If you want to increase your average deal size, the best thing you can do is learn to sell based on value. That’s because a value-based selling approach helps you justify your price and expand cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Here’s how it works.
Focus on Value (Not Features and Benefits)
To increase your average deal size, start by learning how to talk about the customer’s business challenges. Specifically, think about how your solution impacts situations or circumstances that require your customer to 1) spend money unnecessarily and/or 2) not achieve their potential in terms of sales revenue.
This is very different than the approach of many salespeople, who tend to use empty adjectives in an attempt to describe how great their products’ features and benefits are. By contrast, leading with value means using business terms to show how your solution solves their financial challenges.
For example, your offering may increase productivity for your customers. What you want to do is quantify the value of productivity increases for the customer; this way, they understand how your offering can impact their bottom line.
When you talk about value, the customer spends the initial stages of the sale thinking about how much their situation will improve thanks to implementing your solution. As a result, conversations with the customer will become more collaborative. For example, you’ll have far fewer tugs-of-war over pricing, and more conversations about how the value to be realized is more than worth the price of your offering.
Increase Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities
When you establish this framework for a more open discussion, customers are much more likely to be receptive to other ways you can help them. This could lead to more 1) cross-selling opportunities, where they become interested in buying more than one product or service from you, and/or 2) upselling opportunities, where they become interested in upgrading to a tier of products or services that deliver more value, even though they cost more.
Cross-sell opportunities can be facilitated by showing the additional value delivered by a complementary offering or bundled services. For example, the value calculator below gives you the ability to add Contact Center Management to a business case that might have only included Unified Communications Management, and vice versa.
This is a great way to not only increase the average deal size but also to potentially lock out a competitor that can’t provide the same bundled solution.
A value calculator or ROI calculator is also a great way to create upsell opportunities. In the example below, you can show buyers the incremental value associated with moving from Support Flex to Software Flex.
Again, this creates an opportunity to increase the selling price and keep out the competition.
Conclusion
Using these techniques and tools is one of the easiest ways to increase your average deal size and meet quota faster. Think about it this way. If you had a $1 million quota, would you rather sift through leads, qualify prospects, and chase 30 deals to close 10 of them at $100,000 each? Or would you rather go after 24 deals, close eight of them, and use upsell and cross-selling opportunities to increase the average selling price to $125,000? Either way, you get to $1 million in sales, but value-based selling allows you to get there faster and more efficiently.
