3M Field Sales Leadership Accelerates Value Selling with LeveragePoint

As one of the world’s most recognized industrial brands, 3M’s Safety and Industrial Business Group (SIBG) has long faced a familiar commercial challenge: premium products come with premium pricing, and price always enters the conversation. Historically, sales reps relied on individual spreadsheets, manual calculations, and personal selling styles. This inconsistent approach often left reps working with whoever was accessible rather than the key stakeholders who could actually authorize change. As 3M moved from transactional to consultative, solutions-based selling, that inconsistency became a real constraint on growth.

3M partnered with LeveragePoint to build VMAX, a customized value-selling platform that gave reps a standard operating procedure for capturing customer testing data, quantifying operational savings, and building customer-specific business cases. Senior sales rep Brad Dunn played a central role in the field rollout, running weekly peer feedback sessions that shaped ongoing platform improvements.

The results speak for themselves. Reps now walk into customer conversations with polished, data-backed value stories instead of a simple price quote, giving them credibility to reach senior decision-makers and defend premium pricing with real numbers. The platform has also strengthened distributor relationships, with partners bringing 3M into more accounts specifically because of its quantified value capability. As adoption matured, 3M shifted its success metric from usage to outcomes, embedding a two-VMAX-close-per-month goal directly into sales KPIs. As Dunn puts it: “LeveragePoint is now part of our blood. It’s just part of how we sell.”