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Author: Mark Boundy

Are you happy with how much you're selling...and how much you're selling it for?  Improving both means getting your customers to perceive the value your offer provides them.

Do you know what value you provide for your customers? Don’t feel bad. According to McKinsey & Co., only about a quarter of directors on big company boards could describe their company’s value.

And yet, the purpose of a profitable business is providing more value to a customer than it costs to deliver.

Mark brings over three decades of sales, marketing, and corporate leadership experience to his clients all around the world.  His wide-ranging experience has given him a unique perspective into

Creating corporate cultures centered on customer-perceived value.

These cultures are built for long term success, increase customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and yes, increase shareholder value.

Mark uses simple tools and a common language of customer value you can use throughout your organization.  He has developed tools, training, an upcoming book, and coaching skills to make it easy to integrate.

If your company works in the business-to-business arena, we can combine world-class sales methodologies with a value-centric culture shift.  When sales, customer service, marketing, product development, engineering -- every aspect of your company –has a clear line of sight to "customer value ", your entire company can become value focused.  Visit www.boundyconsulting.com or contact Mark at mark@boundyconsulting.com, or 602.374.3020.|Are you happy with how much you're selling...and how much you're selling it for?  Improving both means getting your customers to perceive the value your offer provides them.

Do you know what value you provide for your customers? Don’t feel bad. According to McKinsey & Co., only about a quarter of directors on big company boards could describe their company’s value.

And yet, the purpose of a profitable business is providing more value to a customer than it costs to deliver.

Mark brings over three decades of sales, marketing, and corporate leadership experience to his clients all around the world.  His wide-ranging experience has given him a unique perspective into

Creating corporate cultures centered on customer-perceived value.

These cultures are built for long term success, increase customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and yes, increase shareholder value.

Mark uses simple tools and a common language of customer value you can use throughout your organization.  He has developed tools, training, an upcoming book, and coaching skills to make it easy to integrate.

If your company works in the business-to-business arena, we can combine world-class sales methodologies with a value-centric culture shift.  When sales, customer service, marketing, product development, engineering -- every aspect of your company –has a clear line of sight to "customer value ", your entire company can become value focused.  Visit www.boundyconsulting.com or contact Mark at mark@boundyconsulting.com, or 602.374.3020.|Are you happy with how much you're selling...and how much you're selling it for?  Improving both means getting your customers to perceive the value your offer provides them.

Do you know what value you provide for your customers? Don’t feel bad. According to McKinsey & Co., only about a quarter of directors on big company boards could describe their company’s value.

And yet, the purpose of a profitable business is providing more value to a customer than it costs to deliver.

Mark brings over three decades of sales, marketing, and corporate leadership experience to his clients all around the world.  His wide-ranging experience has given him a unique perspective into

Creating corporate cultures centered on customer-perceived value.

These cultures are built for long term success, increase customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and yes, increase shareholder value.

Mark uses simple tools and a common language of customer value you can use throughout your organization.  He has developed tools, training, an upcoming book, and coaching skills to make it easy to integrate.

If your company works in the business-to-business arena, we can combine world-class sales methodologies with a value-centric culture shift.  When sales, customer service, marketing, product development, engineering -- every aspect of your company –has a clear line of sight to "customer value ", your entire company can become value focused.  Visit www.boundyconsulting.com or contact Mark at mark@boundyconsulting.com, or 602.374.3020.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development Sales

If You Don’t Know Your Differences, You’ll Never Know Your Value

It’s simple:  Your offer’s value exists only in a customer’s mind. When you hear the phrase “customer perceived value”, I want you to remember that the “customer perceived” is redundant; there is no other kind of value besides customer-perceived.

Customers only derive value based upon differences. There’s more to it, which we’ll come to in a minute, but let me simplify half a century of consumer choice research for you.

Hueristics:  Shortcut Mental Processes

Buyer choices are based upon differences between different offers, which is a mental shortcut, or heuristic (an academic researcher word.  Impress your friends).  We shortcut a complex set of choices based only on what’s different.  Think about buying an automobile, for example.  When comparing the options, you don’t go down the list of “what is the same”.  Your brain knows that is a waste of mental energy.  You won’t even take notice tires, spark plugs, cylinders, steering wheels; every option has the same number, and any differences are unimportant to most buyers.  However, you might notice that one option has a comfortable leather-wrapped steering wheel…but really only if the other car doesn’t.

Not all differences are the same (sorry for the pun)

Differences become differentiation (in the consumer choice sense) when two things occur.

First, those differences need to be factored in to a decision process.

Second, they need to be given weight, or value.

For value to “occur” in the customer’s mind, you need to do both.  Let’s start with the first.

Differences need to park between your customer’s ears as differentiation before they can grow into value.

Differences are promoted to differentiation (differences that the customer uses in a decision) under a consistent hueristic.  Buyer (all personas; not just a purchasing agent) decision-making follows a consistent prioritization of differences which:

Come to mind easily. The buyer psychology term is “ the availability principle”.  This means that decision makers default to easy-to-recall differences. Differences that you give to a prospect (especially without confirming conversation) are not as “available” as differences they can describe unprompted. Let’s go back to an auto purchase example:  I’ll recite advantages of one of your two “acceptable” finalist options to you.   Then, I’ll ask you to explain to me the advantages of the second option.  Which one will you end up buying the next day? The reason is the availability principle.   Availability is part of why a customer believes what they tell you much more than what you tell them.  Use conversation to get a customer to process differences into differentiation.

The customer has to produce themselves. If nobody produces any differences,  some buyers will dig deeper to uncover them. This does happen, but you’re leaving things to chance.  Differences which don’t enter a customer’s consciousness don’t create differentiation or value.  I once learned that a customer valued my company’s responsiveness, and willingly paid a small price premium — which could have been much larger.  When there was a “both parties’ fault” problem which shut their production down, we made things right in the way they knew we would…and which we took for granted.  This was the exception, not the rule.  Because we didn’t uncover it, we never had the option to sell (and possibly price, had the difference been something a little more image-positive).

Price becomes a primary differentiator only when no other differences exist in the prospect’s mind.  Note:  some procurement/purchasing folks will lead you to believe that your differences (above) are insignificant or nonexistent – purely to drive a price-centric conversation. It is the responsibility of a seller to determine how real this gambit is. If your sellers respond only by discounting, you may have a significant opportunity to improve.  I work with sellers to understand how and when to play this game.

Status quo becomes your biggest threat when no differentiators have appeared as your customer goes down this decision pathway. It is a threat almost always, of course, but if not even price seems different between the top two choices, status quo always wins (consumer choice research has established this using dozens of experiments repeated hundreds of times).  If status quo is not one of the finalists, customers will produce a differentiator that might seem so frivolous that it feels like they used the dartboard to make their choice.  These are frustrating wins…and even more frustrating losses.

When Differentiation becomes Value

I often quote Bob Miller, who pointed out that Customers don’t buy our offers, they buy outcomes. Buyer research shows that people decide based upon differentiation… differentiation they value due to the outcomes that differentiation yields.

How does differentiation turn into value?  When a prospect gives it weight by connecting it to an outcome or outcomes. The value/weight of an outcome increases as it progresses through “theoretical”, “possible”, ”likely”, ”probable”, then “assuredly”.  It also increases as the desirability of the outcome progresses through “unquantified tie breaker”, to “I’ve visualized the outcome”, to “I’ve visualized myself realizing that outcome” then “I’ve quantified the outcome financially and personally”, and finally,  “I’ve also quantified ancillary outcomes”.

The same rules of availability apply to value building.  If you build a value case and deliver it to a prospect, it is far less available(and thus less value is built) than if you walk the prospect through the exact same validation/quantification process such that they build it themselves in their own mind.

Buyers (other than purchasing folks) seldom use price as the primary differentiator.  Far more frequently, they use your price premium (that’s your price difference, remember?) vs. their own estimate of value. Using an auto purchase example, a consumer might justify whether the leather upholstery option is worth the $1500, quantifying comfort, longevity, prestige, in a way that translates each of these differentiators into a dollar justification.

Bottom Line

If you never help your customer identify your differences, they probably won’t think you have any, and you will never enter the finalist stage.

When you fail to help your customer process differentiation into your (outcome-based) value, they won’t fully appreciate what you offer, and won’t be willing to pay you what you’re really worth.

When you don’t know your value, you’ll never know how to sell or how to price.  Your achievable price premium depends on the value of your differences to the customer.

I invite your comments and feedback.

To your success!

Categories
Best Practices Personal Development Sales

Cold Calling and the Apathy Loop

What a day I had taking cold calls.

Monday, I cancelled a real estate listing.  Yesterday morning, my cancelled listing record was transmitted by some data/leads provider to dozens of realtors who use cancellation lists to prospect for listings.

The calls started at 7:30, and by 10:30, I’d received 20 calls.  It’s now almost 40.

  • About 80% of the callers used the exact same script, word-for-word, pause-for-pause, identical pace and enunciation…it was creepy.  When I told one guy, “You’re using the exact script everyone else uses, and you read it perfectly”, he said “Thank you”.
  • After each caller’s opening script was done, I asked every one the same question: “what can you tell me about my property, and what should I know about you?”  90% of callers told me some version of “I’m a top seller in the valley/state/southwest, and none had looked at my property (although some had it in front of them when they called, and were able to quickly comment about something obvious, but not particularly insightful).
  • Three calls were from one realtor calling from different numbers claiming “the call must have been dropped” after I’d said “no thank you, good luck finding another listing”.  Not sure what that guy was thinking.  Definite used car vibe.

What does this tell us about prospecting/cold calling?

Any reader of sales blogs, articles, ebooks, books, videos, etc. has read that either “cold calling is dead”, or that “cold calling has never been easier and more productive”.  Once you get past each catchy title, they concur is that prospecting now requires sellers to add value within fifteen seconds or so.  Doing this prevents a common failure mode:  a cycle of apathy described in buyer research (from CSO Insights, ask me for a copy of the research if you’re curious). The apathy loop exists throughout the customer’s buying process, but a prospect’s first contact with the customer — especially if it’s a prospecting call — is a major decision point for a customer:

  1. Are you the kind of seller who enters, then orbits on the loop, or..
  2. Are you the kind of seller who avoids it?

The diagram above is a summary of the apathy loop, a death spiral that every one of my incoming callers fell into.   

CSO Insights, in their most recent survey of buyer behavior, found that, starting at the top bubble:

1. Sellers merely meet basic expectations, but don’t exceed them. They’re on time, speak clearly, show competence, submit bids on time, etc.  Because they do “satisfactory” work, salespeople aren’t excluded from consideration, but..

2. Sellers don’t elevate their status to “trusted resource” either. Buyers aren’t impressed enough to believe that sellers can add any value to their buying process, so…

3. Buyers only engage sellers after self-identifying needs, and narrowing down solution options on their own, using resources other than sellers.  After self-informing, they finally engage sellers who seem to fit their self-identified needs and options.  At this “beauty contest” phase…

4. Sellers for the different potential vendors don’t offer differentiated solutions. Buyers experience the same old mantra: “I see three different logos on their business cards, but I can’t tell their offers apart”.  When all is said and done…

(back to #1)…Sellers merely meet basic (low) expectations.

The cycle, simplified as a clever word play:  Because sellers haven’t added value, they aren’t in a position to add value.  CSO Insights labeled their version of this dynamic “the apathy loop”, and it fits.

How Did My Cold-Callers All Shove Themselves Onto the Apathy Loop?

First point: I’d love to be paid so-much-for-so-little as the person selling the exact same script to every realtor in my state.

Second point: Even with all that money-for-nothing, I’d never be able to look at myself in the mirror.  This script is sales coaching malpractice.

The one thing that every cold-caller thought I should be impressed by was “how many homes I/we’ve sold this year”…everyone’s “differentiator” was the same as everyone else’s. Zero of them claimed anything unique (look that up on the apathy loop diagram). I often do an exercise with my clients having them write down their unique differentiators on a list…then spend a few minutes crossing off differentiators that their competitors also claim.  It’s a sobering experience that illustrates step four in the apathy loop.

You owe it to yourself – and your career – to break out of the death spiral.

CSO Insights research also showed that for big/unique/unaccustomed decisions, buyers would welcome a value-added seller into their circle of trust.  We want help, but only from somebody who demonstrates that they add value to the pursuit.

At random (OK, whenever I felt like breaking from my other work), I went into “coach mode” and invested extra time with seven of my incoming cold callers.  I suggested they pre-plan for 10-60 seconds by looking at the cancelled listing info sheet and to find some nugget likely to spawn an insightful conversation. Here’s the feedback:

  • One said “I have a system and it works.  Have a nice day”.
  • Four said “Thanks for the feedback, I’ll take it to heart” (polite refusals?)
  • One said “Let me try to do this again.  What if I’d said_____?”.  It was pretty good.
  • One called back 40 minutes later, thanked me for my interest in her professional development, told me she’d been wrestling with it, and asked me to coach her through a re-do.  She struggled for a few minutes then started demonstrating some great insight.

Which one(s) live the principle that “the best always want to get better”?  Which ones realize that what used to work might not anymore?  You see, buyers have changed.  We now have resources to self-inform, and either want a sales professional to give us something beyond what we can already find…or go away until we need a couple of order clerks to duke it out on price.

How are you going to change your selling approach when prospecting?

The apathy loop applies to the entire arc of the sales process, but prospecting is one critical point at which you either start a death spiral (OK, “death spiral” is a bit dramatic.  The commoditization spiral?…on second thought, commoditization is death), or you take the path of the trusted advisor.

Add value at every interaction.  This isn’t a suggestion.  It’s the new imperative.

To your success!

Categories
Personal Development Sales

CRM:  Compliance Hammer or Performance Instrument?

“Thanks to my CRM for helping me win that deal” said no salesperson ever.  In fact, CRM is almost universally looked on as serving management, not sales.  Salespeople view CRM as a hammer to measure compliance, not a tool.  CRM utilization is a constant battle, where management doesn’t trust reports compiled from inadequate usage.

Why the shortcoming?

Today’s CRMs, in even the most sophisticated implementations, track seller activities, not deal-moving sales behaviors.

I just finished reading a new client’s sales process document, which defines sales stages, tells the company’s sales professionals what tasks should be completed in which sales stage, and what resources are there to help them. It was a very thorough document, obviously well thought out and logically presented in considerable detail. It was tightly integrated with the company’s CRM system, and sellers can easily track the activities outlined in the playbook.  Of “selling process/CRM integration” efforts I’ve seen, this one is above average.

Here’s the thing:  in 35 pages, the customer’s buying process was almost invisible:  There was almost no insight into the customer’s journey, what it might look like, or who might be involved.

  • While several common roles were mentioned, zero coverage was given to what each role commonly looks for, or how they interact.
  • There was no mention of common value drivers at all – unless you count “provide test reports on features where we outperform competitors”. That is, there was not attempt to ascertain which product advantages might actually result in customer value.  And, actionable information like which value drivers might apply to which common buying personas was completely off of the radar screen.
  • While the sellers were doing all of their well-regulated selling activity, there was no mention of what complementary buying actions they should expect the customer to be doing.
  • There was strong emphasis on investing time and resources on the best customers, but no real definition what “best customer” looks like, other than “spends the most”.No particular mention of whether they are a fit for this company’s premium products, and certainly no attempt at a scoring system for “best customer”.

The difference between “above average” and “world class” is powerful.  World class selling organizations implement sales methodologies which address these (and other) gaps.  Miller Heiman Group clients have had the ability to overlay such methodologies on their CRMs.

What does the difference get you?

When you have a methodology that aligns selling and buying processes, then helps sales people diagnose the actions that will keep customers moving along their buyer’s journey, several things happen:

  1. You can identify deal-moving sales behaviors
  2. You can diagnose at-risk deals in time to rescue them…and know how.
  3. You can replicate high-performance behaviors across your entire sales team.

This sounds pretty powerful, right?  When sales leaders, particularly front-line sales managers, are able to diagnose and coach within a dynamic coaching culture, sales performance outcomes improve dramatically.

A new generation of CRM is the next innovation in sales performance:  What if your CRM was able to do some of the diagnosis automatically, so that front-line sales manager diagnosis time wasn’t the bottleneck? You’d really have something, wouldn’t you?

The new generation of CRM is here.  It’s an instrument for sales performance improvement, not the same old compliance hammer.  It’s combined with the world’s most highly respected methodology for complex selling…a methodology updated for even greater results for today’s generation of sellers. Where traditional CRMs measure seller activities, this new CRM is centered on selling behaviors that move deals, identify at-risk deals, and coach performance electronically.

Is the view worth the climb?

Adopting any new system is a substantial investment of resources.  While having a more manageable sales system is valuable to managers; real ROI comes from having a dynamic coaching culture.  Close rates climb by an average of 18%.  The view – the return – is high.  The results have been proven over decades.

Our new system is the easiest to implement way to achieve that dynamic coaching culture in existence. The climb – the cost — has never been easier.

This set of instruments are easy to customize to many businesses.  I’m happy to spend some time with you learning about your unique situation to see if we can apply this powerful solution to your needs, the way you need.  Contact me if you want to talk more.

To your success!

Categories
Marketing Personal Development Sales

Sales Culture, Elevated.

This article is part three of a three-part series on the future of sales performance.

In parts 1 and 2, I wrote that:

  • CRM alone not enough; in fact, many companies have found it’s the tail that wags the dog.
  • Process, and even more importantly, methodology are real difference-makers. Coaching process and methodology makes performance improvement sustainable.

In this article, we’re going to dig a little deeper into the coaching that drives long term sales success. Sustaining world-class performance is about sales culture; culture that ingrains process into the operating rhythm of the organization. Process and methodology do no good unless they are internalized by a sales organization, and the process of internalizing establishes a strong sales culture. When a methodology becomes the default go-to-customer approach for your organization, it enables the three goals of a sales system:

  1. Drive deal-winning behaviors, not simple activity-based measures.
  2. Re-vector at-risk deals, identifying and mitigating risks with opportunities.
  3. Replicate winning across, raising the performance of all sellers in the team.

Dynamic coaching culture

CSO Insights has conducted extensive research supporting the value of a dynamic coaching culture.  The research shows that companies whose coaching culture captures analytics from successful sales, refines sales data into define winning sales behaviors – then supports sales leaders as they coach those behaviors across the sales force outperform their peers.  Dynamic coaching culture is different than simple coaching:  there is a closed loop between results and how process and methodology is emphasized by the organization.  This loop drives self-sustainment and continuous improvement.

Dynamic coaching cultures experience far superior outcomes than average sales organizations:

  • A higher percentage of these companies meet revenue plan.
  • More reps make quota. The gains come from across the sales force, not just a few high performers
  • Win rates are higher. This means forecasts are more accurate
  • Late loss rates are lower. Fewer of those resource-sucking late losses that ruin sales productivity
  • Staff turnover is lower. Lose fewer of the people you want to keep, rehab more of the marginal performers, converting them to keepers.

A robust self-sustaining coaching culture builds the foundation for two things:

  1. Sales performance. The outcomes above are worthwhile goals in themselves, but…
  2. Self-sustaining culture (manager bench strength, coaching acumen, leadership succession/career path). Building a sales culture to last means building sales careers worth having.

The Past, Present and Future of Dynamic Coaching

Let’s look at where we’ve been, and where we’ve led our industry: coaching on CRM-resident tools.

I’ve worked with Miller Heiman Group (and its predecessor, Miller Heiman) tools for almost 30 years. Success in my business is all about delivering outcomes for clients. The reason Miller Heiman Group is the largest in the B2B space is that we’re the partner sales organizations keep engaged with longer…we have the least leaky bucket…growing our clients is how we grow.

Based upon thousands of client engagements, I can tell you with absolute conviction that the key to long-term success is in not conducting training events, but executing long term change in selling behavior organization-wide.  A successful engagement is almost universally the one with a robust component of sales manager coaching, where front line managers become the primary change agents.

The gold standard of coaching is personally diagnosed and delivered by the front-line sales manager (FSM).  This kind of coaching is high-touch, requiring not only discipline by the FSM, but a corporate capability in developing coaches and prioritizing coaching activity over the many other demands on an FSMs time.

While manager-delivered coaching is preferable, it is not always available at the right time for every deal.  We have also noticed that a large proportion of coaching is on a core set of selling behaviors.  That is, managers tend to diagnose and coach the same behaviors over and over.  With the right methodology and the right CRM system (one that helps track deal-moving behaviors, not meaningless activities), an intelligent coaching platform is possible.

Where you can go:

  • Instead of manager-initiated intervention, how about system-led?
    • Not today’s activity-based prompts. Selling behavior-based prompts…seller actions that moves deals, not activity that occupies selling time
  • A rules engine, based upon 40 years of Miller Heiman Group expertise, which can diagnose those repetitive selling
  • AI/big data capabilities which can take it even further.

Where are You?  Where Do You Want to Go?

When you’re tracking and managing to activities, today’s CRM can work just fine.  On the other hand, when you’re trying to establish a rigorous selling culture with a consistent management cadence, you can more efficiently accomplish the three goals of a world-class sales system::

  1. Drive winning selling actions. This means actions, not activities.
  2. Change deal outcomes more rapidly identify at-risk opportunities and figure out how to re-vector them toward success.
  3. Replicate success. Learn what behaviors predict success in your business, and turn them into a rules engine for your sales tool to automatically recommend.

We Can Take You There

Miller Heiman Group has leveraged over 40 years of sales performance expertise into a powerful set of tools.  They have bundled methodology with a dynamic coaching application, which can be freestanding or integrated with a CRM system. It helps front line sales leaders by lightening the routinized part of their coaching load, allowing them to concentrate their time on higher level opportunity strategy.  Sellers become more effective by building sound selling behavior habits.  Finally, senior sales leaders see improved results, and have insight-producing analytics into how to improve sales even more.

I’m excited about this new capability, and am thrilled to offer it to clients. Contact me to discuss whether we might drive winning actions, change deal outcomes, and replicate success in your organization.

Categories
Best Practices Personal Development Sales

Sales Process: Good, Better, Best…and the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Last week, in part one of this three-part series, I made the case that CRM alone is not enough for an effective sales system.  This week, let’s talk about what B2B selling organizations need instead.

What We’re Going For:  The Goals of a World-Class Selling System.

You should have three goals for any selling system you implement:

1. Drives effective selling behaviors, not to be confused with mere activity tracking. Behaviors that align selling process with a customer’s buying process make the difference between activity quantity and quality.

2. Change deal outcomes: Proactively identify which opportunities in your funnel are at risk…and more importantly, tell individual sellers what to do about it.

3. Replicate Winning Behaviors. Uncover new effective selling behaviors, then replicate them across the entire sales force.

These three goals should drive your selling process. Only then can you decide how to implement any CRM (last week’s topic) into a world-class selling system.  

The Good the Bad, and the Reeeaally bad.

Before we get to the more aspirational implementations, let’s consider less effective ones.

Look at the three goals of a sales system above:  Drive effective behaviors, change deal outcomes, and replicate wining.  Now evaluate the sales systems below on how well they are able to deliver on those three goals

The Good:  Process

In “good”, selling actions (for example, discovery meeting, demo, proposal, etc.), and playbooks are established and used.  A best practice is that selling process is tethered to the company’s marketing stack, etc. This coordinates marketing activities and assets to the selling process.

Selling actions are not tightly connected to a customer buying process (see “better” and “best” further down to see what I’m talking about) , but when well-formulated, they were designed to parallel a “model/average” buying process (remember, it takes methodology to consistently engage with the customer to confirm/align with their individual buying process).

In “good”, there is little real aspiration to improve deal outcomes by applying specific selling behaviors, and the “model sale” is enshrined as the standard; replicating success is capped at this ideal standard.

The Bad: Activity-Based Metrics

When managers start to track seller activities that don’t clearly align with – or meaningfully influence — the customer journey, “process” becomes a hindrance to selling success.  If your sellers are measured primarily on activity-based measures like call volume, demos conducted, proposals lobbed, lunches bought, miles driven, number of deals in the funnel, you start chasing mirages.

In “bad”, metrics emphasize quantity, not quality.  Activities tracked tend to be the easy-to-measure kind, not the success predicting kind.  The activities emphasized here don’t drive effective selling behaviors, don’t change deal outcomes, and don’t replicate winning.

The Ugly:  Activity Before Progress

Sometimes “the bad” is so ineffective that management’s conclusion is to double down on it.  In addition to inefficient activity-focused measures, selling organizations apply reward systems to inefficient behaviors, and draconian compliance measures (sellers must enter activities into CRM or be disciplined). In addition to ineffective selling activity, sales forces are incentivized to engage in “manager repellant” data entry activity. Reports are clogged with garbage, which yield such poor results that managers opt for even worse measures.

The three goals of a great selling system are in a different world from this activity-based tar pit.

Good, Better, and Best

Now let’s explore the more desirable end of the spectrum

CSO Insights has clearly defined several levels of process maturity in their research. According to their findings, these levels achieve progressively better outcomes – on several levels (contact me for more detail and access to the research).  Let’s look at some of the alternatives…what makes good, better and best.

Good:  Process

“Good” was described above.  It’s well-structured selling actions (for example, discovery meeting, demo, proposal, etc.), with playbooks and good marketing stack alignment.

In “good”, selling actions (for example, discovery meeting, demo, proposal, etc.), and playbooks are established and used.  A best practice is that selling process is tethered to the company’s marketing stack, etc. This coordinates marketing activities and assets to the selling process.

Again, deal pursuits are fit to the model sale/expected customer buying process, not extensively customized to a particular pursuit.

CRM for this level is little more than a compliance tool, not particularly valuable as a salesperson effectiveness tool.  The operating assumption is reliance on the process design, not seller acumen—certainly not customer acumen.

Better:  Methodology

At Miller Heiman Group, we distinguish “selling activity process” (as described above) from another kind of process: methodology. Methodology is another kind of process which aligns sellers and buyers…specifically, selling process (above) to customer’s buying process.  Methodology bridges the huge gap between selling activities and behaviors that create customer-perceived value…and then leverage customer value into a compelling case for change.

In methodology, “discovery meeting” becomes a customer-centric process of value discovery and development. “Demo” becomes “connecting our solution to a well-articulated customer value gap by demonstrating only those aspects of our solution that add value to this customer”.  As you can imagine, selling organizations who implement methodologies have higher sales success and better customer relationships.

Today’s CRMs don’t really support methodology out of the box, but methodologies like those from Miller Heiman Group can be incorporated using add-in modules.  Using these, sales professionals begin to use CRM voluntarily, because methodology integrated into CRM finally offers a sales-success payoff for using the tools.

Best:  Dynamic Methodology

Today, the state of the art is methodology with analytics that:

  • Help Sales managers look at opportunities and give high-value opportunity coaching in real time. Managers diagnose, then drive winning behaviors, that change deal outcomes.
  • Give managers a real-time tool to glean best practices from their sellers, then characterize them and replicate them through the entire sales team.

The definition of dynamic methodology is about to change.  Soon, these same dynamic coaching capabilities will be converted from “intitiated by front-line sales managers via personally generated insights”, to rules-engine mediated coaching initiated by the CRM system itself to more quickly and widely distribute management attention to all deals.

The Best is about to get much better.  Real-time dynamic methodology, first with a sophisticated rules engine, and eventually with a machine-learned, dynamic coaching schema, is going to transform the sales performance world.

Your thoughts?

Last week, I asked if CRM is the tail wagging the dog.  As you can see, process/methodology maturity should be your goal, and CRM should be your execution tool.

Agree or disagree?  Have any additional thoughts?  Please share them below, or reach out directly.

To your success!

Categories
Best Practices Personal Development Sales

CRM: Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?

Note:  This is the first of a three part series on how sales performance management is evolving

According to their marketing materials, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications solve just about every sales problem your company has ever experienced. Are the promises true?  Or…does CRM just help make your existing processes (good or bad) more efficient –at best? Do your sales people feel like you own your CRM or that your CRM owns them? Is CRM the tail wagging the dog?

CRM systems have powerful functionality, and are able to analyze more data all the time.  And yet, an alarming percentage of CRM implementations don’t meet expectations – see the chart below (CIO magazine recently found 33%, a more current figure, but not out of line with history).  Those numbers look worse when you examine how “expectations” were defined.

What’s going on? CRM Alone is Not Enough

 There are a couple of reasons why CRM implementations miss expectations:

They typically focus on selling process alone.  I’ll discuss this in greater depth next week, but selling process is the easy part: aligning with the customer’s buying process is where big gains in effectiveness happen.

CRM can only analyze the data it has access to. Order history reports tend to be pretty accurate, but opportunity pursuit data is almost always sketchy at best…especially for lower-performing sales people.

For sales people, CRM is often simply a compliance tool; that is, it’s an administrative system to track actions. If it doesn’t help sales people win opportunities, it doesn’t get used.

Even worse, the actions tracked aren’t quality actions that lead to success, and everyone knows it.  If CRM’s intent is to streamline customer interactions, most implementations don’t measure up. Why? Many companies fall into the trap of tracking what is easy to capture, not what’s important.  Analyzing non-predictive data gets you lots of numbers, charts and graphs, but no real insights.

The tail wagging the dog:

If all CRM is in your organization is a tool to track (the wrong) activities… and you’ve become a slave to tracking those activities, you exist to serve your CRM, not the other way around.

There is a huge difference between a tool that makes sellers more effective and one used by managers to gather semi-meaningful data.  While I don’t want to ignore the importance of lightening a front-line sales manager’s reporting burden, that benefit may not be worth the cost s of implementation.

While they’re billed as sales performance tools, most companies’ CRM implementations fall short. When CRM becomes merely a compliance and reporting tool, you’re in trouble.

Worse, if you fall into the trap of measuring only the wrong activities (unfortunately, that means measuring activities that CRM finds easiest to measure and track), you’re in the worst kind of trouble.  You’re not leading with measuring the right things.  Opportunity counts mean nothing.  Winnable opportunity tracking means something. Understanding how to turn an at-risk opportunity into a winnable one is everything.

What should CRM be and do?

While CRM should also be able to analyze post-sale information, it should be a tool for sales professionals. Companies should set a high bar for their expectations. To be a genuine tool for sellers and their leaders, the next generation of CRM needs to:

1. Drive effective selling behaviors(not mere activity tracking). My expertise is selling behaviors that drive sales – as opposed to activities that sales people could perform.  For example: I want to drive great conversations with the right people, not number of calls completed.  Today’s CRM implementations typically help leaders track the latter, when they know they should be driving the former.  The ideal CRM should help alert sales people to the right behaviors at the right times.

2. Change deal outcomes: using expertise, a CRM system should proactively identify which opportunities in your funnel are at risk…and more importantly, why.  That same CRM system should automatically tell individual sellers what to do about it. Early risk identification and management (mitigation or de-resourcing) would be gold in the hands of a selling organization.

3. Replicate Winning Behaviors. The sales behaviors that predict selling success are observable, trainable, trackable and coachable. Uncovering those behaviors, then replicating them sales force-wide by training, coaching, and tracking those behaviors, allows you to bring all of the sellers on a team to a higher level. A CRM that does this would be a huge advantage for a selling organization.

Where CRM has been.  Where It’s Going

CRM has evolved through three major generations:

  1. Contact manager.An automated Rolodex and tickler file.
  2. Massive powerful DB that does everything – some are capable of managing the ordering and assembly logistics of a space shuttle…although integrating proposals and contracts with enterprise resource planning, etc. were common uses.
  3. Today, State of the art CRMs “’Manage’ the selling process”; that is, ather seller data on their activities.
  • Activity-based selling fits today’s CRM tools best.
  • Activities and behaviors that align selling activities with customer buying processes (customer-centric sales methodologies) are firmly out-of-scope.

My company has had, for years, a skinny software stack for CRMs that allows sellers to practice methodology within CRM.  It allowed sellers to benefit from CRM as a performance-enhancement tool.  Because of that, many clients find that CRM utilization by sellers dramatically increases, yielding data accuracy benefits to the organization. (Ironically, some companies have bought sales training –at least initially–to finally achieve acceptable compliance with CRM).

Today, even the best coaching is done in-person, by managers examining meeting plans, account plans and opportunity pursuits, diagnosing selling behavior gaps, and conducting coaching conversations.  The skinny stack is great for this. Tools that score opportunities and selling methodology behaviors (methodology is what connects sales process to customer buying process) have enhanced the skinny stack tool even further.

The three requirements of a great CRM implementation above are met with this skinny stack.  The challenge:  coaching is almost 100% in-person, a large demand on front-line-manager time resources.

What if there was a true sellers-first tool, that helped sales professionals be great?  What would that look like?

Watch this space…or contact me right away to learn more.

To your success!

Categories
Sales Skills

Three Sales Strategies for Even Keel/Indifference

Indifferent or “Even Keel” mode happens when  a buying influence sees no compelling reason to change what they’re doing. Because any change (including a purchase of something different) needs to overcome the uncertainty and interruption factor of that change, indifference happens any time the perceived value an improvement doesn’t outweigh the perceived cost of change.  To get someone out of Even Keel, you need to change their perception somehow:  reduce the perceived cost of change — or increase the perceived payoff from making that change.

Indifference is common, threatening many sales opportunities by causing the prospect to default to the status quo.  It’s often the biggest competitive threat in play. Great sales professionals prepare for indifference so they can plant the seed for perception change during that next meeting…the only one they can count on ever getting.

I was recently asked for a list of the strategies that a sales professional can use to get a buying influence out of “Even Keel” or “indifferent” mode.  He’d read in The New Strategic Sellingabout waiting for the person’s perception to change, and knew there had to be more options available.

Perception is personal. Thus, changing perception should be about people. Let’s examine whomight serve as catalyst for changing a buying influence’s perception to leave indifference behind.  There are three sources of perceptual change:

  1. The prospect changes their own perception based upon perceived change in their environment or situation.
  2. The sales person is the agent of change. That is, the sales person influences the process of changing the prospect’s perceptual change.
  3. A credible (to the prospect) third party acts as perception-changer.

Here are some thoughts on the three strategies for dealing with indifference, to help you prepare for your next sales interaction:

Let the buying influence (BI) change their own perception.

I list this strategy first because many sales people don’t consider it fully. When you are taught to “take control of the call” or something similar, the strategy of letting the flow of events do your work for you is counterintuitive.  While it’s not always the shortest path, it works directly on the perception of the prospect.  There are a couple of variations.

1. Let them fail on their own. When this option works, it works great.  Prospects are likely to transition directly into “I’m in trouble” mode, which is highly leveragable.  It also means you need to politely maintain contact.  Be the one with share of mind to get their first call, then be the most responsive.  Unfortunately, this route can take a long time.  This option is one of the few viable options when the prospect is so overconfident in their current solution that their willingness to listen to anyone is limited.

2. Let them watch as a competitor begins to win. This is a variation of the ‘let them fail” option.  Only certain buying influences will be in a position to see this or care that it’s happening: affected sales people and sometimes  top executives (it can be less impactful to User or Technical buying influences).

The Seller changes the  Buying Influence’s perception

 Note: credibility is foundational for this strategy.  If a prospect doesn’t trust what you are telling them, you can’t build a case for change.  I work with my clients to establish and build credibility at all times — for this reason and more.  Once you’ve got credibility, you can:

Show the prospect that reality isn’t as acceptable as they perceive it; that potential losses from doing nothing are higher than they perceived.  Help them see their problem more broadly (in MHGroup terminology:  help them change their Concept, or solution image.). My readers, who are familiar with my focus on customer value will recognize the imperative to uncover unrealized value.

  1. Uncover and crystalize needs. With deeper investigation, implicit needs become explicit.
  2. Examine the impact of any existing gaps in more detail. What is the “impact of the impact” (including monetizing it).
  3. Think about the prospect’s role in the sale and in the decision dynamic for ideas on possible perception changes. This will help you prepare some high-impact discovery questions.

Mutually discover that you can help them solve a business problem that they didn’t see being connected to your solution. Again, you need credibility with this prospect to secure time to do extra discovery…or to do it in small bites over time.  This means expanding their concept.

Find a sufficiently compelling personal win,tied to a result. If a buying influence sees an adequate (but previously not compelling) business benefit plus a significant newly-realized personal win, that business benefit will become one they are willing to advocate to their peers. Some possible wins:

  • Be the first to respond to a budding problem.
  • Propose a solution before a rival within the company does

Have a trusted third party change the target’s perception.  

 Much of what I said about salesperson-led change above applies below—if your credibility is less than needed, this option might be a good one.  To execute this strategy when needed, you’ll need credibility with that third person.  Here are some options:

A co-worker changes their perception. This person’s credibility will be the key to their mind, and helping that co-worker find a role-appropriate gap may be needed.

  • Might you need to coach that co-worker? How?

Executive adjusts their perspective. Credibility with the target prospect is not a big problem when it’s their boss. Making sure the buying influence saves face or comes out with a personal win should be a point of emphasis.

A Coach changes their perception. A Coach is anyone who has credibility with your target, and who wants your proposal to succeed (Miller Heiman Group alumni: there’s one more criterion. Quiz:  what is it?).  These people can advance and promote the case for change.  Caution:  don’t let your coach cross the line to selling on your behalf, or do anything that damages their own credibility with other buying influences.

Takeaways:

Every salesperson soon learns that status quo is often the biggest hurdle to be overcome in many sales situations.  Buyer inertia is a presence in just about every sales situation, and salespeople need to be able to deal with it.

Salespeople need to build credulity in every customer interaction. This lays the foundation for everything they try to accomplish in the future:, open the prospect’s view to new options , establish value of options…even gain the right to secure a meeting in the future.

Pre-plan how you will bring value to every interaction.  Using your domain expertise in your offer/solution/service/product is of limited value to most prospects.  Apply that domain expertise with insights and knowledge of the prospect’s unique business situation, and your perspective can have that rare value sought by today’s more sophisticated buyers.

If you’d like to talk about creating value with prospects, it’s a skillset I am passionate about helping my clients improve..  Comment below, or contact me directly (mark@boundyconsulting.com) to share your unique challenges.

To your success!

Categories
Investing Personal Development Sales

Why I Hate the Term “Value Messaging”.

I’ve read the term “value messaging” a lot lately, and it disturbs me.  It’s growing in popularity. Even my own company, CSO Insights, uses it to describe how to communicate value to a prospect.

CEB promotes a combination of commercial Insights (customer value, level of “customer specificity” varies) and helping prospects facilitate their buying journey (decision process value) as characteristics of high-performing sales teams.

RAIN Group extolls value-oriented selling as by far the most effective. They have data that shows that a value-driven sales culture is higher performing, lower turnover, more rewarding, and has happier customers than average sales forces.

All of these experts aren’t wrong, the “M-word” just means the wrong thing to too many people. We all agree that focusing on value is what top-performing sales organizations do.  I just find that particular term misleading.

“Messaging” probably isn’t the right word.

The word “messaging” can mislead people. Most dictionaries define “messaging” as unidirectional (although sometimes back-and-forth serial “telling”) communication methods over electronic media. That’s clearly not what the experts above mean; I imagine that they are attempting to broaden the dictionary definition to include in-person delivery.

Even if we remove electronic medium from the definition, the “unidirectional” part is what bothers me. Broadening it to mean ”formulating a communication for impact” still carries a “telling” flavor.  What many people mis-hear, or mis-define it as:  mass messaging, standardized messaging, scripted messaging.  That kind of communication is not how customer-perceived value (there is no other kind of value than “customer perceived”, of course) is best created.  The word “messaging” can ever evolve beyond that unidirectional message flow.

Worse, there are too many people in the world ready to believe that there is such a thing as a magic pitch, a magic script, that will cause the heavens to open up and rain revenue. Most harmfully, some of these people are senior level executives with little exposure to selling, who think that sales is some (“hire the right person and pray”) black box.  The word “messaging” doesn’t free these people from that misperception.

One part of “messaging” I do like is the intentionality that should precede sending an electronic message. We should retain a sense of intentionality and thoughtful message crafting before delivery, jettisoning the unidirectional baggage that the word also carries.

The term “value” in the phrase should bring us all back on track.

Value means the desirability of a perceived outcome from a course of action (such as a purchase). Value only exists in the mind of a customer. While some portion of value may be common to all customers, full value (the desirability of all achieved outcomes) to a prospect is highly individualized.  Value is personal.  If the prospect does not understand full value, they may buy, but will do so without fully-formed preference, probably not at an optimal price, and almost certainly more vulnerable to a competitor’s discounting behavior.

How can you script or standardize communication about something so individual and personal as value? Especially in complex/consensus business-to-business selling?  When you communicate a high level, extremely predictable (and easy to compete with) value on a standardized/canned basis, world-class selling requires more…much more.

“Value dialogue” is what great sellers and sales organizations do. Not deft messaging.  

Value creation in the B2B world involves dialogue, empathy for a customer, deep listening, and business acumen.

Dialogue is uncovering, developing, and expanding value. Both parties are listening and responding to one another. This is the human art of creating shared meaning.  “Messaging” can create a reason to have dialogue…perhaps even some high-level generic value, but will never result in the prospective buyer realizing full, personal value.

Empathy is placing yourself in the customer’s position.It is the foundation for true dialogue. I’m not sure this is trainable, but it can be uncovered in a (pre-hire?) assessment, and developed further.

Deep listening is what separates serial back-and-forth messaging from true dialogue. This is trainable, assuming a minimum level of customer empathy.

Business acumen helps a seller refine empathy into dialogue about value. You can’t “know thy customer’s business” without knowing about business. Business acumen is 100% a training issue.

CEBs “commercial insights” require sellers to be expert in their customer’s business.  Half of all “Challenger” sellers provide those commercial insights via unidirectional messaging, without empathy and dialogue, and end up being a company’s lowest sales performers.  Without business acumen, those commercial insights are little more than marketing messages – sellers must personalize any insights to each prospect.

Research by CSO Insights and many others indicates that, while many customers bring sellers later in their buying journey than ever before, in after extensive self-education, that they welcome one particular kind of seller earlier: one who can provide perspective:  applying their domain solution expertise to a customer’s unique organizational and business challenges.  This requires dialogue, not messaging.

Don’t be misdirected

Language matters. Unidirectional statements are a far cry from value creation dialogue.  Dialogue isn’t “messaging”, at least by any current English definition of the word.

I work with sales organizations to have great purposeful dialogue.  With intention and empathy.  I can also raise your sales organization’s business acumen.

Are you wrestling with how to improve sales performance, and does any of this resonate with you?  It was a unidirectional message, so I don’t expect magic results. I’m actually interested in hearing your individual story, to see if I can provide another set of eyes on your situation, whether we end up working together or not.  Contact me if you’d like to have a dialogue.

To your success!

Categories
Management Marketing Personal Development Sales

Value Discipline Shapes Best Practices in Product Training

Every Sales professional is familiar with a common first order of business:  getting trained up on the products and services of their organization.

I’ve gone through many of these, and as a product manager long ago, created and delivered product training. I’ve seen good, bad, and everything in between.  Today, I’ve decided to share good:  some best practices.

There are several areas that good…and great product training needs to cover:

The Basics:

Yes every product must include the basic product features, standards, specs…speeds and feeds information. While compulsory, this is the least interesting from a differentiation/value point of view. Which means while it’s interesting to the product people and a few technically-oriented buyers, it’s the least relevant to top-performing sellers.

Common Advantages, AKA Differentiation:

 All product training programs should also include advantages:potential benefits (here, I define benefits as advantages with personal relevance to a specific buying influence).  The job of sales is to provide each member of a B2B group buying decision with an individualized motivation to buy.  Product trainers need to share best practices of which advantages tend to turn into benefits for which personas, but the “boots on the ground” salesperson is responsible for a bespoke fit.

Common Applications, AKA Use Cases:

How is the product/service used by customers?  What problems or issues does it solve for them?  What outcomes does it help them achieve?

How does it make the customer more profitable or more competitive, and how much?

What hidden problems has it solved?.

Typical value maps (graphic representations of related value, personas, etc.)

Competition…Specifically, Value-centered Competitive Analysis

Basic product training usually gives a nod to major competitors.  Competent product training covers comparisons/differences from a specs/performance standpoint.

Best Practices: Value differentials.  Good product training can articulate not just differentials in features and capabilities, but how those advantages turn into benefits.  Great product training equips sellers to understand the customer implications – in financial terms.  A tiny component which reduces the downtime in a major industrial customer’s process can have value thousands of times its price.  Sellers need to know how to walk through that math with a customer…or be susceptible to unwarranted discounting pressure.

I work with some clients on product/marketing/sales alignment, and one of the tools I often uses is called product concept statements (some authors also call them product charter statements).  This is a 1 or 2-sentence statement of the outcome the  product produces for the customer.

Common Buying Personas/Buying Influences

 While I strongly believe that every customer makes every buying decision differently every time, there are almost always some recurring themes, plus a few common variants to buying decisions.  The more product training prepares sellers on what to expect, the better. A best practice in product training is to overview the common personas encountered in a typical sale. For each major market segment, sellers should leave product training knowing:

  • Typical buying ecosystems: personas, and role in the decision.
  • Common buyer Journey overviews
  • High-leverage personas: those who typically have high value-affinity for the product’s unique advantages.
  • Mapping advantages to common personas. Especially important:  how and when to expand the buying ecosystem to capitalize on additional value creation.
  • Creative additions to the buying ecosystem which creative sellers have uncovered, previously discovered unique value propositions/
  • My Value Network tool (contact me, or wait for my upcoming book) helps create and articulate how differentiated features/advantages map to specific, personalized value creation with a variety of personas.

Selling Resources

Playbooks.  In some companies with widely varied products, there can be different selling playbooks in place.  Introduce and overview all you have.

Selling resource libraries and policies.  Where are the brochures and white papers kept, and how do they map to specific portions of buying journeys?  A best practice is to capture common “sticking points” in typical buyer journeys, and to develop content which helps salespeople and customers navigate those sticking points more effectively.  Making it easy for sellers to do this is a hallmark of world class product training.

CRM, and collaboration tools.  Introducing tools for the sales force to become a “group learning organism”, and to disseminate challenges and success throughout the company  is also a best practice.

How does this differ with the product training your sales force receives?  What do you think those differences impact sales performance? What best practices would you like to add to this list?  Post below, or contact me directly.

To Your Success!

Categories
Leadership Marketing Personal Development Sales

How Economics Betrays Business Leaders Every Day

I hear even highly-respected consultants and business leaders express dangerous misconceptions about price and discounting. I suspect it’s because so many people took basic economics to heart without digging deeper into the underlying assumptions or learning the true role of pricing. No thanks to economics, we often mis-

apply the supply/demand relationship we learned in our introductory Econ courses. You could not make a bigger mistake.

The demand curve is a foundational concept in economics. The law of demand states that lower prices incentivize higher demand (in units). The principle is correct, but only under artificial conditions. Rather, my decades of work in pricing and value have driven a conclusion that most businesses grossly mis-apply supply/demand analysis in the real world.

I’ve met multiple sales people, sales leaders and CEOs who rationalize indiscriminate discounting. Presumably, they are relying on a misunderstanding of the demand curve. This is far more than mere misinterpretation of the law of demand; it kills businesses.

Let’s review: the demand curve represents aggregated behavior of for a commodity: as price falls, additional customers appear, willing to pay the lower price.

Does dropping your price really help win that deal?

The demand curve correctly states assumes that value for your offer is different for each individual. Prospective customers compare any given price against perceived value. As price drops, demand increases when a customer who formerly perceived inadequate value now perceives a positive value from purchasing. Unfortunately, when you capture a sale from that marginal user who perceives borderline value, you simultaneously just trained all of your higher-value users to expect discounts.

While the perceived value of a product or service can – and is – often individual, it isn’t fixed. Value is a perception, and perceptions change. Perceptions of desirability of an outcome, adequacy of substitutes, and environmental/extraneous considerations change constantly. In fact, this is why the sales profession exists.

Drop your price without knowing your value? Stop it!

The demand curve assumes that your product or services is a “fungible” commodity: all units of the same product or service are identical replacements for each other.. That is, it assumes that you have no differentiation. This is ridiculous. For instance compare the price of a one ounce pure gold bar from a no-name mint vs. a one ounce Krugerrand. The demand function you learned in school ignores differentiating features, branding, distribution, availability, support/service, durability, etc. This was done so that the math works more easily. While there is some great advanced economics work that incorporates differentiation, you probably never learned about it. Pity.

Another way that the real world differs from economic models: Customers don’t have perfect information. When your customers don’t know about all alternatives, don’t fully understand value-in-use, or all the ways that your offer provides value to them and their company, they don’t make “economically efficient” decisions. Imagine a prospect who hasn’t figured out that ROI for a contemplated purchase is over 500%. Discounting isn’t the missing selling behavior…it just creates a discount-accustomed buyer. Or worse, makes them question any value which they had placed in the service. Worst of all, there was no reason to discount, and that every dollar of price drop came out of the seller’s profit line.

For these reasons, you should shift a marginal customer who perceives inadequate value to tip in your favor. This avoids the collateral damage to your existing customers willing to pay your existing price.

Your price isn’t just the effect, it’s the cause.

Your price isn’t just a cost figure a customer weighs against your offer’s value. Because of the confusing plethora of differentiation in the real world, consumers use price as an indicator of value. Your price declares your value — or your lack of it. Imagine: you are the incoming CEO of a company that outgrew its peers for decades at a price premium and without discounting before you entered the job. When you encourage sellers to start discounting to “win” deals, what do you think you’re doing to the brand?

My work on value and price

Bottom line: discounting to gain sales is only a smart choice if you, your marketing group, your customer service people, your product group, and your sellers are all powerless to grow customer perceptions of value. I help under-powered clients.

When I work with clients, we usually find that their offers are priced well below the customer’s true value. This doesn’t necessarily mean we raise prices, but almost always helps them see that discounting is merely shipping profit dollars out the door to their customers.

Don’t be “that guy”. Or “that woman”.

The only kind of value there is: customer-perceived value. It’s impossible to have value that the customer hasn’t validated yet…you don’t have value; just a value proposition. Customer-focused conversations and interactions which get your prospects to validate value is the difference.

I’m happy to help you on your journey to understand how you can capture the value your company earns in the form of pricing power. Comment below or reach out to me directly to discuss in more detail.

To your success!