Value Creation Selling

WHY VALUE CREATION SELLING MAKES SENSE?

1. As a Seller we spend time and energy around demonstrating the capabilities of our Product or Services much more than in learning about Customer’s businesses in great detail.
2. We generally under utilize our channels and tools to understand core business challenges of our Customer. Many of us take Sales as a solo activity and so ignore the other core groups of Organization during Sales process, like Legal, Finance, R&D, Marketing and Manufacturing etc.
3. We are limited to focus on Customer’s needs and no investment in “Customer Value Chain” means knowing Customer’s Customer and so on.
4. To pitch for new Customers we need patience, consistency and determination to build a high degree of trust and that gets distracted with more leads knocking at door. We should remember that new leads would also need the same qualities in us.

INFORMATION: BACKBONE OF VCS

As a Salesperson, my job definitely needs me to be confident on Customer’s information but I also need to look back what were the boundaries of the information I last collected about the Customer. Did I ever researched about following points?

1. What are Customer’s set of Opportunities and the anatomy of the competitive dynamics. How’s Customer doing in market?
2. What are Customer’s goals and priorities, both short term and long term, clearly and specifically. It is quite possible that things changed after you studied about same last month or last year.
3. What are Customer’s company culture, its dominant psychology and values? There might be change in leadership recently which may have set altogether different culture than it was earlier.
4. Who are Customer’s Customers and the Customer’s competitors? This is highly sensitive to keep Customer’s competitors also as our Customers from Contract, Legal and Values prospective.
5. How decisions are made in Customer’s Organization? Your earlier contact may not be as influential as it used to be.

VALUE ACCOUNT PLAN

VAP is one of the most popular tool to execute Sales Process but it’s important to relook the core parts of this, to improve success chances every time. If needs to cover qualitative as well as quantitative aspects both.

The VAP demands a great deal of thinking. It forces the team to go beyond what already know and what Customer tells them to define offerings that provide benefits Customers may not realize.

VAP prompts the team to collaborate in using the comprehensive information they have gathered about the Customer’s business and to create a value proposition that helps that business thrive.

Key Elements:

• Customer Snapshot – Market Reputation, Organization Insights, Decision Process and Authority, Goals
• Value Proposition – Customer’s needs, Your Offerings, Your Financials
• Business Benefits – Physical Benefits, Margins, Cash Flow, ROI, Brand Equity, Market Share

Value Creation Selling is not just following a template, but also a change of mindset across teams in the Organization with realization of Cost associated. Only miracles happen overnight and any sustainable process need to give enough space and bandwidth to mature and prove.

SUSTAIN THE PROCESS

• Value Creation from the Top Down
• Organizational Support
• Focus on Both Revenue and Cost
• Drive and Improve value creation selling through Feedback
• Link Compensation and Rewards
• Measure the Success

Sale force might be an area being most evolved by the technological innovation but value creation selling is always going to be core part of it. We need to overcome the myth of putting Price as prime factor for Sale Maturity. Let’s get matured and budget for values to really add them to Customer’s business.