How Effectively Do Your Salespeople  Deliver Value?

The word value is used extensively in the discourse of B2B selling. Often conjoined with the words such as: good, added, proposition, add etc. It’s used so often its real meaning can become lost.

(Benefits – Costs) = Value

What are the benefits of your sales proposition minus the costs of its delivery? Significant benefits less little cost equal great value for money (VFM). The opposite is also true. Every time a salesperson is ineffectual, unprofessional, ill informed or unreliable they distort in equation away from high to low value. Again the opposite is true.

However, when the salesperson gives more than the customer was expecting, delivers very professionally, offers real insight and does exactly what they say they will do the value equation is enhanced. Where this pays off is in value’s relationship to price. The way a salespersons’ conducts themselves hardens or softens the customers’ view of price.

The internet is having a profound impact on the salespersons’ role in the value equation. As customers become more informed, better educated and more resourceful they look to salespeople to offer something they aren’t easily able to acquire – insight. When a salesperson can make connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of data and show the customer a new way of looking at something, the customer will start to draw on the salesperson for more input into their decision making processes, the sales person starts to add value, even better, the salesperson might even begin to create new sorts of value for their customer, something at SalesPathways we consider to be the pinnacle of what today’s selling should be all about.

Unfortunately many salespeople are stuck in the previous way of working, where they are simply gatekeepers of information and the control the flow to the customer, sometimes even controlling the flow back into their on organisations. This worked when information flow was controllable.

No longer, salespeople may arrive at a customer where the time the journey has taken them to arrive has made what they know out of date.

They must contribute something much more challenging and insightful to the customer relationship than information, they must think about the value they create.

If you would like to increase the amount of value your sales team creates please call:

Claudine McClean
T:  01789 734400
E: claudinem@salespathways.com

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© SalesPathways Ltd. 2006

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