The Inflexion-Point Blog: VALUE SELLING STRATEGIES

Whenever your customer sees little meaningful difference between their current situation and their future potential, they will be inclined tostick with the status quo.

And whenever they see little meaningful contrast between the various offerings being proposed to them, they will be inclined to buy thelowest-cost solution.

If you are determined to compete on value and not on price, and if you are equally determined to avoid losing potentially winnable opportunities to a decision to "do nothing", you need to establish the strongest possiblevalue gapbetween your approach and all the other options available to them.

To achieve this, you need to recognise that your competitors are not just the other similar vendors that are proposing apparently similar solutions - your true competition includes all the othercredible optionsyour customer might be considering...

It’s falsely comforting to think of selling as a process in which one step follows logically after another. But although rigidly defined processes might be the best way of running a manufacturing production line, they completely fail to reflect the realityof any moderately complicated sales environment.

It would be convenient if things were simpler. But the truth of the matter is that in complex B2B sales your customer’s buying processes arerarely linear, compounded by the fact that they are sometimes poorly defined or even if they are well defined are often not well understood by many of your customer's decision team.

Rather following a perfectly straight path, many customer decision journeys zig and zag, go backwards as well as forwards, find themselves way off-piste, struggle to achieve consensus, can be redirected on the whim of a single powerful individual or can be abandoned at any stage along the way.

Gartner have recently characterised this "long, hard slog" as looking more like a spaghetti bowl than a conveniently linear process...

In any high-value complex B2B sales environments involving new projects with multiple stakeholders, the buying behaviours and motivations that drive your customer’s decision-making journey are inherently complicated and may be impossible for the average sales person to ever completely understand.

An earlier version of this article was first published in the November 2019 edition of Top Sales Magazine.

Every sales organisation likes to believe that what they are selling is valuable. But there are many interpretations and definitions of what value really means. In practice, of course, the customer’s opinion is the only one that really matters.

One of the most common claims made by salespeople, the sales organisations they work for and the marketing departments responsible for positioning their company is that they offer “value-added” solutions, or that they have a “unique value proposition”.

Companies can sometimes get away with these claims in B2C or simple B2B environments.

But in complex B2B sales environments, this “value-added” language often turns out to be a smokescreen for trying to persuade customers that they require more functionality than they really need and as a justification for paying more for the proposed “solution” as a result...

I’ve had the opportunity to sit in on a number of QBRs with my clients, and as an outside observer I’m struck by how common it is for salespeople to make untested assumptions that directly affect the accuracy of their sales forecasts and the outcomes of their sales opportunities.

It’s all-too-easy for salespeople - particularly if they have relentlessly positive personalities - to fall into the assumption trap, and to confuse hope with evidence. It’s easy to project past experiences onto current situations, and to assume that they will lead to the same results.

And it’s all too easy (to draw upon one of my recent articles) for salespeople to succumb to avoidable errors of ignorance or application. The conclusion is clear: assumptions kill opportunities. So how can sales leaders create an environment that avoids these mistakes?

When Harvard Medical School Professor (and BBC Reith Lecturer) Atul Gawande published his “Checklist Manifesto” nearly 10 years ago, it soon became apparent that the application of simple checklists - which have transformed patient outcomes in healthcare systems around the world in recent years - had implications far beyond the world of medicine or aviation.

There are many parallels between the worlds of medicine and sales, not least of which the idea that both surgeons and salespeople often tend to have a very high regard for their personal capabilities and a natural distaste for working within what they see as over-rigid systems that prevent them from practising their craft.

Checklists have been recognised as essential contributors to aviation safety for decades. But it turns out that the disciplined application of checklists in sales and medicine also have profound benefits for everyone concerned - for both the practitioners and the patients (or customers in a sales environment) ...

There are so many potential variables and unknowns in any complex B2B sales environment that the idea of running a completely perfect sales campaign feels like an impossible dream (or more accurately a hallucination).

That’s why rigid sales scripts, standard sales presentations and canned product demonstrations are largely ineffective in convincing the modern prospect to move forward with you - they expect more than that from you.

But it is entirely possible - and I would argue, very necessary - to focus on avoiding predictable and preventable errors when pursuing a sales opportunity...

Corporate Visions recently hosted a webinar on how to gain access to business executives. Their findings were based on a series of realistic simulations intended to identify which messages senior business executives were most likely to respond to (there’s a link to their conclusions at the bottom of this article).

Their research compared the impact of a range of different messaging approaches, including product value, ROI, provocative insight and competitive benchmark-led models in an environment where the vendor was vaguely familiar but not particularly well-known to the prospective customer executive.

I’ll leave you to review the detailed conclusions, but for me the most profound take-away was the idea that when considering whether to invest their time busy executives need to believe that, by taking the proposed call or meeting, they will learn something they don’t already know...

When your salespeople submit a proposal, it should always represent the natural culmination of a series of value creating conversations with their potential customer.

The contents should not come as a surprise. The recommendations should reflect an already established set of agreements with the key stakeholders. So why are so many sales proposals so ineffective?

One of the obvious reasons is that they were submitted as a blind response to an unexpected RFP and did not actually reflect any meaningful dialogue with the prospect (I’ve explained why this is so unproductive here).

But a less obvious but unfortunately all-too-common explanation is that the proposal has failed to sell the thing that is almost always most important to the ultimate decision-makers...