Value Selling Blog

Depending on where the prospect is in the buying process, there are different tools or calculators to help you with your value-based selling approach.

In the earliest stages of the sales cycle, you want to establish the prospect’s pain and how much that problem is costing them. This will help set you up for a conversation about how much your offering can help. A value calculator helps you show how much money the prospect is leaving on the table each month, or how much they’re spending that’s unnecessary. This helps you establish the “value” of solving the problem. (Here’s a good example of a value calculator.)

There are a couple of categories of value dimensions that will often be challenged by a prospect when you are building an ROI-based business case, and labor savings is at the top of that list. Labor savings tend to be tough to get customer buy-in for a number of reasons:

1. Labor Savings are often spread across many people’s time and thus are considered soft or indirect benefits without real economic impact
2. In order to capture the labor savings, the company often needs to take some action (reduce headcount, avoid hiring more workers, or reallocate employees to other value-added activities)
3. Often the people that you are dealing with when building the business case are the people that will be impacted by the actions required (e.g., selling a technology solution to the IT department that reduces IT headcount may be difficult)
4. Companies have been promised productivity gains many times, but rarely have they seen the results.