When the going gets tough, the tough get going... working harder and focused on meeting their challenges. The tough ones in our business are those who can convince cautious customers to buy in an exceptionally challenging economic environment.
Value propositions need to be constantly refreshed as customer, competitor, and market dynamics change, which is all the time. Successful, energetic companies embrace this renewal and use it to sustain ongoing profitable growth. Let’s examine more closely why and how to adopt this approach.
Has your organization built its marketing and sales programs around selling your product? Well, here’s a news flash. B2B customers don’t buy features and functions; they buy solutions to their problems. So not only should you be selling your solution, you should also be “selling money.”
What’s your sales strategy for 2021? The global pandemic has wreaked havoc in every business sector and will likely dominate the economy going into next year. And the upcoming presidential election is sure to add more uncertainty. What better time to build a sales strategy that delivers business value?
When meeting with C-level executives or a VP of Sales or Operations, I am often asked how and when to introduce selling value to their sales team. They all believe in the importance of creating a value-based sales strategy, but they struggle with its implementation.
In pre-pandemic days, sales and marketing efforts focused on enhancing the customer’s total experience (e.g., brand assurance, strategic growth, ESG, responsiveness, and future enablement). But COVID-19 has flipped this paradigm, at least in the short term, as buyers keep retreating to more basic considerations.
In the economic downturn of 2008, Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffrey Moore wrote a thought leadership piece for Harvard Business Review (HBR) entitled, “In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers.” I give them credit for setting off a chain reaction that we now know as “Selling Insight.”
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, millions of workers have been quarantined and are working from home in an effort to slow the rate of infection. And while employee safety is paramount, organizations are still responsible for marketing and generating revenue to keep their business healthy.
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?
Two years ago, I heard a “value nugget” that has influenced how I help organizations define their value proposition and distill it down to three words or less. It came from John Chambers, former Chairman of Cisco Systems, who grew Cisco’s annual revenue from $70 million to $47 billion.
