Unlocking Enterprise Growth with Value Engineering
When I was at Looker and Twilio Segment working as CSM, my sharpest tool in my toolbox was our Value Engineering team – it's a game-changer for scaling into enterprise markets and retaining these customers.
What is Value Engineering?
Value engineering is a collaborative, consultative approach where businesses quantify the value their product delivers— like cost savings, revenue generation or operational efficiencies —and build a tailored business case with the customer throughout their journey with us. This approach, often employed by enterprise giants like SAP, Oracle, and Deloitte, helps balance cost, quality, and performance, ensuring both customer satisfaction and profitability.
Why It Works
A survey by MetaCX and RevenueCollective found businesses with value engineering teams reported 13% higher sales effectiveness. The approach allows AEs to price based on the value delivered, not just licenses or transactions, creating pricing power with enterprise customers. It also allows CSMs to create a case for “why” the customer bought the solution, and measure the current strength of the partnership through the lens of the value engineering models.
At Twilio, I saw the impact of value engineering firsthand through resources created to support sales and customer success teams. Some key insights I learned:
Drives Enterprise Revenue: Value engineering acts as a free pre-sales consulting engagement, helping quantify value and build consensus across stakeholders. CSMs then piggy back off this model and continue to iterate as the relationship evolves.
Pricing on Value: Instead of steep discounts, businesses can justify pricing by demonstrating ROI—for example, a solution that saves $1M in costs makes a $500k price tag compelling. This becomes even more compelling when the revenue generation, cost savings and operational efficiencies increase YoY.
Strategic Fit: Growth-stage startups piloting value engineering can validate enterprise pricing and product-market fit before scaling.
How Looker’s Customer Success Team Leveraged Value Engineering
Cost Savings
Value engineering helps companies like Looker demonstrate measurable cost savings to enterprise customers by quantifying the financial impact of their solutions. For example, Looker’s data analytics platform can reduce the need for manual reporting by automating workflows, saving engineering hours and cutting down on headcount dedicated to repetitive tasks. A value engineering team would calculate these savings upfront, presenting a clear ROI for stakeholders to justify the purchase. By showing a direct correlation between adopting Looker and lowering operational costs, customer success teams can frame Looker as an essential investment rather than a discretionary tool.
Operational Efficiencies
Operational efficiencies are a critical area where value engineering shines. Looker empowers organizations by providing real-time insights that enable faster decision-making, reducing bottlenecks in processes like inventory management, sales forecasting, or marketing campaign optimization. A value engineering team might work with customers to identify inefficiencies in these workflows and build a business case for how Looker’s platform could eliminate those gaps. Customer success teams can then leverage this framework post-sale to align on KPIs and ensure the customer realizes the projected efficiencies. This proactive approach strengthens customer relationships and positions Looker as a partner in operational excellence.
Revenue Generation
Value engineering isn’t just about cutting costs or optimizing processes—it’s also a powerful driver of top-line revenue growth. With Looker, value engineers can quantify the potential uplift in revenue by helping customers leverage data insights to uncover new sales opportunities, improve customer retention, or enhance pricing strategies. For instance, a retail customer using Looker might identify high-margin product categories that should be prioritized in marketing campaigns, leading to higher sales. Customer success teams at Looker can build on this foundation by guiding customers in implementing these strategies, ensuring the promised revenue impact is achieved. This results-driven approach not only drives customer satisfaction but also creates opportunities for upselling and long-term retention.
When Should You Invest?
If you’re excelling in mid-market but struggling to close enterprise deals, value engineering could be the key to unlocking those larger accounts. While larger companies often have dedicated teams, startups can pilot value engineering initiatives to test the waters.
If you have Enterprise customers, having aligned on value models becomes the reason for a non-event renewal.