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.
Building value selling content into your solution messaging and sales process requires a deep understanding of the difference between ROI and TCO analyses and the right use case for each. If used inappropriately, or not at all, you can lose credibility with customers and hurt your chances of closing deals.
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.
The buyer's journey has evolved from a linear, predictable process to a complex expedition with twists, turns, and multiple decision points. Unfettered access to information puts the buyer in charge but something important is missing: a clear perspective of a product's value to the business.
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.
With value selling tools, sellers can develop a more persuasive business case with insights into customer problems. And buyers can justify investing in a solution whose value is expressed in dollars and cents. In our experience, successful value selling tools adhere to ten core principles.
When selling to well-informed buyers, your sales team needs to skip the “features and functions” pitch and get straight to the point: the value your solution delivers relative to the problems it solves. Do they have the right tools and training? Do they understand what’s most important to buyers?
Have you had a chance to read the new ebook written by Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and CEO of Selling Power -- 5 Trends That Will Impact Your Sales Team in 2019? It does a great job of highlighting how B2B sales and marketing leaders can develop strategies that align with these trends.
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.
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.
