DecisionLink
Automation to Create Compelling Value Propositions

The information age presents new challenges to sales organizations worldwide. Buyers are self-educating, and are bombarded with social and digital information from sellers for their valuable time. Sellers need to come up with a personalized understanding of the customer and the value they’re looking for to be heard against the background marketing noise. When sellers produce clear business content to showcase the value of their products, they win a much higher percentage of opportunities while lowering the cost of sales and increasing their margins. Yet this is done less than ten percent of the time because of the cost and energy it requires. DecisionLink decided to leverage the power of automation to address these challenges.

“At DecisionLink, we have brought automation to a critical business function for the first time, that results in ten times the production at one tenth of the cost of traditional methods. Doing so has a significant impact on revenue, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction,” states Jim Berryhill, CEO. DecisionLink’s Value Selling AutomationSM platform addresses five main issues faced by sales organizations: the high percentage of “no decision”, competitive losses, margins eroded by discount requirements, poor lead to opportunity conversion ratios and customer churn when they don’t realize the value of the solutions.

DecisionLink built the industry’s first repository for value objects, called the Value CloudSM. In parallel, they developed a methodology to produce value solution models in a day or two. The system is designed to empower the sales force, and enable them to present a clear value proposition to prospects. “What a value analyst would do in three days to two weeks depending on the complexity of the account, the DecisionLink system performs in a few minutes, producing sales ready assets in forms of presentations, proposals and executive infographics,” says Berryhill.

“We designed a comprehensive system with all the elements necessary to be scalable and easy to use to empower the entire organization, not only a specialized group of people within it,” explains John Porter, DecisionLink Co-founder and CTO.

We bring automation to manual sales functions resulting in higher productivity, increased revenue, improved margins and, ultimately, improved shareholder value

“Workflows are built to enable best practice processes and go much beyond the legacy CRM tools that are good at keeping records, but don’t help in closing deals and winning competitive battles.”

Jim continues with compelling results from a client, ACI Worldwide, the leading software company for processing payment transactions. “The number one issue for their sales organization was the ability to communicate value to their customers and prospects,” he mentions. The DecisionLink system was rolled out in 2016. “We invested in the best of the best for our sales organization. Salesforce for CRM, The Challenger Sale for methodology, messaging from Corporate Visions and more. DecisionLink ties it all together and makes it all work the way it should, solving the value communication problem. Nothing we invested in is more valuable than DecisionLink,” said Cliff Elam of ACI.

“CIOs are the catalysts of pushing technology and automation to create positive business outcomes for their organizations,” says Berryhill. “This is an area of great opportunity for the business-aligned CIO to enable her/his sales organization with world-class capability via automation, best practice processes and related disciplines.”