In today’s economic climate, the need to demonstrate the unique value of your products and services compared to your competitors has become a hot topic of conversation across the SaaS industry. But what is value selling, really?
This article will explore what value selling is, why it’s important, and practical tips for implementing value selling at your organization.
What is Value Selling?
Value selling in its simplest terms is the practice of selling your products or services based on the total value it will offer to your customers. This means that every conversation your sales teams have with your customers is focused on your customer’s individual needs and what you can do to address them, whether that be personal value, job value, or business value. Value-based selling is focused on demonstrating to your customers exactly how your product or service will help them meet their business objectives.
Why is Value Selling Important?
Value selling allows you to get to the root of what outcomes your customers are looking to achieve so you can tailor your business case to their unique needs and value drivers, making your sales process highly personalized. By tailoring your business cases, you are better able to set yourself apart from your competitors. Without value selling, it will be more difficult for your sales reps to demonstrate your unique value and stand out among your competitors.
4 Key Tips for Implementing Value Selling
Enabling your sellers to sell on value can be a daunting task. Use these 4 tips to help you get started.
1. Align Your Internal Organization Around Value
The first step in value selling is to ensure your entire organization is aligned on a common language around value. From pre-sales to post-sales, your organization needs to be enabled to ensure value is present during the full customer lifecycle. By aligning everyone around a common language and understanding of value, you will also guarantee that your customers will have a smooth transition from sales to customer success.
If you’re struggling to align your organization on value, download our updated value blueprint for a world-class value-based commercial operating system to help you determine what level your organization’s value maturity is at and how you can advance.
2. Be Your Customer’s Guide
To be able to sell on value, you need to first align your customers on what business outcomes they are trying to achieve. If your customers are not aligned, it is hard to know what value drivers you need to be selling on. This will make your value-selling approach less personalized and based on inputs rather than outputs. Additionally, if customers do not know what outcomes they are trying to achieve, they will be less confident in their decisions to purchase your solutions. To learn more, check out Brent’s Breakdown episode 22.
Customers need to be aligned on outcomes, tactics, metrics, targets, and timelines in order to feel confident in their purchasing decisions. Ecosystems’ SaaS platform provides a collaborative environment to align on value, made easy with our best practice templates and library of 5,000+ value drivers. You can learn more here.
3. Position Yourself as the Expert
Customers are always looking for new ways to demonstrate the value of their products and services to differentiate themselves in the market. However, knowing how to go about this can be challenging. Due to this, customers are also often curious about what other companies in the industry are doing. Thus, don’t just sell your products, have the conversation around potential customer value in order to educate your customers on how they can innovate and grow. Use third-party benchmarking to let them know what others in the industry are doing and how your solution can help them move to the next level.
4. Collaborate With Your Customers
Instead of selling to your customers and talking “to” them, suggest some commonly desired business outcomes for their company size and industry and explore what’s really important to them. Ecosystems’ SaaS platform arms sellers and customer success managers with a library of credible third-party data from IDC to build credibility from the very beginning of the relationship. By making value collaborative, you are shifting from a transactional approach to a relationship approach, differentiating yourself from your competitors. To learn more about value collaboration in selling, check out our Future of Value Selling White Paper.
Value selling is key to setting yourself apart from your competitors and creating a personal relationship with your customers. If you're looking for a full customer lifecycle approach focused on value, learn more about our collaborative SaaS platform here.
