Genius Drive

Quota attainment has not rebounded. And the data from RepVue, Everstage, and Salesforce confirms this is not a temporary problem. It is structural. The pattern across struggling teams is consistent. Value is being introduced too late, applied too reactively, and delivered too inconsistently to move buyers to action. When buyers cannot justify a decision internally, deals stall regardless of how good the solution is. Closing the value gap is not a sales training problem. It is a go-to-market strategy problem. And it starts with making value the foundation of every role, every conversation, and every stage of the customer lifecycle. #GeniusDrive #ValueSelling #SalesEnablement #QuotaAttainment #B2BSales #RevenueGrowth #GTMStrategy #SalesTransformation #ValueEngineering #PipelineGrowth #CustomerSuccess

For years, the Value Engineer and Value Consultant have been cornerstones of modern go-to-market teams. Quantifying ROI, building business cases, justifying decisions. Essential work in complex B2B sales. But as the market shifts toward an Outcome Economy, the expectations of the role are changing in meaningful ways. The clearest signal is the rise of the Forward Deployed mindset. Inspired by the Forward Deployed Engineer model in modern software companies, this approach is not about sitting on the sidelines and supporting deals from a distance. It is about being embedded with customers, working alongside them in real time. That means engaging early to help shape the problem and the solution. Staying present through implementation and adoption. And being accountable for delivering real, measurable outcomes, not just building the case for them. The name of the role may not change overnight. But what the best value professionals are being asked to do already has. #GeniusDrive #ValueEngineering #ValueSelling #OutcomeEconomy #B2BSales #SalesEnablement #GTMStrategy #RevenueGrowth #SalesTransformation #CustomerSuccess #ForwardDeployed

Ken Powell, speaking at Value Driven 2026, shares how K1X has built one of the most impressive growth stories in a market that most would consider nearly impossible to disrupt. K1X was carved out of a large Midwest accounting firm that had built a software-as-a-service platform for its own clients. The IP and technology were locked inside one organization while the entire market desperately needed the same solution. Ken and his team saw the opportunity, took it off their hands, and built a standalone company around it. The result over three years has been 65 percent CAGR, with every single year delivering top decile growth over the prior one. And they did it in a buyer persona that is famously resistant to change. CPAs operate in a world built on precision, reliability, trust, and accuracy. They manage risk for a living. Convincing them to change how they work is not a small ask. What made the difference was not just the product. It was having a solution the market genuinely needed, a clear problem worth solving, and a value story precise enough to earn the trust of buyers who depend on getting everything exactly right. 💡 Learn more value best practices and skills to win in complex, high-trust markets. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gkSVTpMz #GeniusDrive #ValueDriven2026 #Podcast #ValueSelling #OutcomeEconomy #B2BSales #SalesEnablement #GTMStrategy #RevenueGrowth #ValueExpert #KenPowell #K1X

A CFO's goal is not to get excited about your solution. It is to feel assured about the decision. Clarity, confidence, and control are not just preferences. They are the three things standing between your deal and a signature. When you walk into a CFO conversation without all three, you are walking in underprepared. Quantify the impact. Bring the evidence. Make the cost model simple. That is how you win the CFO conversation. #GeniusDrive #ValueSelling #CFO #BusinessValue #B2BSales #SalesEnablement #GTMStrategy #RevenueGrowth #SalesTransformation #ExecutiveSelling #FinancialJustification

Ken Powell, speaking at Value Driven 2026, opens with a contrast that perfectly frames the problem his company was built to solve. F1 is synonymous with speed. The K-1 is the opposite. A tax compliance document buried in over 100 pages of unstructured data, passed back and forth through a broken chain of manual processes. Download it. Key it in. Create a PDF. Send it. Review it. Retype it. Send it back. Find a mistake. Start over. And do all of this under the pressure of a filing deadline that arrives on the last possible day, forcing everyone to file an extension. It is not just inefficient. It is a process that every person involved genuinely dreads. The gap between the complexity customers tolerate and the speed they deserve is exactly where real innovation lives. Ken and the K1X team saw that gap clearly and built a solution around eliminating it. The best value stories do not start with a product. They start with a problem so painful that customers cannot wait to hear what comes next. 💡 Learn more value best practices and skills to build problem-first value stories that resonate. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gkSVTpMz #GeniusDrive #ValueDriven2026 #Podcast #ValueSelling #OutcomeEconomy #B2BSales #SalesEnablement #GTMStrategy #RevenueGrowth #ValueExpert #KenPowell #K1X

Nearly half of value management programs now use offshore resources to support value work. That is a dramatic shift from just a few years ago, and it signals something important. Demand for value is growing faster than most organizations can operationalize it. Offshoring is expanding capacity, but capacity alone does not solve the underlying problem. More people producing more artifacts is not the same as value working at scale. What actually drives scale is clearer value workflows, stronger enablement, and tighter integration between value teams and the revenue roles they support. Without that foundation, adding resources only adds noise. The organizations that will win are not the ones with the biggest value teams. They are the ones with the most efficient, well-integrated value operations. #GeniusDrive #ValueManagement #ValueSelling #BusinessValue #B2B #RevenueGrowth #SalesEnablement #GTMStrategy #SalesTransformation #ValueEngineering #ScalingValue

It now costs $2.07 to generate just $1 of new ARR in IT. That is an 83 percent increase in four years. The economics of acquisition no longer add up. 🔷 Filling the pipeline is costly Every lead, ad click, SDR call, and event scan carries a heavy acquisition burden. The yield on those inputs is dropping while the cost keeps rising. 🔷 Each opportunity must count You cannot outspend your way to growth. When it costs more than two dollars to earn one dollar of revenue, wasting a single opportunity is not just inefficient. It is expensive. 🔷 Stalled deals and discounts are silent killers Indecision, delays, and discounting quietly erode the ROI of every deal in your pipeline. Each one compounds the acquisition cost problem. 🔷 Retention and expansion are the biggest growth levers left 74 percent of revenue leaders say most growth now comes from existing customers. The most cost-effective pipeline you have is the one you already won. #GeniusDrive #ValueSelling #RevenueGrowth #B2BSales #SalesEnablement #GTMStrategy #CustomerSuccess #PipelineGrowth #SalesTransformation #ARR #ValueManagement

Doug May, speaking at Value Driven 2026, responded to an attendee's challenge that many value leaders face but rarely talk about openly: how do you scale value transformation inside a large organization when leadership has not bought in yet? The attendee was making real progress through grassroots efforts, winning over one rep and one leader at a time. But without corporate leadership alignment, scale was out of reach. Doug's answer reframed the entire challenge. Driving internal transformation is not an organizational problem. It is a sales cycle. The same principles that apply to winning a customer apply to winning internal support. You need champions. You need to identify the economic buyer. You need to understand what they care about, who has influence over them, and how to help them see that what you are bringing is the solution to their problem. Doug learned this firsthand at Splunk when he nearly quit out of frustration. A conversation with a trusted sales leader changed his thinking completely. Build your champions through grassroots work, then find the strongest ones and map a path to the person who can actually commit to the change. The approach is the same. The audience is just internal. 💡 Learn more value best practices and skills to drive transformation at scale. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gkSVTpMz  #GeniusDrive #ValueDriven2026 #Podcast #ValueSelling #OutcomeEconomy #B2BSales #SalesEnablement #GTMStrategy #RevenueGrowth #ValueExpert #DougMay #ChangeManagement

Moving to outcome pricing is the right direction. But vendors who move without the right foundation run into four challenges that can derail the transition. Revenue volatility, measurement infrastructure, honest attribution, and portfolio segmentation are not just operational concerns. They are the difference between an outcome-based model that builds trust and one that erodes it. The vendors who get this right will have the most defensible value story in the market. #GeniusDrive #OutcomeMaxxing #ValueSelling #BusinessValue #B2B #SaaSPricing #RevenueGrowth #GTMStrategy #SalesTransformation #CustomerSuccess #AIStrategy

The selling climate has changed, and the numbers make it impossible to ignore. Over half of buying efforts are cancelled before a decision is made. More than two thirds of B2B buyers experience post-purchase regret, leading to 25 percent declines in gross retention. And discounts of 20 percent or more have become the norm just to close deals. For every $1M in pipeline, the reality looks like this. $300K lost to cancellations. $240K eroded by discounts. $400K delayed in elongated buying cycles. Leaving only around $72K in closed business and just $49K in retained revenue after renewal. Yesterday's sales motions will not win today's buyers. Customers are not looking for more features, more pitches, or more price cuts. They want partners who understand their business, collaborate on outcomes, and give them confidence in their decisions. The Sales Kickoff is the moment to make that shift. Not just a motivational event, but the launchpad for a value-based growth strategy that sustains results all year long. #GeniusDrive #SKO #ValueSelling #SalesKickoff #B2BSales #RevenueGrowth #SalesEnablement #GTMStrategy #SalesTransformation #CustomerSuccess #ValueEnablement