By Huthwaite (Creators of Spin Selling):
You may be at least passingly familiar with what Huthwaite calls the Client Insight Creators—that is, the drivers of value in 21st century selling. “Value” is a difficult word to pin down. It tends to be rather vague in current usage, because everyone seems to mean something a little different. In the sense we are using it, there are at least four competing definitions from the Random House Dictionary:
value
monetary or material worth, as in commerce or trade: This piece of land has greatly increased in value. the worth of something in terms of the amount of other things for which it can be exchanged or in terms of some medium of exchange. equivalent worth or return in money, material, services, etc.: to give value for value received. estimated or assigned worth; valuation: a painting with a current value of $500,000 —and that’s just the noun!
What precisely does it mean, for example, when a customer reports having received “value” in the course of the sales process itself? We’ve actually developed some insight from our research that will offer some precision to the term. We assembled data on several thousand transactions which met two rather curious criteria:
The customer reported that in an effort to purchase a particular product, service or bundle of capabilities, they were faced with a group of competitors seeking their business whose offerings all looked the same. In other words, despite the best intentions of the sellers to differentiate themselves, the buyer could find only one clear differentiator: Price. Despite the almost absolute similarity of the products or services, the customer in these transactions did not select the lowest-price offering.
We reckoned it somewhat bizarre behavior—but realized that if we could understand why, we might gain some understanding as to what customers mean by “value.” At its simplest, these customers reported that they were willing to forego price concerns when in the buying process they experienced one or more of the four scenarios, which we call value drivers. That is, these customers were willing to pay a premium, redefine the buyer/seller relationship, erect barriers to the seller's competitors and establish the seller as a trusted adviser when:
The seller discovered a problem the customer was unwittingly experiencing
The seller identified a superior solution to a problem the customer was experiencing
The seller explored a previously unseen opportunity with the customer, and/or
The seller brokered all of his company’s capabilities on the customer’s behalf, or effectively cross-sold.
Each of these scenarios (the Unrecognized Problem, the Unanticipated Solution, the Unseen Opportunity, and the Broker of Capabilities, or Cross-selling), provides a depth of insight to the customer that they did not previously have. We therefore call them the collectively the Client Insight Creators. Each relies heavily on expertise of the salesperson as seller; the expertise that is gained in the field by interacting with a wide swath of customers across industries.
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