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.
For starters, ROI and value-based selling was born and really took off in the supply chain and enterprise software industries. Companies like i2, Manugistics and SAP pioneered selling based on the value that could be delivered. Thus, it makes sense that value selling is heavily adopted across those industries.
Likewise, since IT either drove or was heavily involved in buying enterprise software, it naturally follows that the telecommunications and computer and networking hardware industries would follow. This is especially true because enterprise software vendors could readily provide CIOs and IT managers with the business case they needed to close the deal.
So, why do industrial products still lag behind on realizing the benefits of value-based selling?
I spent the first ten years of my career working as an engineer in an industrial manufacturing setting. Part of my job was performing economic evaluations on proposed projects and either recommending or rejecting these significant investments based on their cost-justification. I know first-hand that evaluating the economic business case is important to industrial customers. So why aren’t vendors and their sales teams driving that discussion more often?
I believe there are three primary reasons, all of which can be readily addressed to improve sales.
ROI and value-based selling can be just as or even more effective for selling industrial products. Why? Because customers are likely doing an analysis on their own already, and you just aren’t part of the discussion. Arm your industrial sales team, and yourself, with the training and tools needed to provide the cost justification to make the sale without relying exclusively on selling the technical aspects of your offerings.