Value Selling Blog

If you are like the vast majority of businesses, you strive to shorten your sales-cycle and accelerate closing the deal. On the other hand, some businesses are blessed with such a smooth sales process that they need to slow things down.

Imagine being a tennis coach and one day, you tell your team you want them to start playing golf. You hand out brand new, top-of-the-line golf clubs, and send them back out to the tennis court to play golf. What do you think will happen?

Although we have many industrial clients, the adoption of value-based selling still lags far behind other industries such as software, supply chain, telecommunications, and computer and networking hardware. I recently pondered why this might be the case.

During initial conversations, prospective customers often tell me they’re looking for a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculator or tool. My typical response is to ask what they’re trying to accomplish so we can explore which tool (or tools) will best serve their needs. More often than not, a TCO tool can be helpful, but it may not the best solution.

For years I've been telling people that value calculators are used for marketing and lead generation and ROI tools are used by sales to close deals.

Until now, that is.

I was recently interviewed by my longtime friend and colleague, Bruce Scheer, CEO of SalesConversation.com. It was great fun being part of Bruce’s podcast series, which covers a broad range of topics that can help sellers be more successful. Before I summarize what we discussed, consider subscribing to The Sales Conversation Podcast on iTunes and listening to the entire podcast on Bruce’s website.

Grant Thornton’s 2018 CFO Insights on New Technologies research study reveals that “CFOs are playing an increasingly important role in influencing decisions related to technology.” At the same time the study found that “only 12% of executives strongly agree that they have an effective system of measuring financial key performance indicators associated with the implementation of technology.“

The best way to increase your average selling price (and earn more commission) is to use a value selling methodology. Value selling is a proven approach to avoid or minimize price discounting and increase upselling and cross-selling, which all contribute to a higher selling price.

Our recent blog post, "How to Boost Sales Results with Business Value Conversations" includes some telling statistics about achieving sales success by presenting and discussing your solution’s value proposition with your customers. More importantly though, how do you define the value your organization can expect to receive from adopting a value selling approach?

Our series on value pricing wraps up with three pitfalls that can jeopardize future sales, customer satisfaction and of course, your bottom line.