Has your sales cycle grown longer and more complex? Are you challenged by new buying behaviors that exclude you in the early stages of discovery? Chances are you’re also faced with more restrictive corporate and financial oversight, which shifts purchasing authority to CFOs and inter-departmental committees.
How can you get the attention of buyers and decision makers in such a dynamic sales environment? A proven approach is value selling, a strategy that develops distinct sales messages focused on the bottom line. When all is said and done, prospects want to know how investing in your solution helps save money, increase sales and revenue, and achieve pertinent business goals.
Rise Above and Be Heard
Before you can deliver a unique and compelling sales pitch, prospects need to be aware of the problems you can help them solve. This is especially important as buyers conduct significant research before contacting you. Touch points include perusing your website, consuming digital and gated assets, and reading your blog and social media posts.
Leveraging these touch points, value selling must begin to break the silence and motivate prospects to contact you. Including value calculators and assessment tools on your website is a great way to generate interest and capture information that helps you understand prospect pain points and identify potential solutions. The results are also essential for creating a sound business case that can accelerate purchasing decisions by helping everyone from the buyer to the CFO understand your solution’s ROI.
Flip Your Sales Pitch
Shifting your focus from functionality to value will open more conversations and increase sales success. These three tips will grab and keep your prospect’s attention by showing how your product helps them improve business results.
1. Focus on Solving Business Problems
Prospects buy products and services to meet business needs and solve problems that hinder their success. Purchase decisions are based on how far your solution goes in moving their organization forward, and at what cost. These concerns cannot be addressed by focusing on new product features and advanced functionality. These are simply the mechanisms through which your solution solves the problem.
Instead, highlight solution results such as improved productivity, which saves time and frees workers to engage in more strategic activities. Perhaps your solution upgrades quality, which reduces material and remanufacturing costs and boosts customer satisfaction. Your sales pitch should help prospects visualize the results of using your solution before demonstrating how it does so.
2. Quantify Value for all Stakeholders
Although solutions are acquired to meet a specific need, the benefits often extend beyond a single department or group of users. Your pitch, therefore, should speak to every stakeholder with a vested or peripheral interest in the solution. Besides describing how you meet those core needs, value selling allows you to quantify organization-wide benefits, especially for areas represented on the buying committee.
Value selling tools calculate results specifically for your prospects. They can show how the sales department can increase revenue by $10 million and how improved productivity in another area can reduce staff by three full time employees or $450 thousand. Ascribing a dollar value to solution benefits helps decision makers keep acquisition costs in perspective and provides a more nuanced view of the total investment.
3. Facilitate Budget Approval
Buyers and sellers can accelerate budget approval with a value-based sales pitch and cost-justified proposal. Your proposal should contain a detailed financial analysis that includes total investment costs, ROI, payback period and the total expected value. Metrics such as these make it easy to compare your solution’s returns to other projects under consideration.
A value-based approach to your selling process and securing budget approval will boost interest in your solution and strengthen your credibility with decision makers. Prospects can better appreciate the value of working with you when they can quantify its financial and operational benefits. Consider flipping your sales pitch and enhancing your website with value selling and assessment tools. When they see the results, prospects are more likely to initiate contact and open a dialogue with your sales team.
