When selling to well-informed buyers, your sales team needs to skip the “features and functions” pitch and get straight to the point: the value your solution delivers relative to the problems it solves. Do they have the right tools and training? Do they understand what’s most important to buyers?
I am always happy to provide value-selling training, but I hesitate when the organization hasn’t already invested in value selling tools or integrated value selling into its overall sales process. Why? Because three critical components must be present to ensure a successful value-selling initiative: people, process, and technology.
If you are like the vast majority of businesses, you strive to shorten your sales-cycle and accelerate closing the deal. On the other hand, some businesses are blessed with such a smooth sales process that they need to slow things down.
My guest appearance on The Sales Conversation Podcast explored How to Sell Complex Solutions to Multiple Buyers using value selling. I shared practical strategies and tactics to advance your value selling approach with host, Bruce Scheer, founder of Sales Conversation, and together, we took a meaningful look at how to improve sales performance with value selling.
The best way to increase your average selling price (and earn more commission) is to use a value selling methodology. Value selling is a proven approach to avoid or minimize price discounting and increase upselling and cross-selling, which all contribute to a higher selling price.
When you get right down to it, B2B deals are driven by the buyers’ desire to lower costs or grow sales. Even if they tell you they want to “mitigate risks” or “achieve compliance,” buyers still expect to achieve their desired outcome along with a positive impact to their bottom line.
Our series on value pricing continues with a detailed look at how to set prices that benefit both you and your customers. Now that you understand the risks of other pricing models and how value pricing leverages the value your offering creates for customers to maximize earnings for your company, let’s look at one way to actually calculate the optimal price and the data you would need to populate the formula.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Serulneck, an accomplished (and now happily retired) value engineer, who shared his experience using value selling methodologies to sell technology solutions, as well as his perspective on how value selling has changed over the last decade.
What can Aristotle teach us about value selling? Aristotle? Value selling? The link between one of the greatest thinkers of the Western world and value-based sales processes is stronger than you would think!
Your ability to help B2B buyers understand the value you provide can make or break the sale. In some cases, as with our client IQS, that means communicating the ways in which the prospect or customer is losing money so that the buyer understands the potential of the solution.
