Too often sales professionals are told by their leaders that they must create value. However, there is a fundamental problem with this advice. Value is not what you say it is. Value is what the customer says it is. If you don’t understand what is of value to the customer you are just doing a lot of talking.
When sales stall or are lost, and the reason is price, sales managers often tell their people it’s because they did not create enough value. The truth is they did not listen to what the customer told them is important to them. Just because your product does everything under the sun, does not mean it’s something the customer cares about.
You need to figure out what is really important to the customer. It may not be the things you may instinctively think of. Your solution might save the customer time and money. But what if that is not important to the customer. What if what is important to them is actually costs them more money? What if what is important to them would cause them to be less efficient? But the value you are creating goes against everything that is important to them.
So, you have uncovered a need. You understand their buying process. You have a strong relationship with all of the people who can say yes. But they don’t care about your value proposition. What do you do now?
You have to listen. I mean really listen. What you hear might not make any sense to you. But it if it is what they value and if it is important to them you had better take notice. Maybe once you have heard them and you fully understand what they value you may find your solution really is not the best fit for them. You may find that a different configuration of your solution would be better than what you had originally envisioned. You will only figure this out if your really listen to the customer.
If you find that you and your team are struggling to accomplish this it may be that the process you are using now needs to change in order to help you more effectively align your solutions with your customers values.
If you would like learn more about how you can significantly improve your ability to help customers do more business with you contact us and we can talk about what you are doing now and how to get you to where you would like to be.
