Managing value-based selling
Most businesses are in a middle of moving their business practices toward service-based exchange, proactive evidence of customer business value, and ecosystem-based value creation. These trends also fundamentally change B2B selling and sales management.
The “Managing value-based selling” course focuses on contemporary B2B selling and sales management from an organizational perspective. The course views selling as a proactive business function that seeks to identify, communicate and arrange for joint value creation opportunities by showing how the supplier's capabilities, products and services combined with the customer's capabilities help customers achieve their goals.
The course content builds on a view that suppliers and customers integrate their capabilities and resources to create value. The task and goal of the sales function is to identify value creation opportunities, communicate the value creation opportunity to key stakeholders (in the customer organisation), agree on the roles, responsibilities and rules for the joint value creation, and agree on how the valued is shared among the participants.
The influencing task of the sales function is described as an organised system of sales activities, which are supported by (digital) tools and sales skills. Central to the value-based selling is value proposition, which the sales function builds, communicated, and adapts during the buyer-seller interactions.
The proactive influencing by the sales function is organised into a framework of sales, key account management, sales opportunity management, and sales funnel management processes, which all link to the customer's buying and procurement processes.
Learning Outcomes
The participants will learn how to plan, perform, and manage contemporary B2B sales. The course develops knowledge, skills, and tools to build an effective sales function, develop market-driven value propositions, and evaluate and coach sales quality. The course also teaches customer value (and value proposition), which lay the foundation for the business-to-business exchange. Further, the participants will learn about the changing role of sales as cross-disciplinary function in a networked (ecosystem-based) value creation.
Assignments
The course teaching leveraged a versatile set of learning methods, outlined below:
- Online activities (Online pre-learning module)
- Article reviews (in-class activity, in groups of 1-2 students)
- Learning cases (visiting business guest speakers)
- Learning diary (1-page summary of the day's lecture in a pre-specified format)
- Course essay (group activity in groups of 2 students)
- Course exam