Posts Tagged B2B Sales
The Sales Skill You Need to Succeed
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on July 29, 2014
ROI, P&L, Acquisition Cost, KPIs, EBITDA…
Did your eyes glaze over as you read the words and acronyms in that line? These are common business terms senior executives discuss, use and measure but I have consistently been surprised how many sales people get the “deer in the headlights” look anytime I mention them in sales training workshop.
Why is this important?
Today’s sales person needs to become more business focused. We need to think and act like business people, rather than someone hawking a product, service or solution.
What does this mean for you?
If you are already familiar with business terminology, jargon and acronyms, all you need to do is present this “business” understanding when you are dealing with key executives.
If this is a new concept, you have a bit more work ahead of you.
The first step is to become more familiar with business in general and you can do that by reading business publications. These can include newspapers, trade journals, blogs, and magazines such as INC, Fast Company, The Economist, Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fortune, Forbes, and Entrepreneur.
If you understand what is important to business people, and you can position your offering accordingly, you will stand out from your competition and improve your odds of closing the deal.
This article was originally posted on the Fearless Selling blog on May 26, 2014
Sales Situations When You Should Slow Down
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on May 2, 2014
Many sales people are notorious for speaking too quickly and this habit can cost them money in lost sales. Here are 15 critical times sales people should slow down:
1. When opening a telephone call with a new prospect. Most people are not fully engaged when they initially answer a call. The majority or still focused on the task they were working on when the call came through so slow down until you have their full attention.
2. When speaking to someone who is calling from their cell phone. Most cell phone connections are not as clear as a landline so it is important to slow down your conversation to ensure that the other person hears everything.
3. Immediately before you ask for the sale. Many people are nervous asking for the sale. To relieve the stress associated with this, try slowing down and taking a deep breath before asking your prospect for their agreement or commitment.
4. When you begin your sales presentation. Too many sales people race through their sales presentations often due to nervousness. When you slow down before a presentation it gives you the opportunity to collect your thoughts and to think about the key points you need and want to make.
5. Before you respond to a question. Instead of blurting out a quick answer, take a few moments and carefully think about your response. This will help you build credibility and gain your prospect’s respect (providing of course that your answer is appropriate).
6. Before sending an email. One of the biggest time wasters is sending an email and forgetting the attachment. Do yourself a favor and slow down before you press ‘send’. Use this time to make sure your attachment is included and that your email is properly written and free of mistakes, spelling errors (including your prospect’s name!) and grammatical errors.
7. When introducing yourself. Do people ever ask you to repeat your name when you introduce yourself for the first time? If so, you are probably speaking too quickly. Slow down when you state your name so people can hear and understand it the first time.
8. Before you respond to an objection. Avoid the impulse to react quickly to an objection. Objections are not necessarily negative and slowing down before you respond can help you position your solution more effectively.
9. When you notice that you’re speaking too quickly. I often catch myself talking too fast, especially on the telephone and during presentations so I constantly remind myself to slow down.
10. If you feel your emotions getting the better of you. Sometimes people will say something that triggers an emotional response. Slow down before you say anything and prevent your emotions from affecting what you say.
11. When you don’t understand the other person’s perspective. When a prospect or customer references something and you are unclear what they mean, slow down for a moment before forging ahead with the conversation. Ask them what they mean by saying, “Can you clarify that for me?” or “What do you mean?”
12. When writing a sensitive email. If you need to write a sensitive email slow down and carefully choose your words so your message is not misinterpreted. However, I highly suggest that instead of sending an email in these situations, that you pick up the telephone and speak directly to the other person.
13. Before returning a call from a customer or prospect. Make sure that you have all the information necessary for the call before you dial. This includes a list of questions you need to ask if it is a prospect calling about a particular product or service. A few minutes of preparation can make a big difference in your results.
14. When you’re rushed. I realize that this sounds contradictory but here’s the rationale. When you are feeling rushed, you are more apt to make a mistake. So, in these situations, make a concerted effort to slow down, check your work and prevent a mistake from occurring.
15. When you don’t know the answer to a question. Many sales people feel obligated to respond to questions even when they don’t know the answer. Instead of falling prey to this fatal mistake slow down and tell your prospect that you don’t have an answer and that you will get it for them.
Speed isn’t everything especially in sales. You can stand out from many of your competitors by slowing down at opportune times. Great sales people know that slowing down at the right time can improve their sales results. Determine which of the suggestions in this article most apply to you and begin integrating them into your sales approach.
Three Pitfalls to Avoid When Developing an Account Strategy
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on January 8, 2014
The importance of selling strategically is an idea repeated time and time again – the larger and more complex the sale, the louder the advice. However, advising someone to sell strategically is somewhat like suggesting they “sell smart.” That’s great advice, but a little vague unless you can provide some specifics about the how to accomplish the goal.
Let’s start by examining some of the fundamentals for developing an account strategy – beginning with an actionable definition: An account strategy is a plan of action for getting to the right person, at the right time, with the right message.
When thinking about what it takes in a major account to formulate a winning sales strategy, a good starting point is remembering the buying environment is complex. Many decision-makers and influencers are involved, the needs and issues are multi-layered and the solution configuration and implementation management is likely to be complex and sophisticated.
In major accounts, one-size-does-not-fit-all is the cornerstone proposition for formulating a winning account strategy. There are no generic customers in major accounts. So there are no winning generic account strategies. Each customer is unique and each major account strategy must take that uniqueness into consideration.
Here are three pitfalls that will make a successful account strategy less likely.
Underestimating the importance of information is the first pitfall. Collecting, analyzing, and utilizing information about the customer is the starting point to develop any effective plan of action for getting to the right person, at the right time, with the right message. Getting that right requires the recognition that breadth comes before depth.
There is neither the need, nor the time to find out everything about everything all at once. It is however important to get a broad information base about the customer even before your sales process starts and to build upon it early in the sales cycle. This provides the foundation for formulating an initial strategy and provides guidance as to where and how to get in-depth information. The trap is getting a lot of information about the wrong things from the wrong people.
Confusing goals and strategy is the next pitfall. A list of goals is not a strategy. It is just a long list of things to do. A good account strategy focuses on a few pivotal goals and then delineates the challenges, resources, and actions necessary to achieve a favorable outcome – what needs to be done and how are you going to do it.
A correlated trap is substituting blue-sky ideas for pivotal goals using buzzwords like customer-centric that are just vague statement about some desired end state.
The third pitfall is assuming the future looks like the past. We live and sell in a time of “compressed history.” Changes driven by the global market and advances in manufacturing technologies make the past a bad predictor of the future. As a result competitive advantages that once lasted a long time now disappear quickly. In major accounts, if you want to prosper, assuming what worked in the past will work in the present is a risky premise.
To avoid these pitfalls, one overarching best practice should be remembered. In order to think and act effectively throughout the entire sales cycle, your sales strategy requires constant updating. Success cannot be achieved by filing out a form and periodically checking off key milestones. It requires understanding and reacting to the changes in the account and reviewing the responses to those changes with your sales management and the rest of the sales team on the account.
This article originally appeared in the Sales Training Connection blog on October 13, 2013.
Payoffs to Asking Questions in Sales Calls
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on October 1, 2013
If salespeople are going to bring value, new ideas, and insight to customers, they must understand the business issues and the challenges their customers face. Questions are a primary consultative tool for getting that done.
Bringing value can be achieved just as well by the thoughtful question as by fact telling. For example, if the customer seems to be thinking about a business strategy that involve risks, asking questions about how they plan to manage the risks shows you understand their situation and enables you to offer a thoughtful solution later in the discussion. Here are five specific payoffs for getting good at asking questions:
1. Asking questions leads to more memorable interactions. Well-planned questions go a long way in establishing your credibility particularly when they are framed around issues and challenges important to the customer.
2. Second, they help salespeople avoid the temptation to jump into the conversation too soon. A common scenario is for the salesperson to start the conversation by asking some thoughtful questions … the customer says something about an issue or concern … and then the salesperson immediately jumps in to provide information related to the answer. Equally often that is a trap since the definition of the problem is incomplete and/or all the issues are yet to be surfaced.
3. Alternatively, asking follow-up questions is an effective way to better understand the scope of the problem as the customer sees it and to explore what the possible strategic, operational, and financial ripple effects might be. Follow-up questions help a salespeople drill down to gain a better understanding of the problems facing the customer, as well as, helping the customer discover new insights about the nature and extent of the problem. It also means that salespeople avoid the temptation of talking about their products too early in the call.
4. Next, questions can be used to assess the potential value of a solution. Questions are not only valuable for exploring the scope of the problem; they are also useful for assessing the potential value of a solution.
By asking questions you can obtain insight about the customer’s view of how the overall situation would be better off if the problem is resolved and the possible downsides of maintaining the status quo. This approach to questioning also provides an opportunity to add a benefit that the customer may not have envisioned as an achievable outcome.
5. Finally, consider using questions for shaping the customer’s point of view. Shaping helps customers redefine a problem in a way that brings value to them and creates a better fit with your capabilities. It is important to emphasize that this use of questions is only legitimate when shaping brings new useful insight to the customer. Trying to persuade the customer to a point of view that is not in their self-interest must be avoided at all cost.
There are two major times in the sales cycle where shaping comes into play. The first time is in the early part of the sales process when the customer is defining their needs.
The second time is when the customer is defining the decision criteria they will use to decide between competitors. Helping customers think differently about the criteria and your capabilities to meet them can be helpful to them and can help position you as the best qualified candidate to deliver the solution.
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This article was originally posted to the Sales Training Connection by Janet Spirer on September 27, 2013.
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You can’t sell if you don’t know how they buy
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on September 17, 2013
It is one of the most fundamental and important propositions in major account selling – you can’t sell if you don’t know how people buy. Ask any top performing salesperson and they will paint a comprehensive picture of the customer’s buying process. Ask an average performer and they will provide only a sketch.
Because of the foundational nature of this idea, it is always a good idea to pay attention when someone adds new insight about how customers buy. In a McKinsey article they asked a fundamental question – Is the buying cycle linear? Their short answer was – No!
According to a McKinsey & Co study, the traditional linear sales process – customers take in information; narrow down their choices; kick the tires, and submit the purchase order – is not really how customers buy. Rather, they talk about the Customer Decision Journey that is anything but linear.
The study found that more than 50% of marketing spend is misaligned because of a misunderstanding how customers make buying decisions – as they say that is a problem worth correcting. So let’s take a look at three steps a salesperson could take to start getting it right.
Stop assuming the buying process is a mirror image of your selling process.
Most companies have a five or six stage selling process beginning with stages like need recognition and ending with stages such as resolution of concerns and proposal submission. The processes are almost always linear in depiction.
The first problem, as the McKinsey authors pointed out, is the buying process is often not linear. Second, the customer may not start at the beginning of your sales process. For example, they may expect that you have a good understanding of their needs hence not want to go through an extended series of discovery conversations. Third, they may have placed additional emphasis on a stage like evaluation of options so they can engage more people and committees in the buying process. So you are stalled at Stage 3 and don’t even know why.
Don’t get there too late with too little.
In an HBR article Steve Martin reported on a win-loss analysis study. He found – “Approximately 30% of the time, the winner of the sales cycle was determined before the official selection process started. Another 45% of the time, customers had already made up their minds about whom they were going to buy from about halfway through the process.”
This means that 75% of the time customers make their final decision halfway through the selection process. Consequently you have to determine early on whether you are chasing a bad business opportunity. On the other hand, if it is the case where the race can still be won, you need to have a strong first half.
Stop assuming the present can be predicted from the past.
Today we are living and selling in a time of “compressed history.” Changes driven by the global market and advances in manufacturing technologies make the past a bad predictor of the future. Companies in many industries are going through transformational changes which are impacting their buying process and, in some cases, their basic business model.
As a result, competitive advantages that once lasted a long time now disappear quickly. What you need to do and how you do it during the sales process has to be adjusted and fine-tuned to the new reality. If you want to prosper – assuming what worked in the past will work in the present is a risky assumption.
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This article was originally posted to the Sales Training Connection by Richard Ruff on September 9, 2013.
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Never Say “Thank you for your business.”
Posted by Rick Pranitis in CUSTOMER SERVICE, GENERAL DISCUSSION on April 1, 2013
Every sales person appreciates winning a big order from a key customer; but it’s rarely appropriate for him or her to say so to the customer. Saying “Thank you for your business” is bush league, and can significantly weaken your position.
Top performing sales executives recognize that customers buy their solutions because to do so makes good business sense for the customer’s organization. That isn’t to say that personal relationships don’t play an important role in the process. Strong relationships throughout the complex network of buying influences can play a significant strategic role in the sales rep’s ability to understand and communicate the relevant value that their solutions offer their customers’ organizations, to the exclusion of the competitors.
World class sales organizations train, coach, and provide the tools necessary to enable their sales reps to systematically investigate, identify, quantify, and prioritize customers’ specific value drivers, and enable them to formulate and communicate high value solutions across the buyer’s organization in order to clearly differentiate their offering against the competition.
Receiving a big order is confirmation that the sales team has successfully established its solution as offering superior value versus the alternative competitive options. This is no time to weaken your value proposition with a bush league “thank you”. Receipt of the order means that it’s time to proactively manage your customer’s post purchase evaluation phase. A strong competitor is not going to go down without a fight, and purchase orders have been known to be withdrawn after their award for a variety of reasons. Receipt of the purchase order means it’s time to reconfirm to all of the important buying influencers that their decision was the correct one. Saying ‘thank you’ serves virtually no purpose towards this objective, and will more likely plant seeds of doubt about their decision.
Send your customer a message that successful execution of this project is a top priority to your organization, and that it will be planned and executed in a manner that exceeds the expectations of the customer. Be careful not to open any cans of worms that may potentially cause doubt, but be thorough in communicating that your organization has a solid plan to execute and deliver.
While it is certainly acceptable, and generally expected, to send an order confirmation, the confirmation should convey the message; “We look forward to working together with you to ensure the successful execution of this very important project,” versus “We would like to thank you for your business.” Below is a sample listing of some key activities you can initiate to solidify your position and competitor-proof your Purchase Order.
- Provide your customer with a Point/Counterpoint Table illustrating the customer’s key issues and how your offering will successfully address each;
- Initiate an internal project kickoff meeting to ensure that your organization is prepared to deliver 100% customer satisfaction;
- Submit a detailed production, service, installation schedule that illustrates how your solution will meet the customer’s key milestones;
- Initiate a joint production kickoff meeting with your customer and the key influencers in the decision;
- Develop a joint project communication protocol and milestone update schedule that highlights the collaborative teaming nature of the project;
Yes, receiving a six, seven, or even an eight figure purchase order is a milestone that deserves celebration. It may have taken you and your team months to secure such an order. But don’t put such a huge win at risk by letting down your guard. In today’s highly competitive business environment, receipt of the purchase order doesn’t signify the end of the race. It represents the beginning of a joint collaboration between your company and your customer’s team to successfully execute and deliver a complex high value solution that will solidify your long-range organizational relationship.
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This article was originally posted on the Sales Racehorses blog.
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Eight Qualities Which Lift Sales Leaders Above Managers
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on January 19, 2013
What’s the difference between a sales manager and a sales leader? How can you become more effective on the job and dramatically increase your influence with your customers and your company?
Here’s the CODE leaders live by:
- Company orientation. They’re interested in the future of the company and are concerning about every department, not just Sales. They’re always ready to suggest ways to help work flow more smoothly, save time or cut costs. They embrace responsibility, recognizing that salespeople who try to put the blame on others don’t inspire others to follow them.
- Organization. They never approach the day in a state of panic and are in full control most of the time. They put the needs of others ahead of their own to achieve goals. They are goal-centered rather than ego-centered, when dealing with customers, their sales manager or other employees.
- Detail focused. They take the time to listen about customer concerns and question any areas of confusion. They listen carefully before setting goals and moving ahead. They get others to cooperate by selling their vision on what must be done and are able to get customers and other employees to accept their roles.
- Energy. They’re willing to work longer than required, getting a lot done in a day’s time and enjoying it.
Traits of a leader
Of all the characteristics of a sales leader, four are particularly important. Test yourself to see how you measure up.
Do you:
Relate to the larger picture? Sales leaders understand how their jobs go beyond selling. They act as a treasure-trove of information for their customers, keeping them abreast of competition and paying close attention to the markets in which they and their customers are competing. They’re seldom surprised when price cutters suddenly threaten their accounts.
Have a vision? Sales leaders have visions that are easily understood by customers and are attainable if everyone works together.
Prepare yourself to make fast changes? Good leaders are prepared to change direction whenever new information warrants making a shift.
Think long-term? A sales leader’s focus extends far into the future. How long? At least a decade, often longer. Whenever you evaluate your future, ask yourself, “What demands are likely to develop over the next two to 10 years? How can I help my customers and my company meet them?
Four critical steps
These steps will help you improve your sales leadership skills:
- Connect with people and stay connected. That means being open to ideas from customers, prospects and your own management. It takes more than simply listening and asking a few questions. It requires building a feel of trust and letting customers know what’s happening. Talking to them is important, but listening to them is critical.
- Expand your boundaries. Don’t restrict yourself to your job as a salesperson. Converting features into benefits and practicing value-added selling is only part of your job. Ask questions to help you investigate the possibilities for doing your job more effectively. The answers you get may help you become bolder in your pursuit of efficiency and productivity.
- Show respect for established practices. This is a good way to win respect from both your customers and your management. Respecting “the way things are done around here” may also help you suggest changes when they’re needed.
- Be willing to take risks. All of the techniques outlined above involve some element of risk. You’re going to be wrong sometimes. But you’ve got to do it. A willingness to take some risks separates the sales leaders from average salespeople.
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The Ten Best Sales One-Liners of All Time
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on January 5, 2013
Great sales managers are great coaches. More often than not, they’ve worked deals “from soup to nuts,” and have “carried a bag” as individual contributors to sales teams early in their careers. Now it’s their job to motivate and develop inside and outside account executives to achieve goals and advance their careers.
To successfully motivate their teams, managers should first make themselves equal, rather than different. This often requires managers to “talk the talk” and make their points fast while educating teams.
What follows are ten of the best sales one-liners, Ever! Call them clichés, truisms, or idioms, whatever. Executives, sales managers, customers, industry pundits, and other sales reps use them all the time. This is only volume 1, and there are a whole lot more where these came from. Enjoy this first installment, and share with us in the comments which one-liners you use and hear most, as well as which ones you’d add to the list.
Ten of the Best Sales One-Liners. EVER!
- Just tell them what time it is; they don’t care how you built the watch.
- There’s no need to engineer the Starship Enterprise when all they need is budgetary pricing.
- If you can’t thoroughly demo your product, you’ll die on the vine.
- You prospect’s got a finely-tuned BS meter.
- You can’t expect to take a fishing boat out and just watch the fish jump into the boat.
- You won’t get by on just personality and good intentions.
- It’s better to lose in the 1st round than in the 15th.
- If you’re going to lose, don’t lose alone.
- If all you’ve got is a hammer in your hand, then everything will look like a nail.
- From a strategic perspective, this deal’s carved in butter.
Learn them. Know them. Live them
The Four Phases of Customer Evolution
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on November 10, 2012
There are only four customer phases, and all customers will be in one of these at all times. There are many erudite articles written about the interdependence between sales processes and buying processes, but – being primarily focused on new customer acquisition – many miss a critical consideration; The Four Phases of Customer Evolution.
Customers go through three Growing Phases and one Dying Phase. You should understand the phases and particularly the reason why customers more from the Growth Phases to the Dying Phase. The critical thing is not just to recognize which phase they are in – that is fairly obvious – but to understand that if they are to become a customer, then they will inevitably morph from phase to phase. It is only a matter of time.
The four phases are:
- Prospect
- Customer
- Loyal Customer
- Former Customer
The fundamental substance of all the management theory, strategic advice and best practice writings about customer management, key account management or account planning any should be to accelerate phase transition through the Growing Phases; phase 1, 2 and 3, and then decelerate the inevitable transition to phase 4, the Dying Phase.
Here are some facts to chew over:
- The cost of new customer acquisition is 500% that of customer retention
- Increasing customer retention by 2% equates to decreasing costs by 10%
- Reducing customer defections by 5% can increase profitability by up to 125% (depending on industry).
Source (Leading on the Edge of Chaos – Emmet C. Murphy and Mark A. Murphy)
The Road to Customer Defection
Before you read the rest of this section, I want you to consider two different scenarios. Each is real, and I hope you will easily identify with them both.
Scenario A: In the first scenario you (or your company) are selling a product or service to your customer. This scenario should be real and should relate specifically to your existing company. Stop and think for a minute about why prior customers have stopped doing business with you.
- Why have they left you or your company?
- What do you think are the top three reasons?
- Write them down – now, before you play out the next scenario.
Scenario B: In the second scenario; you are the customer. We might all be forgiven for thinking that being a customer is easier than being a supplier – but that is not always the case. In this scenario you need to think about the last time you (or your company) decided to stop doing business with a particular source.
If you take a personal perspective on this, that source might be a restaurant, a clothing store, a hairdresser, an online bookstore, an airline, or an online community. From the perspective of your company, the source may be your stationery provider, IT services supplier, sales trainer, telecommunication equipment vendor, or any one of the many other options.
Combine the personal and company perspectives (if you have both) and write down the top three reasons why you defected. If you are like most people, the answer to Scenario A will start with price or product features, and the answer to Scenario B is more likely to be more focused on ‘how I was treated’.
The problem is that in the real world these two scenarios converge and the disconnect between what suppliers think and the opinions of their customers send their relationship hurtling from a Growing Phase straight into the spiral of the Dying Phase.
Why do customers leave? The reality might be different than you think. According to Rightnow Technologies (now part of Oracle):
- 73% of customers leave because they are dissatisfied with customer service, but companies think just 21% leave for this reason.
- Company thinks that nearly half (48%) leave because of price, when in fact, according to the customer perspective, this happens only 25% of the time.
- The U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce support these findings. According to their research:
- 68% leave because they are upset with the treatment they’ve received (Customer Service)
- 14% are dissatisfied with the product or service
Serenade your customer
You’ve abandoned me.
Love don’t live here anymore.
Just a vacancy
Love don’t live here anymore
The lyrics here are from the 1978 song Love don’t live here anymore by Rose Royce, an American soul and R&B group who had a number of hit singles in the 1970s. While the reference to this song might be a little contrived – I’m a sucker for musical references – the sentiment is well expressed and relevant.
If your customers leave you, it is because they don’t love you, and that is usually because they feel unloved. The reason they don’t love you is usually because they feel you have abandoned them. If there is a vacancy – your competitor will rush to fill it, and your customer will inevitably become a former customer.
It is hard to accept that the reason your customers don’t love you is because you have underserved them. It is much easier if you can point to price or product features as the determinants of defection. That hurts less because you can convince yourself that there is little you could have done about it.
Ask yourself this. If you knew that the customer was going to move from a Growing Phase to the Dying Phase, and there was nothing that you could do about price or product features, what actions would you take to serve them better so they would stay? So what are you waiting for? Write down your answers – and take action now.
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This article was originally posted by Donal Daly at DEALMAKER 360® on November 6, 2012
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Six Essentials in Building a Value Proposition
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on October 23, 2012
A great deal of conversation these days is about the way the buying process has changed. Sales professionals are discovering they must step up their game to stay in line with customers’ expectations. One thing that hasn’t changed is the buyers’ expectation for receiving value in each transaction be it goods and services or just conversation. There’s been a good amount of interest in the” Value Proposition” as a method of satisfying this expectation and being a “silver bullet” to sales success.
There isn’t quick fix or an easy answer but you’re going to pursue this path here are essential six things to help smooth your value proposition journey.
1. Create first, communicate second
We often find that there is confusion between creating your value proposition and then how you take it and communicate it during the selling process or through marketing channels.
In my experience, it’s absolutely critical to do the high-level creation part BEFORE attempting to communicate the value proposition to your customers and potential customers. Doing it this way around makes the communication part, and therefore the selling part, so much easier. Suddenly we all become clear about the key messages. They’re obvious, simple, clear and based on reality. One of the biggest problems we come across is good sales professionals doing their best to create value messages in the absence of any wider understanding of where the source of their company value lies. Suddenly, the sales professional is forced to come up with a value proposition based on the latest opportunity – retrofitting their messages back into the rest of the organization. Hard work and almost impossible to achieve – I’ve seen many demoralized sales teams sweating this one.
2. Top down, not bottom up
It’s so much easier for sales people to have a clear, high-level, company-wide, value proposition created, and then they are free to tailor this to specific opportunities, rather than having to make them up from scratch. Also, doing it this way around (i.e. top-down) will reduce your cost of sale as you’ll know which opportunities are worth pursuing and which aren’t.
So the starting point needs to be company-wide, or division, or sector or product group, before translating the messages into major accounts or specific products or sales opportunities.
3. Involve all stakeholders
A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered and a belief from the customer of the value that will be experienced. And you can’t create this by thinking up some clever words. You need input from many sources including people in your organization and your customers.
4. Understand customer risk
We use the value equation where Cost must also include the risk taken by the customer in choosing to buy from you and your company. Benefits are shown squared because the benefits you discover after going through the value proposition creation process must significantly outweigh the costs:
Value = Benefits – Cost
5. Value is not just rational
During the value proposition creation process, it’s not just the rational dimensions of the client’s organization that need to be taken into account but also the political and emotional/psychological. Look at the 3 dimensions of:
• Rational (price, ROI, speed and feeds, features etc.)
• Political (e.g. how is this going to affect the buyer’s job? How will this value proposition be received by their organization?)
• Emotional/psychological (how does the customer feel about you, your products/services and your company?)
6. Offerings deliver value
You can often achieve a huge surge in value for your customers, with very little outlay, by re-bundling or re-packaging existing offerings.
So, is a value proposition a silver bullet? No, it isn’t, but it will significantly help with lead generation, conversion rates and overall profitability but only if you put some blood, sweat and tears into the creation process first. Mine the silver first, hand-carve the bullet and then aim it at a precise target.
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