My guest appearance on The Sales Conversation Podcast explored How to Sell Complex Solutions to Multiple Buyers using value selling. I shared practical strategies and tactics to advance your value selling approach with host, Bruce Scheer, founder of Sales Conversation, and together, we took a meaningful look at how to improve sales performance with value selling.
One of the biggest challenges in sales is getting buyers’ attention. And even when you do get a phone call set up, too often buyers on the other end of the line are clearly multi-tasking and not paying full attention. The panacea is to provide buyers with meaningful insights. Follow the five steps below to create deeper buyer engagement, which will lead you from initial contact to sealing the deal on renewals and future sales.
If you are marketing and selling a complex B2B solution, it is critical to differentiate your offering’s value proposition for each market segment. Markets are often segmented using geographic attributes (e.g., continent, country, region, state and dispersion) and / or business attributes (e.g., size, industry, product mix and legal structure). That said, the key factor in your segmentation analysis is how your customers use your solution.
Presentation is everything, from food and fashion to thought leadership and value propositions. There’s a lot riding on how well your team articulates the customer’s problem and presents the value of your solution. When it’s done clearly, persuasively, and with a sense of urgency, buyers will take action quickly and decisively in your favor.
They’ve been to your website to research your product and download free content. They follow you on social media and learn from your posts without commenting. Though they lurk in the shadows, today’s buyers are hard at work educating themselves about every possible solution to their problem.
When you get right down to it, B2B deals are driven by the buyers’ desire to lower costs or grow sales. Even if they tell you they want to “mitigate risks” or “achieve compliance,” buyers still expect to achieve their desired outcome along with a positive impact to their bottom line.
The vast majority of buyers evaluate technology solutions based on the criteria of “better, cheaper, faster.” This approach seeks technology that can improve some aspect of their business at a lower cost. While this is important, it’s often incomplete.
Small B2B technology companies face the same challenges as businesses of every other size: cash flow, marketing, talent management, execution, access to capital, and more. But they are uniquely tested when it comes to growing sales.
Some deals are simple, like selling a solitary product to a single buyer. Other deals can be more involved with offerings that include multiple products, phased timelines, and deployments for multiple departments, locations, or processes across an enterprise.
I recently spoke with Mike Serulneck, an accomplished value engineer who has successfully developed and managed business value engineering and sales proposal teams at Tier 1 technology companies. During our conversation, Mike shared his experience using value selling methodologies to sell technology solutions, as well as his perspective on how value selling has changed over the last decade.
