by Dan Corcoran, Chief Technology Officer, VP Sales Enablement
What is Value Selling?
Value selling is often defined as selling by leading with the value of your product or offering, not just its features and functions. The approach has been around for decades, sometimes adopting different names like value-based selling, value messaging, or value engineering.
No matter what you call it, though, value selling has proven its worth as one of the best strategies for driving sales in the business-to-business (B2B) world. It has consistently outperformed traditional B2B selling techniques, where reps typically tout vague promises about their products and rely on emotional triggers designed to burnish the buyer’s market reputation, reduce their anxiety level, or paint a big strategic “vision” — minus any quantified financial return.
In contrast, value selling is rooted in delivering what individual buyers are looking for, presented in clear and concrete terms. It uses quantifiable metrics that decision-making executives often use to measure value. Value selling or value consulting is an approach that helps to quantify the overall impact the product or service makes on the customer’s bottom line.
Sales industry experts state that the number one method to boost sales doesn’t depend on an abundance of leads, sales training, or products, as much as the ability for sales and marketing teams to effectively communicate the value of their solutions to prospects. Studies have shown that value selling outperforms all other sales techniques in the long run. Up to a 50% reduction in stalled deals and over 40% boost in total sales quotas are just some of the benefits from value selling.
Building a better business case with value selling
Why does value selling’s quantitative approach build a better case for buying a solution, product, or service – more so than the traditional qualitative approach?
One reason is that value selling makes it easy for financial decision-makers to evaluate the worth of a particular project or solution. Today, CIOs, CFOs and other execs are inundated with requests for budget. As a salesperson, your proposed solution is just one of many projects that decision-makers have to evaluate. But the basis for evaluation is not always equal. That means if you show up with a well-defined business case based on a sound financial analysis – one that is presented in an easy-to-consume package — that project is far more likely to move to the top of the stack than a nebulous “ask” from your IT group.
What’s more, if you’re in the business of selling technology products or tech-related solutions, you’re usually selling into IT. And while IT people are very smart, they don’t necessarily have the skillset to communicate effectively in the language of a C-suite decision-maker with real buying power. In other words, IT may not be capable of producing a credible financial business case. But with the right value-selling solution, you can empower your client contact to effectively communicate the business case for your proposal, even if you can’t be in the room to present it.
Almost all buying decisions are driven by three factors: increasing revenue, decreasing cost, and mitigating risk. To close deals, you need to be able to communicate these values based on the individual buyer and their specific objective. You need your offer to be quantitative and focused on the customer’s business. It should also be portable, so that your proposal can be easily shared across teams and scaled across locations.
The new relevance of value selling
Given our evolving economic landscape, value selling is finding growing relevance and traction in the B2B marketplace. In an economy marked by an increasing shift to subscription-based commerce, execs can no longer count on simply closing deals and moving on to the next customer. They must address value up front and then follow up the sale with clear, quantitative value realization to reduce churn and preserve revenue streams.
In light of this shift, executive teams have started embracing the potential – indeed the necessity – of demonstrating value throughout the buyer’s journey. In fact, an ideal value selling strategy will engage a prospect at all stages of the buyer’s journey from initial awareness through customer retention.
Contact Us to Learn More
Mainstay believes that the first step toward implementing an effective value messaging approach requires a smart assessment of how value selling can be successfully integrated within your current sales operation. Let’s work together to develop a value-based marketing and sales strategy that can fuel your pipeline and deliver the tools you need to take your business further. Learn more here or email sales@mainstaycompany.com
