Forget brochures – Discover value selling!

^Do you know what your customers do first when they want to buy something? They look it up on the Internet. However, the information available there is usually not tailored to their situation, and often the features and functions of the offers are more in focus than the benefits for them, the customers.

Then your sales rep goes in for the call, often with a brochure very similar to the information your customer has already found. Long, detailed, with all sorts of evidence that your product is the best, but missing the most important part: All the benefits that your solution can give to this particular customer.

In this article, you will find a simple solution and practical examples of how to improve your capacity to focus on the value for the customer.

First, examine whether you face one or more of the following challenges in selling the benefits of your product:

1. Sales pitches are not adjusted to the customer’s situation
2. Customer objections are not satisfactorily addressed
3. Lack of alignment among sales reps to present the unique value of your products

Let us start with how to adapt sales pitches to each unique customer situation. Seems impossible? It is easier than it looks.

1. Sales pitches are not adjusted to the customer’s situation

Forget brochures – sales teams need a simple framework that allows them to understand the customer’s situation before presenting the advantages of your solution.

If you observe successful salespeople, you will notice that they always sell in a certain pattern. They see a product feature, think about the advantages it may have, and then consider what type of customer it might be of use to. Finally, they ask an open-ended question to find out or confirm if that benefit is really valuable to those customers.

Very simple and obvious, isn’t it? Then why don’t we share all of this information in a simple and structured way with all salespeople before they reach the first customer? In the following example, you can see how this can be achieved.

If you provide this framework to your salespeople and train them to use it, you will experience a great, positive surprise: You will reach peak sales sooner than expected.

One of the reasons an amazing new product does not hit peak sales when it is supposed to is due to the long time it takes salespeople, even the best ones, to build this framework in their own minds. As a result, they are reluctant to sell the new product until they know which customers would welcome its benefits. If you provide this framework, you will speed up this process tremendously.

Remember, the sooner you reach peak sales, the more profit you bring to your company.

2. Customer objections are not satisfactorily addressed

The sales negotiation is far from closed, with only the discussion of how your offer can benefit your customer.

Even if the customer sees tremendous value in your offer, he will raise objections. This tactic is most often used to lower the price. Salespeople may feel guilty if an objection from the customer cannot be adequately addressed, so they often take the easy route of lowering the price.

In addition, a good salesperson will not risk losing face with the best customers until their brain has developed a solid database of compelling responses to the most common objections.

The challenge is the time required to have enough experience with objections to new products. In some industries, this can take years. During that time, your company is waiting and losing money. Blaming salespeople is the wrong way to go. Losing face is a risk they cannot take, and they are right. Credibility is a sales rep’s most important asset, and you depend on that credibility to drive your profits, too.

Again, the answer lies in giving sales reps the most likely objections before they meet the first customer. It should be a short, simple, and structured piece of information, as shown in the example below:

Combined with the initial framework presented earlier in this article, this will help you to accelerate the process of achieving peak sales of your solutions.

3. Lack of alignment among sales reps to present the unique value of your products

If the unique value of your products is not clearly communicated to your sales teams, through a simple framework and training, each sales rep will develop their own positioning, which will likely differ from one another. Different positioning, sometimes even slightly different, will result in different pricing. Chaos is a given.

The reason this situation becomes chaotic has to do with the price range your products will have in the market. The lowest price will set the standard sooner or later. The losses due to the price drop can be massive and destroy your profitability.

To avoid this, I suggest starting small. Take an important product to launch, create the framework suggested here, and train your sales teams. The first version will be far from final. You should continually refine the framework until the sales and marketing teams are satisfied with the content.

Once you reach that level, you can expand to other products. I would definitely focus on product launches. While it is possible to make improvements to current products, they are already established in the marketplace, and correcting their course requires far more energy from your teams than launching a new product from scratch.

The benefits of the methodology proposed here are: an aligned approach by all sales reps in presenting the product’s unique value proposition, sales pitches adapted to the customer situation, and an objection database that enables each sales rep to confidently present a new product.

This solution not only avoids a significant price difference for the same product, it also accelerates the sale of newly launched products. Forget your brochures and experience the great advantages of the value selling method offered here.

Contact KRAEMER to further improve your capacity to focus on the value for the customer.