Bringing your Customer Value
The question of what value means to a customer has a different answer for every customer. Ultimately each customer — and no one else — decides what constitutes value. When a customer assesses the value of a solution, there are two key determinants: business value and personal value. The explicit discussion may be all about business value, but there is always a personal agenda.
Explicit business value is about either reducing cost or increasing revenues, or both. Business value is never about product features or capabilities; it is about how those features and capabilities can improve the business so it makes money or saves money.
When a sales person attempts to express value by listing an impressive array of features and functions (the “spray and pray” approach), the sale is unlikely to go anywhere fast. Features must be linked to a desired business benefit, and it is the sales person’s responsibility to help the customer connect the dots by explicitly linking the features and functions to the business benefits.
While business benefits are usually identifiable in terms of dollars, there are always non-financial components to any decision, and they are often individual and personal in nature. Understanding the personal agenda is often the key to a successful sale. While the stated reason behind a purchasing decision will almost always be a straightforward business benefit, the real (hidden) factor that clinches the sale might well be something more personal. The buyer, for example, may be looking for a promotion, may have annual bonus dependent on resolving an issue, may be trying to ease pressure from above, or even be trying to build a new organization.
These personal drivers present two challenges: discovering the information and using the intelligence effectively. To find out what is on your customer’s personal agenda, you must build a trusting relationship and listen.
As a sales person, if you can’t present business value, you are really only presenting cost and pretending that the value is at least as big as the cost. It is better not to waste the customer’s time.
Most Recent Articles
- What Do Customers Really Want-Really!
- Characteristics of the “A” Player Sales Professional
- Are You Customer Centric?
- Is Your Value Irresistible
- Is Your Value Proposition Compelling
- 3 Components of Customer Value
- What Drives the Customer to Buy-Pain or Gain?
- 3 Musts for Sales Success
- Social Awareness and Selling
- Self Awareness and Selling
- 5 More Critical Mistakes of Cold Calling
- 5 Critical Mistakes of Cold Calling
- Is Cold Calling Worth it?
- The Three Elements for Sales Success
- 3 recommendations for your negotiating strategy
- Anticipating your negotiator’s style
- Negotiating with inside information
- The four critical elements for negotiating
- Negotiating-It’s all about power
- 3 considerations for exceeding your sales budget
- What’s their decision making style
- The power of influence
- Momentum: The key to a winning sales team
- Positioning customer value
- Three realities of prospecting
- Emotional intelligence & “Four People You Should Know”
- Maximizing your team’s performance
- Identifying personality from a conversation
- Four key questions that aid in identifying the customer’s personality style
- How knowledge of personality style helps with conflict
- The Strategic Seller
- Streamlining Customer Buying Decisions
- Anticipating And Handling Your Customer’s Objections
- How Do You Identify Someone’s Personality
- What Motivates Your Customer To Buy?
- Leveraging Perceived Value For Sales Success
- The value of identifying personality styles
- Maximizing your team’s performance
- Your lifelong personality
- It’s not “what” we do, but “why”
- Left Brain versus Right Brain learning
- The Company’s most important asset
- Customer Benefits
- Do You Know Why Your Customers Buy?
- Responding to Customer Objections
- The Sales Process
- What does Affability have to do with Sales?
- Resilience: The Antidote to Failure
- Enthusiasm Breeds Success
- Persistence: a Key to Success
- Fuel Your Attitude with Optimism
- The Power of Value Propositions
- A Positive Attitude Wins Customers
- Are you motivating your sales team?
- Bringing your Customer Value
- The Truth on Sales Training
- The “Cold” Call
- Today’s Hi Tech Sales Environment
- Selling in the new Millenium
Subscribe to Articles
Competitive Excellence offers readers the ability to subscribe to new website articles — you’ll be instantly notified whenever a new article is available.
Subscribe to Competitive Excellence Article Feed
Questions about subscribing? We’ve got the answers to the ‘What?’, ‘Why?’, and ‘How?’.
Questions about Subscribing?
- What are feeds? I don't know how I might use these links when I find them.
- Feeds are a way for websites to distribute their content beyond just visitors using web browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a news reader.
- What Does This Mean?
- You may recognize the universal feed icon from your favorite websites. This icon (among others) represent content in any format - text, audio or video - to which you can subscribe and read/watch/listen using a feed reader.
- Why would I use this?
- This way, whenever new articles are written at Competitive Excellence, you'll be instantly notified.
- How do I read feeds?
- If you want to browse and subscribe to feeds, you have many choices. Today, there are more than 2,000 different feed reading applications - here are our three favorites.
- Do I really need to bother with this?
- Absolutely not. Visit http://www.competitive-excellence.com/ regularly - you won't miss anything.
