 382-0005
www.alinean.com
Editor's Notes
This presentation provides a brief walk through of Alinean ValueStory for HTML5-based browsers. ValueStory is a guided value storytelling and "back of the napkin" financial justification tool specially designed to help you communicate, differentiate, and quantify your business value and ROI.
When you open ValueStory in a browser you'll start at the main screen shown here. This is a full-screen view of the application. By tapping on the up or down arrow on the left side of the display you'll be able to view the multi-function Toolbar and the Tray. The Toolbar and the Tray are available at any time while you are delivering the ValueStory to your prospect.
The multi-function Toolbar provides access to ValueStory Plays (templates), Runs from previous conversations with prospects, the ability to refresh ValueStory content on the iPad and edit preferences for the application. You can also use it to get additional information and help, print reports, specify company profile, buyer roles and challenges, and save results as a specific Run.
The Tray at the bottom provides the ability to see each ValueStory vignette in the order it appears in the story, jump to different points in the ValueStory as necessary, and use tap and hold on any vignette to hide/show it.
To close the Toolbar or Tray simply tap on the up or down arrow on the left side of the display near it.
Tap on Company Profile to enter information about the company you are talking to - including it’s Name, Industry, Location, Annual Sales, and Total Number of Employees.
This information is usually specified ahead of time, before the client meeting. Company information like industry, location and size is used to personalize the storytelling vignettes to be presented to the prospect, deliver industry specific insight, provide the taxonomy for collecting customer intelligence.
A ValueStory vignette is similar to a slide, but interactive – used for storytelling (a Story Vignette) as well as surveys, assessments and value quantification (a Value Vignette).
Tap on Roles to select the role of each decision maker you are talking to during this conversation and run through the ValueStory.
The Role selection process tailors which ValueStory vignettes are presented to match the interests and challenges of the person or persons you’ll be speaking with.
This completes the preliminary steps required to tailor ValueStory, and you are now ready to use it during a live customer conversation.
ValueStory conversations typically begin with a Did You Know vignette, used to provocatively challenge the buyer’s status quo with compelling commercial insights to teach the prospect about common challenges that you can uniquely solve for them.
The insights are presented in a manner to immediately grab the buyer’s attention, important in today’s short attention span environment, and be memorable.
The insights are supported via footnotes and links to references. Click on the (i) icon in the lower left hand corner of any Vignette and you will find notes.
Notes include speaker guidance as to what to say during the conversation. Notes are interactive, including links to resources like insight sources, additional information from videos or white papers.
Notes are also included in a Printed Report which you can deliver to prospects at the end of the conversation. Notes help to communicate the value story as the report is shared internally amongst other stakeholder.
Next is typically a summary of The Challenge your prospect faces on a day-to-day basis (Business as Usual/Status Quo).
This vignette, which typically includes graphics and/or text, is intended to communicate your understanding of the challenges your prospect is currently faced with and help them gain a new understanding about their issues, problems, and impact on their business.
You then have the opportunity to discover Your Prospect’s Unique Challenges by having them select from a series of challenge statements and providing a view of where they stand in comparison to other companies similar to theirs who have run through this ValueStory, and whose responses were anonymously captured in Alinean’s PaaS database.
To select your prospect’s unique challenges and view the Peer Comparison data, simply tap on the section box preceding each challenge statement.
Based on the selections you will see a comparison highlighting how many peers also selected that particular challenge.
As well, the story will be fine tuned around the selected challenges (supplementing the tuning already done based on the Company Profile and Roles). Subsequent Story and Value Vignettes will be hidden/shown to correspond with the selected challenges.
In stories that are more consultative, this simpler survey is replaced with a more advanced diagnostic assessment, which measures each challenge or capability/maturity based on a scale from 1-5 versus a simple selection.
Now you’re ready to paint a What If vision of what your prospect’s day-to-day life would be like if the challenges they currently face were resolved.
This vignette typically includes rich content like video, web links, document links, etc that expand on the vision and provide additional information about the vision for a solution to the prospects challenges.
At this point in ValueStory you’ve helped the prospect identify and prioritize key challenges, helped paint a picture as to a potential solution, and you’re ready to walk your prospect through each customized ValueStory Chapter that maps to his/her unique challenges.
Chapters which have been prioritized for the prospect are highlighted in color, chapters that may not relate are dull grey. You can explore any Chapter by tapping it if your prospect has an interest to explore it further. You can also tap and hold on any Chapter to enable/disable from being recommended for the conversation.
Within each Challenge chapter you begin by showing a Before versus After vignette that highlights the business challenge, communicating key insights as to why the challenge should be a priority, as well as presenting a vision of the solution and particular business benefits that can be derived.
With a clear understanding of the typical costs and benefits, you can now quantify the personalized “Cost of Doing Nothing” and Benefits for this prospect using a Value Vignette.
Interactively working with the prospect you can specify actual metrics from their own experience (starting with industry defaults), quickly and easily calculating the Cost of Do Nothing and Value of the Proposed Solution. Working collaboratively, the prospect takes ownership of the calculations and results.
We work with you to be sure that all calculations are “back of the napkin”, making them easy to understand and well documented in the Notes, to provide credibility.
At the end of each ValueStory chapter you will Provide Evidence to Backup Claims that your company and your solution can deliver the business benefits proposed in the value calculation.
Like other ValueStory Vignettes, this vignette can include rich content to showcase customer testimonials, analyst reports and success stories.
When you are done exploring a chapter and you return to the Chapter Summary you will see a value filled in, designating the business benefits that you can deliver to the prospect for solving that Challenge.
Any chapter that you visit will indicate the dollar value so you can easily track which Challenge Chapters you have already explored, and which ones remain.
After advancing from the Chapter Summary you are typically presented with a show and tally of all the Benefit calculations within each Chapter (some Chapters sometimes have more than one value calculation).
You can click on any Benefit to see the details of the calculation.
As well, the total is tallied, clearly communicating the value of your proposed solution.
Moving on, the Differentiate vignette provides your prospect with compelling information related to your unique position in the marketplace and the business value you are capable of delivering that your competitors cannot. Rich content is fully leveraged here to set a tone of thought leadership, confidence and capability on your behalf.
When you have a need to Brainstorm ideas with your prospect you can utilize an embedded white board via an exclusive partnership Alinean has established with Zamurai. Tap on Create Whiteboard to open it up.
That will take you into the Zamurai app interface where you can utilize their advanced toolbar and other functions to dynamically bring in graphics, draw figures, enter text, change formatting, etc. as you work with your prospect to capture key ideas.
When you’re finished tap Done to return to Alinean ValueStory and your Zamurai WhiteBoard is automatically imported in your ValueStory run where it becomes part of the permanent record of the value conversation.
As you move toward the conclusion of the conversation you should agree on things you and your prospect need to do as follow-on activities from the conversation. You can use a List Vignette within ValueStory to Collaborate, Capture and Edit Next Steps. Steps for follow-on activities can be created in advance or on the fly.
You’ll show the Learn More vignette to tell your prospect where to look when they are in Self Discovery mode searching for information on their own.
You can also generate a customized report of the results from this ValueStory run for your prospect and send it to his/her email or print it.
After clicking on Create a Report you will get a preview of the report.
Here is a quick look at the first few pages of a printed report showing the format, structure, and variety of content and text included in the Customized ValueStory Report.
And here is an example of a single page of Report Details.
You can see the Notes and the Vignette, conveying the imagery to tell the story and the notes for explanation. This document will continue to communicate your value story long after the meeting, and will be shared with other stakeholders (which Alinean will track and provide metrics on).
The example we just leveraged for this demonstration is from one of several ValueStory Plays we developed for Splunk. ValueStory is being used by 500+ sales reps, and to good effect, helping Splunk transition from a technical product sale to interactive business conversations, helping to accelerate new hire ramp up time, and increasing selling effectiveness resulting in immediate deal flow/wins.
Thank you for your time.
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