“Marketers need methods that go beyond what a customer can readily articulate –that get at what people don’t know they know….the more important is the unconscious mind”
Professor Gearld Zaltman, Harvard Business School
Of one of the most difficult exercises for a salesperson is to be able to create a value proposition that has many uses. They could be used to open up a presentation, it could be used to open up a proposal for an RFP, they could serve as an opener on an email a voicemail and the list goes on and on. The reason I say it is so difficult is because it’s really a matrix approach.
Think of a box with multiple lines from top to bottom and multiple lines from left to right basically a spreadsheet. On the spreadsheet you could have the industry that the company is in the pharmaceuticals, you could have the region of the country that they’re in, you could have the size of the business as in SMB, Enterprise or Fortune 100, etc.
So far, we have laid out as a framework to figure out what would be of interest in this model. Our target executive works within this model but we are not sure yet. They could be senior executive with a pharmaceutical firm at in the Midwest, at $500M. They could be senior executive at Johnson & Johnson
in New Jersey and have P&L of 4 billion. Each executive has different needs and wants, from how they run their business, and career, so approaching them would have to take that into consideration. We haven’t gotten to how you deliver value yet, as in what is your problem to for the business? How does it avoid costs, increase revenue, mitigate risk?
And with this, can we?
- Measure exactly what it is in dollars and cents? So as we are now reading we started to think I have this pharmaceutical company in the Midwest with $500M in sales, and the senior executive is controlling approximately $60 million P&L.
- He has an initiative to increase revenue because he is in Sales, and spends a good amount of his budget in supporting that, at 15%.
So at this point we revised the sales rep to create his matrix, fill in the blanks, and the most challenging but the most rewarding, is how you deliver monetary value to your prospect (free “gifts of Knowledge”). This is all about communications mechanisms, on voicemail, emails, elevator pitch and a PowerPoint presentation and everything that you do. I run into a lot of vendors that do not have value measurement and hence we advise them to talk to their customers.
I’ve even heard the customers cannot measure value, and that is a challenge unto itself. But alas, there is great hope in that these customers are buying your product wanted to lower the cost increase the revenue and cut the risk that is widely known.
So simply asking them, have they raised their revenue 5%, or 10%, how would you measure this over one quarter versus a year? They will give you guidelines, they always do. And that will help you in creating your scripting and now, you can put it all together. I opened this blog that this is not easy, and it is not. However, the rewards are tremendous.
Senior executives will listen to your messages that resonate about their business especially is you add a name drop from LinkedIn. These are all helpful tools and all work very well. So we hope that you will begin this journey, and build your value props not one or two, but replicate 10-15 for different prospects across verticals. Create a library! There’s nothing more powerful you could do to increase your sales.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.