(As sent out in our October New Rules Newsletter)

Your Value Is All You Have–How Competent Are You At Expressing It?

I was looking through some old training handouts …  and came across one called “How To Express Your Value.”

Although I don’t have space here to review the entire module, there was one part that I thought you’d like to hear about. It had to do with how you get hold of your true value to your clients. It seems that every sales organization has a tough time communicating their value. One exercise we do when we begin working with a company is to have each person “write out” their expression of the value they bring to clients.

We usually have as many different expressions as we have ‘people in the room.’ That’s no good. So, this exercise is designed to help you know ‘where to go to get clear about your value.’

PROSPECT TRENDS. What are the trends that your prospect faces in the running of their business (department)? Trends cause pain. And you fix pain. So it pays to know trends. These trends could be macro/industry trends or trends within their company.

PROSPECT PAINS. What kinds of pains/problems do you help people solve? Do you have a list of those? No? Shame on you. How can you be a problem solver if you don’t even have a menu of the kind of problems you fix? Start that list today.

PROSPECT POSSIBILITIES. Selling is emotional. What’s more emotional than dreams? How can you help–through your service/product–create future possibilities for your prospect? Don’t laugh so quickly. If you sell a solution, then you solve problems. And if you solve problems, you advance your client to a new future. Shouldn’t you know what that might be?

STORIES. Most sales teams overlook case studies and stories. You have a wealth of those stories inside your company. But they don’t get accessed. Make a point in the next week to talk to 10 people in your company about a project that went well, or a customer that became overjoyed at your solution. That becomes a story you can tell as you talk about your value. 

PICTOGRAPHS. Those who are in our training get tired of this story, but I’ll tell it anyway (in case you forgot). I read a book once called The McKinsey Way (about McKinsey Consulting). In it, they revealed that when you first get to McKinsey, you are responsible for creating a graph/ picture/ drawing every day on something you worked on. You might say that’s absurd, but they understood something you should understand. That we are all VISUAL people. And pictures do represent thousands of words.  So if you can reduce your stories, examples and value to pictures, you’ll be helping your prospect “GET” your value at a deeper level.

Hope that’s not too much for today.

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Other Resources:

Advanced Selling Podcast: Thanks to your referrals, we’re up to over 7800 world-wide podcast subscribers.

Caskey Blog: We post when we see fit (and have time). Usually the topics come from training we have just done.

Same Game New Rules–E-Video Course (Free). Sign up for our 5 part course on the book, Same Game New Rules.

Regards
Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale