Value Selling Blog

Has your sales cycle grown longer and more complex? Are you challenged by new buying behaviors that exclude you in the early stages of discovery? Chances are you’re also faced with more restrictive corporate and financial oversight, which shifts purchasing authority to CFOs and inter-departmental committees.

How can you get the attention of buyers and decision makers in such a dynamic sales environment? A proven approach is value selling, a strategy that develops distinct sales messages focused on the bottom line. When all is said and done, prospects want to know how investing in your solution helps save money, increase sales and revenue, and achieve pertinent business goals.

Quite often sales and marketing professionals seek a TCO analysis to help grow sales when an ROI calculation would actually be a better choice. Many people assume they need a TCO analysis to close deals, when an ROI analysis would actually be far more beneficial. I know this because I get frequent requests to create TCO tools, and my first question is “What problem are you trying to solve?”

When customers make a purchase, they typically go through a few different stages. As a seller or marketer, your job is to help shepherd the customer through these stages quickly and efficiently.

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.)