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Whether you use traditional sales tools and methods or leverage the power of AI with other new-age technologies and modern methodologies, putting your customers’ needs first is essential to boost sales. That’s where value-based selling (or value selling) can help.
What Is Value-Based Selling?
The goal of value-based selling is to convey the value of your offer (say, the value of a product) to your prospective customers, rather than its specific features. However, the value here doesn’t refer to what you pay for.
The definition of value-based selling can be expressed as the difference between how your customer values the benefits of your offer and the money that needs to be paid to take advantage of it.
To quote Warren Buffet, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
A value-based selling approach should focus on helping your potential customers solve problems or address pain points while delivering a favourable economic and resource impact. Though there are various ways to benefit from such an impact, the common ones can be classified into four categories, namely time savings, cost savings, risk mitigation, and competitive advantage.
Importance of Value-Based Selling
As a sales leader, your job is to train your salespeople to get your potential customers’ trust first rather than shoving a new product or service in their faces. Wondering how to do it? By making your salespeople deliver on the value your buyers are seeking.
Earning this trust is essential for creating long-term customer relationships, which in turn, can open doors to upselling and cross-selling in the future.
It’s important to train your sales team to share useful insights and give advice to customers to help the latter understand the value of buying your product. With an effective value-based selling system in your company, you can reduce sales cycles, boost close rates, and decrease price pressure.
When your customers appreciate the value of your offer, they are less likely to object to the price and more inclined to make an investment quicker, often accompanied by a bigger sum of money.
A Value-Based Selling Approach – What Should It Have?
1. Find Out Your Potential Customers’ Needs and Challenges
Value-based selling is about putting the needs of your prospects first. But you can’t do it if you don’t know what those needs are. As a sales leader, it’s essential to guide your salespeople to do their homework well. This will let them know the needs, problems, and challenges of your potential customers before they connect with them on a sales call.
Your sales team can browse the potential customers’ LinkedIn pages, social media content (on Twitter or Facebook), websites, press releases, and quarterly financial reports (if relevant) to know their pain points and needs. From learning about their business, industry, and background to obstacles to growth or significant decline in employees, revenue, or production, and finding common connections (to help you build trust quicker), it’s a must to understand your prospects first.
Once your sales reps have some clarity regarding what the needs of your prospective customers are, they can connect with them over a discovery call to learn more about their present struggles and needs. Your sales reps should ask about what their ideal solution would be to address their current problems and needs while bringing financial, operational, or productivity value.
Instead of jumping into a generic sales pitch right away, taking time to gain insight into how to position your offer the best way and provide value can help your salespeople build trust with prospects, which will be beneficial in the long run.
2. Decide on Your Value Proposition
Once your sales reps have identified the specific problem or challenge of your prospects that your offer will address, they should focus on helping the potential customers understand why and how your offer gives them a solution. The key is to emphasize the benefits of your offer and how it will drive a positive impact for your prospects.
For instance, you can train your salespeople to focus on how your company offers free training to get customers accustomed to your product fast. Or the features of your product that boost productivity while reducing cycle time. Instead of blatant selling, your value-based selling approach will be to teach the customers the value of your offer.
If the target problem of your prospects is big, a beneficial approach could be to break them down into smaller “chunks” and connect them to the features of your offer that can solve those smaller problems. Such mini solutions and their value propositions (mitigated risk, cost saved, time saved, or competitive advantage achieved) can give your prospects the information they need to make a buying decision.
By highlighting your offer’s unique differentiators and demonstrating the value it brings to your buyers, your sales team can build trust and prime your prospects to buy. Your team just needs to ensure the problem chunks or mini solutions they talk about in their sales conversations are aligned with the needs, challenges, or pain points of your potential customers.
3. Craft an Ideal Pitch
Once there’s clarity regarding your offer’s value proposition, your sales team can draft a formal sales pitch. The message should be crafted to highlight how your offer (product or solution) can solve your prospects’ specific problem while delivering the value that’s vital to them.
For instance, you can use real-life case studies or customer experiences to provide measurable results. You could also try different value-based selling approaches where you focus on quality, financial incentives, security, or differentiation. Using stories to talk about how your product could be used in real life can also help position your offer favourably.
It’s always best to include specifics in your pitch instead of generalities. Be it using real data insights, researching to tailor your pitch for prospects with personalized messaging, or using story-selling, the secret sauce is to depict the value of your offer that will resonate with your target customers.
Final Words
Value-based selling isn’t easy. It’s likely to take your sales team a reasonable amount of preparation and practice to do it right. As a sales leader, you can guide them using the 3-step approach above to help them get into the groove of things.
If you need help with your sales talent acquisition, you can always contact us at InHunt World!
This article was written by InHunt World