How do you effectively communicate the value of your product or service to large, complex organizations?

First, you need to understand who your ideal customers are, what they are about, their typical challenges and what success means to them. Then, you need to understand how your product can align to address those challenges and/or support their success. It's critical that you understand who your ideal customers are, so you can articulate the value of your product in their language and within their context.

Communicating value effectively isn't about having the perfect pitch. It's about having a system that enables you to drive credibility, identify real pain, and maintain momentum throughout the journey.

Here are the core considerations to include in your system:

1. Establish credibility – Be someone worth listening to, early on. This means coming prepared, demonstrating expertise, and speaking their language. Credibility is earned by showing you understand their industry, challenges, and the outcomes they care about.

2. Identify & implicate pain – Discover the problem beneath the surface and highlight its impact. This is about asking the right questions to uncover hidden issues and then framing those problems in a way that connects emotionally with stakeholders.

3. Reference relevant use cases – Show them they’re not alone, and that others have succeeded with you. Share stories of similar organizations that faced similar challenges, and how your solution helped them achieve tangible results.

4. Map pain to value – Demonstrate clearly how your solution addresses their specific challenges. Create a direct line from the pain points identified to the value your solution provides, making it obvious why your approach is the best fit.

5. Sell a thoughtful evaluation plan – Guide stakeholders through a process where everyone knows their part and what’s next. A well-structured evaluation plan helps build confidence and ensures that all decision-makers are aligned on the steps to move forward.

6. Align on investment – Ensure they agree: this is a problem worth solving with time, energy, and budget. Make sure each stakeholder understands the cost of inaction, and that solving this problem is a priority worth their investment.

7. Establish ROI – Use value engineering to build an ROI model that lives across a worst case, most likely, and best case threshold. This will help quantify the value and show different possible outcomes, making it easier for the committee to see the financial impact of your solution.

8. Push professionally – Keep everyone focused and committed to moving forward, even when things get busy. Be respectful but assertive, maintaining momentum by setting clear expectations, follow-up actions, and deadlines.

When selling to an executive committee, it's important to understand where the power lies in the organization and pressure-test your champion on their ability to wrangle team members to test your value story. The dynamics of a larger committee often mean multiple perspectives, varying priorities, and different levels of influence. Navigating this effectively requires knowing who holds decision-making power and ensuring that your champion has the influence to bring others along.

Each time you're meeting with new decision-makers, you're running through the above system or process. You'll need to start a new mini sales cycle all over again. The objective is to align everyone who has power to get a deal done to your desired outcome, which, of course, will align perfectly with your champion's desired outcome.

Value selling is an ongoing commitment. It’s not about pushing product—it's about helping others realize what's possible when real problems get solved.