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.
During initial conversations, prospective customers often tell me they’re looking for a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculator or tool. My typical response is to ask what they’re trying to accomplish so we can explore which tool (or tools) will best serve their needs. More often than not, a TCO tool can be helpful, but it may not the best solution.
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.
PwC’s June 2024 Pulse Survey found that "58% of CFOs say they’re spending more time on tech investment and implementation." The same study also found that 44% of CFOs identified "increasing use of technology to reduce costs" as their most important funding action.
One of the biggest challenges in sales is getting buyers’ attention. And even when you do get a phone call set up, too often buyers on the other end of the line are clearly multi-tasking and not paying full attention. The panacea is to provide buyers with meaningful insights. Follow the five steps below to create deeper buyer engagement, which will lead you from initial contact to sealing the deal on renewals and future sales.
After working with thousands of sellers around the globe for 20+ years, I've discovered that few sales reps conduct business value conversations with their buyers. This is despite the reality that value selling improves margins, close rates, and customer satisfaction better than any other sales strategy.
Presentation is everything, from food and fashion to thought leadership and value propositions. There’s a lot riding on how well your team articulates the customer’s problem and presents the value of your solution. When it’s done clearly, persuasively, and with a sense of urgency, buyers will take action quickly and decisively in your favor.
In B2B sales, complementary tools and dynamics work together to make or break a sale. So which of them ultimately closed the deal? Was it the glowing reference or great rapport with the sales rep? Chances are it was the vendor’s discovery-based sales process that yielded a targeted solution than delighted the buyer.
One of our earliest blog posts titled Why Value Based Selling is So Successful is still one of our most popular posts. It opens by defining value-based selling as an approach “built on quantifying the impact the service makes on the customer’s financial performance,” based on a reference from Sequeira Consulting’s website.
Every now and then, it's worth rereading the now-classic business book, “The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation." The authors make it clear that value selling can help every sales rep perform like a Challenger by adopting the attributes in the profile of this likely sales leader.
