Developing a solid business case is a critical step in the B2B sales process. It involves creating a clear and comprehensive argument that presents the financial benefits of a solution so that a customer can make an informed purchasing decision.
I recently reflected on what might cause sellers to reassess their value pricing and value selling strategies in a changing economy. While both are rooted in value, value pricing and value selling use different tools with different purposes and reference sets. Let’s take a moment to review the basics.
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.
The biggest gap between sellers and buyers is a shared understanding of a solution’s value. This gap leads to long sales cycles or worse, deals that just fade away. Overcoming this chasm can be accomplished using value selling tools, which function as a Rosetta Stone to unlock insights for both sides.
Wonder why your buyers and sales teams aren’t using your value selling tools? Chances are they’re built around a product-centric value proposition and creating unwanted complexity, despite your best intentions. Here are two strategies for fine tuning your value selling tools and increasing adoption.
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.
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.