Value is vague and varies…

Earlier this month I wrote about prospects pressuring us to compete on price in order to win their business.  Price-based negotiation was also a question posted on LinkedIn.  “Subject Matter Experts” were invited to weigh in.  (Other Schmoes like me, too. HaHa!) 

In my recent post, I told the story about how my Dad delt with Christmas tree sellers “back in the day”.  In that piece I mentioned the difficulty those tree sellers faced.  They wanted to sell my Dad the value of their best trees.  The problem was, he was shopping on price – even worse, the price he was shopping for was “free”! 

Selling value vs. competing on price comes with many challenges.  Three I cited were: 

• Value is vague
• Value varies by person
• Value is very hard to legitimately quantify 

My comments stimulated several opinions and questions (about negotiation not Christmas trees).  Permit me to address a few of those questions today. 

First, let’s establish a little context.  (BTW - You’ve heard me say before that in the modern marketplace, context is a killer application; especially when it comes to negotiations and selling value vs. price.  The first salesperson to clarify the prospect’s context almost always wins the business.  But I digress…) 

Let’s start with context about our prospects’ money:

You see, I believe we have all been taught since childhood that whatever something “costs” it’s in our best interests to seek a lower cost.  As we saw in Victor Antonio's video, it’s easy for salespeople to be trapped by the gravitational pull of cost becoming the main context of negotiating.  It’s understandable.  I think you might agree that the #1 question, every prospect has at the very beginning of their buying cycle (aka our sales process) is, “How much does something like this cost?”  We ask that question ourselves when we shop, true? 

Now on the other side of the same coin is value.  I believe we have all been taught since adulthood that when we invest in something and that something meets or exceeds our expected return …  we invest more!  Unfortunately, gaining agreement from our prospects on value and return is just not as simple as Victor Antonio’s “Value Equation”.  

That’s because of my second point - value varies by person.  SellXL put it this way a few years ago:

Consequently, the term “value” may sound singular, but it’s really plural.  Each person on our prospect’s buying committee has their own version of value.  In the book The Challenger Customer © (a companion to the book The Challenger Sale ©) this reality and our selling path were expressed this way: 

What's the best strategy for selling to increasingly diverse buying groups?  Track them all down and win them all over. 

Brent Adamson 

Yep, “track them all down”; clarify the context of their value as it relates to our proposal; and then “win them all over”.  Not so simple, agreed? 

The final contextual concept for today is this.  It’s not our prospects’ first rodeo when receiving our value “pitch”.  My colleague Cameron Newell put it more bluntly: Prospects are “burn victims”.  No, not from fire; but from being exposed to years of hyped up sales and marketing messaging that looks something like this:

Have you used these sound bites?  Me too.  However, we need to stop because if we don’t our prospects will “fight fire with fire”.  Smell that?  That’s our deal burning.  Pass the aloe, please.  

                                                            GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.