Changes in Sales Strategy
Answering that question is the subject of a new book Huthwaite will publish within the next year. For the time
being, however, let’s examine some of the most important ideas about how to employ this new concept of value:
Identify Your Value
What sellers must do first is recognize their own and their company’s capabilities that fit into each value-driving category. A good way to do this is to examine your past and current customer experiences. Consider, for instance:
What are the problems you have helped customers recognize of which they were previously unaware?
What unexplored opportunities have you helped customers exploit?
How has your expertise allowed you to help your customers draw conclusions and develop solutions that
they could not have come to on their own? How have you leveraged the capabilities and expertise of your company to create value for your customers that your products alone could not have produced?
Refine Your Value
Vet your list of potential value-creating capabilities through two filters:
How do you know your chosen capabilities can create customer value?
Rigorously validate everything that makes your list. Work collectively with your colleagues to test all of
your assumptions. Which of the items on your list do you and your company do better than—or exclusive from—your competition? If the list at the end of this step contains more than two or three items in each category, this is a warning sign that the list is too optimistic and has likely been developed with too little of the customer point-of-view in mind.
Position Your Value
Finally, with your list whittled down by facts and experience, you are left with true gems. Now, think through how these capabilities can create real value for specific customers. What problems will your customers experience in the absence of your capabilities? What opportunities are you uniquely positioned to help your customers with? What customer solutions can best—or only—be provided through your expertise?
Sales Calls That Create Value
Once the concept of Value Drivers has been developed into a set of specifics, planning calls becomes a process of creating an “agenda of discovery” that the seller will facilitate for the customer. While a full discussion of this process is beyond the scope of this paper, there are some basics that can be embraced with relative ease. And here is where good consultative skills still play a critical role.
For readers familiar with SPIN® Selling, this involves a re-definition of how and where to use the SPIN® model. For those unfamiliar with SPIN®, it is an acronym for a questioning model that was the result of the most comprehensive scientific research effort of interactive behaviors including selling and negotiating. SPIN® is essentially a model for creating questions that lead buyers to draw important conclusions that they would not have drawn on their own.
It is a process for using questions that cause buyers to extend invitations for sellers to tell
them more. But every good seller knows that questions are the key to great selling. What too few seem to recognize today is that questions in and of themselves are just that: questions. More important to both seller and buyer are the answers.
Great questions that drive value tend to be those posed by the seller to which he or she may already know
the answer, but which cause the buyer to pause and think. The key to value-creating sales calls is to construct questions that cause the buyer to ask for more information.
In a recent Huthwaite study of some 2,200 sellers, it was revealed that 67% of salespeople sell to weak needs statements. That is, they begin to rattle off a brochure-like litany of product or service features before the buyer has acknowledged the seriousness of the need or any desire to take action. Think of a time when you’ve expressed dissatisfaction to a seller and he or she immediately launched into a breathless explanation of all the “benefits” of his or her product before you’ve had a chance to say if you even want to explore a solution.
In other words, product discussion is a commoditizing activity. Interestingly, the research also revealed that over 90% of sales managers believe that their salespeople are “above average” at value creation during customer interaction. Is it any wonder that an increasing number of companies are puzzled at why their products and services don’t seem to excite the market or sustain their customer relationships in the way that they did 10 years ago?
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