Kevin Vincent
Managing director of Vincent Consulting
www.vincentconsulting.co.nz
Top salespeople use four unique steps to create value-selling opportunities and quantify benefits and solutions.
While customers love quality, benefits and service, they need bottom-line dollars to justify recommendations, compare offerings, benefits, and to find reduced costs or increased productivity.
Salespeople who refer to “quantified value” use the same language that customers understand and therefore succeed more often. Quantified benefits enhance selling, handling objections, negotiating, and enable differentiation.
Here are the four steps that consultative salespeople use to effectively sell value.
1. Search and discover the value opportunity
Finding the customer value may be the biggest challenge. Few salespeople do it automatically and must be trained to search, find and assess the value. In short, they must determine what the specific customer benefits/applications are and how their benefits can generate value.
IMPACT indicators help identify generic, broad areas where savings and efficiency can be generated. In simple terms, IMPACT indicators tell the salesperson where to look for concrete data that will improve the customer’s operation. They are: Inventory, Money, People, Assets, Capability and Time.
2. Use IMPACT indicators to analyse the value
It is essential to find a value on indicators to make the benefits specific, measurable, and memorable for the customer, and to aid in quantifying the indicators. A simple example: If your product or process can save 10 minutes per day per worker, this needs to be extrapolated over the number of workers, and converted to dollars for full impact.
The six IMPACT indicators are values that work together to help measure/predict the impact or results of the benefits your company can provide. This is a creative process and requires thought, time, and logic.
3. Optimise the value
It is important to project the values over a longer period of time. Obviously, if a benefit has a life cycle of six months, or is a one-time enhancement, you are limited. However, if you provide an ongoing benefit to the customer, you have earned the right to value it over a longer period of time.
4. Present the value solution
The salesperson has to support his or her presentation with collected customer data and a worksheet showing how the conclusion has been reached. This adds credibility to the forecast or prediction of performance improvements.
While it is not a guarantee of results, it enables the customer to understand your rationale, explore the possibilities and even add or negotiate the process.
