What Every Technology Salesperson Should Know
8 Keys to Selling Value
Apr 30th
Selling value links your technology to your customers’ business success. It helps you sell higher, close faster and get your price. This article summarizes the keys to building value.
This month we have discussed how to build value so you customer logically understands why your solution is the best choice and is emotionally committed to a successful outcome. Here is a summary of what you have learned:
Link your solution to the customer’s results.
Value links your solution to your customer’s business success because it shows them how it will help them achieve their strategic business goals faster, better and cheaper.
Value drives the sale.
The customer’s perception of value is the driving force behind the sale. It determines how much customers are willing to pay, how quickly they will buy and how much risk they will take in the purchasing and implementation process.
Value is contextual.
The perception of value changes by decision-making role, the stage of the sales cycle and the technology adoption profile. Maintaining your value proposition requires discipline. Since each selling situation is unique, it is up to you to tailor the value building process to every account.
Value is quantifiable.
You create value when you quantify the benefits of your solution and prove to the customer its direct contribution to the financial results they expect from the successful implementation of their business strategy.
Anxiety builds value.
To build value you have to build your customer’s awareness of the consequences of not accomplishing their strategic business objectives. You do this by linking the customers’ technology problems and needs to the company’s business strategies.
Value is a moving target.
The subjective nature of value means that it is constantly changing. As the sale progresses, as the market adopts, as the competitive landscape evolves, the definition of what the customer values will change.
Pain causes momentum.
People have to feel pain before they are motivated to do any thing about it. Technology sales people use Value Building Questioning Strategies to help build the customer’s pain, and subsequently value, around the critical factors required for the successful implementation of the business strategy.
Value creates energy.
Using value to drive a sale makes your job as salesperson much easier. Selling value is like riding a wave; the energy of the marketplace keeps moving the sale forward. If you don’t sell value, then you have to create all the momentum of the sale by yourself, which is exhausting and rarely successful.
Build Value TODO List
Apr 29th
You build credibility through consistent communications. Understanding what your customers value should shape all your interactions with them. When customers have a series of consistent experiences reinforcing their belief in the value you are promising, they become increasingly confident in their decision to buy your solution. If, however, the experiences are inconsistent then the customer will doubt your sincerity and/or the ability of your company to deliver on your promises.
Doubt slows down the sale. A stalled sale is ripe for competitors. So make sure that everyone on the sales team understands the value proposition and that it is consistently communicated throughout the sales process. Here is a TODO list for each member of the sales team to make sure that your organization is building consistent value in the customer’s mind.
Sales Person
Identify emerging business strategies in your territory
Create a hit list of high potential opportunities for the technology based on emerging market trends.
Write a customized Value Map for each account
Run value building customer education meetings
Write Value Building Questioning Strategies for the key stakeholders in your accounts
Communicate back to Sales Support actual examples of how businesses are using the technology to support emerging business strategies.
Sales Manager
Ask your sales people to explain each account’s business strategy in account reviews
Role-play Value Building Questioning Strategies with your sales people. Take on the role of different functional executives in the same account, so the sales person can practice tailoring the Value Building Questioning Strategies by stakeholder.
Review account specific Value Maps with the sales team
Role-play the Elevator Pitch Exercise with your sales team before each important sales call
Sales Support
Provide information about emerging business strategies and market trends.
Build Value Maps.
Write Value Propositions and Value Building Questioning Strategies by market segment, business strategies and the specific needs of each functional executive
Identify how the customer’s perception of the value of your solution evolves along the technology adoption curve.
Track, document, quantify and publish the results of successful implementations of your technology solution
Just Do It – What You Need to Do Build Value
Apr 29th
Research the Market.
Identify the market drivers – economic, demographic, technological, etc. – that are changing the marketplace. Read up on how innovative copanies are capitalizing on these changes by creating new business strategies. Use the Wall Street Journal or business magazines to better understand what is happening and why.
Use technology adoption profiles to interpret behavior.
Technology adoption theory explains a lot about customer behavior. Read the technology marketing classics by Geoffrey Moore – Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado – to deepen your understanding of how markets develop and how technology adoption profiles influence the customer’s buying process. Draw a technology adoption curve for your territory and use it to predict behavior.
Identify value drivers.
Apply your technology solution’s value proposition to the various business strategies identified in your Emerging Business Strategies Worksheet to uncover what drives value in each market segment.
Build a Value Map.
Work with your marketing and product engineering team to figure out how your technology supports emerging business strategies. Lead a multi-disciplinary team – account executives, business analysts, sales engineers, product marketing, product development engineers – through the value building process. Create a Value Map that you can use to create value propositions for each account.
Develop Value Building Questioning Strategies.
Once you have built the logic flow, develop Value Building Questioning Strategies. These questioning strategies will help you get through the initial telephone calls and sales interviews. They will insure that you focus on what the customer is trying accomplish, not what you want to accomplish.
Schedule a customer education meeting.
Propose an educational meeting with your customer. Use your value proposition to drive the meeting agenda. If it is focused on the customer’s business strategy and promises success, it will most likely grab the attention of the people who count. Then use your value building strategy to drive the meeting. Take chances and aim high. Executives are always interested in new ways to improve their business. By using value as your guide, you will be speaking to them in a language they understand.
Does your sales team sell value?
Apr 27th
If your sales team does not know how to build value, lots of problems can crop up. Consider the following questions.If the answers are yes, then think about training your field organization in value selling.
Do you have too few top performers?
The ability to sell value is what distinguishes mediocre from exceptional salespeople. Most technology sales people sell features and benefits. Exceptional salespeople sell the value that comes from enabling strategic results.
Do your sales stall or result in no decision?
Sales stall when the customer doesn’t perceive the value of the purchase. If the customer’s compelling reason to buy isn’t strong enough, then it is easier not to decide than to make a commitment.
Low sales productivity or high cost of sales?
When your salespeople don’t know how to sell value, it takes them longer to close a deal. Value helps them get to the economic decision maker faster with a compelling reason to buy.
Do you have to discount to make a sale?
If you haven’t built value into your sales offer, then you probably won’t get your price. Value helps you uniquely differentiate your solution, which is what earns you the right to charge a premium price.
What you need to know to build value
Apr 26th
Building a Value Map is a rigorous exercise in applying logic. To develop a value map you need to consult with market analysts to understand the market dynamics that are driving change; business executives to understand the emerging business strategies and economic and operational needs; technologists to understand the technology needs and issues, product marketing and sales engineers to understand how the technology solution’s features and functionality can support the customer’s needs and enable their business strategy.
Although it is not really hard to find this information, figuring out what is really important is challenging. Most likely, your corporate web site has lots of information about customer needs and multiple white papers discussing market trends. However, it is the rare marketing organization that has synthesized this information into logical thought strategies that build value and created useful sales tools so it is easy to apply them to your accounts.
Information Required to Build Value
Market Drivers
Trends that are causing the new market to develop and why, so you understand what is causing the market to change and new opportunities to develop.
Business Strategies
New business strategies that enable customers to respond to the market change and capture new opportunities, including how the strategies work; what they accomplish and expected results; the customer’s compelling reasons to buy, and real-life examples of the strategies in action, so you know what your customer is trying to accomplish.
Customer Needs
Tactical requirements to implement the business strategies including economic, operational, and technological needs, so you can help the customer translate his strategies into tactical needs for your solution.
Customer Problems
Problems and issues arising from the implementation of the new business strategies; economic, operational, and technological impacts of the problem; causes of pain, and examples of how customer pains manifest themselves, so you can help the customer anticipate problems and show her how your solution will solve or prevent them.
Solution
Features and benefits of your solution; how the solution satisfies needs and resolves key issues; economic, operational, and technological benefits of the solution; ways to prove the benefits, and examples of successful implementations, so you can build the customer’s confidence that your solution will deliver the results that you are promising.
Value Drivers
How to combine benefits to demonstrate strategic results, and examples of linking the solution’s benefits to expected results of the business strategy, so you can build the customer’s perception of value.
Four Techniques to Build Value – Part 4
Apr 24th
strong>Technique #4: Develop Value Building Questioning Strategies
People have to feel pain before they are motivated to do any thing about it. It is human nature. Your job is to help your customers feel their pain. You have seen their problems before and you have probably solved similar problems in the past. You could tell them what to do about it. But the odds are that they wouldn’t listen. You need to coach them so they discover their problems on their own. By asking them the right kinds of questions you build their awareness of their problems and fuel their desire to solve them. Your questions help them define their needs and raise the issues they need to resolve. It also builds their trust in you at the same time.
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Value Building Questioning Strategies are solutions-specific questions that guide the customer through the value building process. The questions combine logic and emotion into provocative and compelling conversations. They help the customer:
• Discover how the market is impacting their business and the importance of implementing new business strategies.
• Develop anxiety around the impact of these problems to build urgency around the need for a solution.
• Analyze the situation to uncover key problems, determine what is causing them and linking the problems to strategic issues.
• Acknowledge their tactical needs and accept the benefits of your solution.
• Realize the value of how your solution supports the business strategy by solving key tactical problems.
Four Techniques to Build Value – Part 3
Apr 23rd
Technique #3: Write a Value Proposition
A value proposition is a simple statement that links the benefits of your solution to the benefits of your customer’s business strategy. Your value proposition identifies:
• who the customer is
• what the customer needs to do
• how your solution helps them to do it
• why your solution is uniquely superior to other alternatives.
Be succinct.
A compelling value proposition is one that simply states what the customer can expect by accepting your proposal. Make sure it showcases how the value drivers will enable the business strategy and the quantifiable benefits of its successful implementation.
Four Techniques to Build Value – Part 2
Apr 22nd
Technique #2: Quantify Value Contribution
The value contribution of your solution is calculated by quantifying its impact on the customer’s ability to produce strategic results. Impacts can be measured in quantities of time, money, new customers, market share, customer satisfaction rates, etc.
For example if the openness of your application means it is easier to integrate the customer’s purchasing process with their key trading partners, then you can quantify its benefits by documenting:
• time saved when implementing the application – 3 months
• reduced costs from better purchasing – $100,000
• increased opportunity – projected incremental revenues of $2,000,000 thanks to the increased personalization options.
Since you have already documented the business results the customer expects at both the strategic and tactical levels, showing the potential contribution of your solution on their ability to realize these results is merely a matter of quantifying how much faster, cheaper or better they can do it with your solution.
Four Techniques to Build Value – Part 1
Apr 21st
Since building value is about managing the customer’s perception it is important to evolve your value proposition as the sale progresses. Learning how to write effective value propositions that you can use to develop questioning strategies, build your solution and structure your proposal is critical to your long-term success selling technology solutions.
Over the next few days, we will be presenting four great techniques to help you build value with your customers.
Technique #1: Identify Value Drivers
Value drivers are the tactical benefits that add up delivering strategic results. They close the value loop by explicitly telling the customer how the solution will enable the business strategy, better, faster and more productively than any other alternative.
Although your strategic marketing organization spends a lot of time and money developing value propositions, it is up to you to find the one that crystallizes the value of your solution for your customer. Value drivers are completely dependant on your customers’ business strategy, technical environment and financial objectives. You need to know what the customer values before you can to combine their value drivers into a value proposition that will win the deal.
Create a Value Map to identify your most compelling benefits in light of your customer’s business strategy and describe how their combined value adds up to significant strategic results.
To identify value drivers, ask you customer…
• What are the business results you expect to achieve by implementing your business strategy?
• What are the key needs that need to be satisfied to enable the business strategy?
• What are the key issues that need to be resolved before you can implement the business strategy?
• How does the solution satisfy these needs and resolve the issues?
• What are the solution benefits that support the successful implementation of the business strategy?
To build a Value Map you integrate the perspectives of several different disciplines into a common definition of value. This is not an easy process. You need to build consensus between various constituents in the your and your customer’s organization. Without that agreement, you will not be able to write an effective value proposition.
The definition of value is constantly changing
Apr 20th
The subjective nature of value means that it is constantly changing. As the sale progresses, as the market adopts, as the competitive landscape evolves, the definition of what the customer values changes.
In his book, Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore describes the transition between the early adopters to the early majority sales as ‘the chasm.’ The chasm is the epicenter of the fight for market share. Because technology buyers want to establish a market leader, the market tends to standardize on one technology solution. Standardization benefits customers because it makes it easier and safer to implement the new technology solution.
This is a very difficult time for technology companies because they have to transform a value proposition promising innovation and radical change into one promising pragmatic and reliable evolutionary business improvement. Evolving a message is a complex and dangerous process. Unless it is perfectly executed, customers hear conflicting messages about your solution, which undermines your credibility.
Maintaining your value proposition requires discipline. You must be sure that your value propositions reflect what is happening in the marketplace and in each of your accounts. As the market evolves the essence of your solution’s value will change from innovation and competitive advantage to risk management and productivity. As the sale progresses your customers will value risk reduction over the promise of enabling benefits. So you need to be constantly revising your value proposition and how you apply it.
