4 Ways Value Selling Offers You a Competitive Advantage

Value selling, which focuses on the value you bring to your clients as opposed to the features and price of your product or service, has proven its effectiveness time and again. It can give your company a competitive edge over other businesses in your industry by helping you attract more leads and close more sales. Here are four reasons why value selling gives you a competitive advantage

1. Begin Co-Creating a Trusted Partnership from Day 1

In today’s fast paced world, products and services have quickly become commoditized, and new vendors are constantly emerging and competing for market share, making it more challenging than ever to cement your place within a customer account. Being seen as a trusted partner from day 1 is one of the most powerful advantages that can help you stand out from the competition: you’re not just another vendor; you’re a strategic partner.

Value selling helps you achieve this by recasting your sales representatives as expert consultants. They come to sales calls armed with industry best practices, tools, and resources–not a canned pitch deck. With value selling, sales representatives spend their time with prospects uncovering the biggest pain points, goals, and priorities for all key stakeholders–and only then bring tailored solution recommendations backed by proven, quantifiable results.

By starting the relationship with this level of co-creation, you solidify in your customers’ minds that you will be a true partner that can deliver the results they need. Learn more about empathy: the secret to value co-creation.

2. Speak to What Really Matters to Your Customer

When you start your sales conversations by uncovering what your potential customer values most, you have the power to tailor your pitch in a way that builds trust, confidence, and enthusiasm for your solution on a psychological level.

At Ecosystems, we use what’s known as the Value Trinity™ framework to demonstrate customer value across three interlocking gears: Corporate Value, Job Value, and Personal Value.

• Corporate Value focuses on fact- or logic-based decision making. For example, Corporate Value might demonstrate the financial benefits of your solution, including revenue generation, cost reduction, risk mitigation, etc. Corporate Value answers the question, what is the ROI and TCO of this investment decision?
• Job Value focuses on the emotional elements of decision-making and specifically demonstrates the benefits to the stakeholder’s job. Job Value answers the question, how does this solution align with our vision for the company and where we want to go, and how does this solution make my job easier or more efficient?
• Personal Value focuses on building credibility and demonstrates the intangible benefits to the individual as a person, for example, how the solution improves or enhances their reputation. It answers the questions: am I better off working with you and what tells me I can trust this person to be a successful business partner?

Ultimately, the Value Trinity framework centers around how we make decisions as humans: we make choices and evaluate opportunities through an emotional lens that is backed up with logic and credibility. The key to value selling is to get all three dimensions working together. For example, using ROI and TCO calculators to convince the “logical” portion of the brain, while using emotion and credibility to inspire and connect. Learn more about the Value Trinity framework.

3. Stop Competing on Price

Value-based selling is the idea that instead of competing solely on the price of your products, you instead focus on offering your customers the value they are looking for. Value-based selling allows you to compete more effectively in an ever-changing marketplace because it takes into account both the economic and psychological factors that affect customer decision making.

Traditionally, being pitted head-to-head against a competitor would have been a no-win situation: if you didn’t discount your price to match the competitor, you’d risk losing the deal, but if you did discount your product, the deal may have ended up unprofitable for you.

With value-based selling, you can compete on value instead of price, enabling you to hold your ground on price and lean into your proven results and promised value to clinch the deal. To learn more about how value-selling can help you drive more and higher quality revenue, see 6 Ways Value Selling Increases Your Bottom Line.

4. Retain Customers for the Long Term with Value Realization

Finally, it is important to remember that value selling doesn’t end when the contract is signed. To retain your competitive advantage and keep customers for the long-term, you need to continue the value journey post-sale as well. Ensure a seamless hand-off from sales to customer success. Have a clear value realization framework and value platform in place so you can clearly demonstrate the ways you’ve delivered on the value promised during the sales cycle. Learn more about customer value best practices throughout the entire customer journey.

Get Started With Value Selling

No matter what type of product you’re selling, value selling can help you reach your targets and gain competitive advantage in your industry by putting the focus on customer needs, objectives, and priorities. Interested in learning more about value selling? Check out our whitepaper, The Future of Value Selling: Value Co-Creation.