What is Value …Value is the direct linking of your Services or Products unique benefits to the most important needs and desires of the customer. Value is a critical element in all sales situations irrespective of what you are selling in the Home, Association and Organization. If your customer does not see the value, they will not buy, but if they do they will be happy to buy even at higher prices because they are delighted.
In the sales cycle, learning how to build value for your products and services is more important than learning how to close the deal, reason is that you close the deal but the customer’s experience and relationship is Key.
TO WHO – In most sales situations, you are selling to more than one person and you are always going to find out that two different people in a group or committee are going to have different needs and wants, therefore what’s valuable to one person might not be to the other in the group. The one size fits all strategy no longer works as customers are aware of their options.
People’s taste differ from one individual to another which also changes from time to time, so it’s the job of the sales professional to know what those different tastes are to get their customers excited about the value.
How do you find out what’s valuable to the customer?
The Sales professional just needs to ask significant need development questions, researching the organization to find out areas they are struggling with, issues they face and how their solution can address those needs. Secondly, when someone doesn’t know you well, they are probably not going to tell you what is really on their mind. You would first need to build some trust and credibility.
The question, “what’s the most important issue to the CEO who is focused on growth and innovation rather than operational problems?”, can take days and months to get to the real answer from the CEO. Could he be trying to reach the company’s target market or interested in numbers and matrix etc. Before you start off a conversation on the benefits of the products & services it will be best to find out what he values the most, if done well, creating value for the client becomes easier.
Note: Value outplays Price every time.
For companies that want to sell services that are considered expensive, value creation would be their differentiating factor; otherwise, people would always go for the lowest price option.
The What – What’s valuable about our service , what needs does it fill, what problem does it solve, the customer does not care what the product is or how it is made, he cares about what it does for him and how it solves his problems.
However, it is our job as sales professionals to show how our solution is different, better, special and why he should buy it profitably from us rather than from other salesperson or any other company.
Anytime a customer doesn’t buy from us it means they chose some other person’s service or our service did not meet their needs or the sales person didn’t explain it well enough by not asking enough questions to uncover the true need.
The value may lie in the price of the product or service. For example, value can be obtained through cost savings for the customer or impeccable after sales support or even from the sales person’s account management skills.
Finally:
The more you understand about your customer’s business, challenges they face, issues they encounter , their dreams, hopes and needs, the more you can build up the value for your organizations’ solution.
Author: Shadrack Udubra
