Darrin Fleming
Darrin Fleming is Managing Director at ROI Selling. Darrin has worked with a variety of companies in technology and complex solutions including Honeywell, Celanese, Merck, PPG, Battelle, and Cooper Industries to quantify the value of their solutions and build compelling business cases. His years of starting and managing consulting and professional services businesses at companies like Rockwell Automation allow him to bring a wide range of experiences and insights to his clients.
Darrin has developed proven approaches for analyzing the market, understanding customer needs, developing strategies, developing appropriate Go-To-Market plans for the offerings, and enabling an effective execution of the strategy. He travels around the world helping and training companies to improve their marketing performance. Darrin also has to his credit a book published through McGraw-Hill. Darrin attended the MBA program at the University of Oregon where he focused on Marketing and Organizational Development. He also has a BSEE in Control Systems Engineering from Michigan Technological University. He is based in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife Nikki and their two sons.
I recently reflected on what might cause sellers to reassess their value pricing and value selling strategies in a changing economy. While both are rooted in value, value pricing and value selling use different tools with different purposes and reference sets. Let’s take a moment to review the basics.
Unlike digital marketing, live industry events allow sales teams to engage one-on-one with multiple prospects over a focused period of time. Value selling tools are a compelling way to attract enough qualified visitors to your booth to justify your investment. Try these tips at your next show.
Sales adoption is a crucial challenge to rolling out a successful value-based selling program. Beyond providing ROI tools, companies must also help the sales team embrace a new way of selling. You can understand and overcome these challenges using best practices gleaned from our 20 years of experience.
Economic indicators are sending mixed signals about the health of today’s economy. Inflation is on the rise and whether we’re in (or will be in) a recession is up for debate. Through it all, B2B sales don’t have to slow down if you understand how an uncertain economy influences buyer behavior.
I recently met with the marketing manager at a new ROI Selling client. While reviewing a draft of their new value selling tool, the manager commented, “Customers don’t think about it that way and they would never say that. That’s our internal language about our product.” Oops. How did that happen?
In B2B buying decisions and consumer purchases, humans do not always make optimal or even rational economic decisions, as predicted by Rational Choice Theory. If this is true, why do we continue to preach value-based selling? The fascinating and evolving study of Behavioral Economics may hold the answers.
Why would a company abandon its existing value selling tools after investing in their development? The answer is often simple: the tools are too complex and the sales team won’t use them. To better understand how to deploy more effective value selling tools, it is first important to understand how and why they are too complex.
A well-designed value calculator gives buyers an easy way to analyze your solution’s impact on their bottom line and get meaningful answers to their questions. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the results are defensible and believable enough for users to engage with your sales team.
The concept of the buyer’s journey seems to have lost some of its appeal. Some B2B pundits now contend that the journey is a convoluted route with many twists, turns and dead-ends instead of a neat, linear process. How can sellers nurture sales if they’re not sure where buyers are in their process?
When the going gets tough, the tough get going... working harder and focused on meeting their challenges. The tough ones in our business are those who can convince cautious customers to buy in an exceptionally challenging economic environment.