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.
Encouraging prospects to change their behavior is one of the greatest challenges facing marketers and sellers. Behavioral economists call this phenomenon “status quo bias.” How can sellers overcome this inherent yet irrational desire to keep something the same, even if it’s less than optimal?
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.
I recently met with the marketing manager at a new ROI Selling client. While reviewing a draft of their new value selling tool, the manager commented, “Customers don’t think about it that way and they would never say that. That’s our internal language about our product.” Oops. How did that happen?
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.
An effective business case conveys your solution’s value and impact as they relate to the specific needs of your buyer. Although different levels of approval are often needed, a business case should be tailored to include the messaging and metrics most important to the decision maker.
