Author: Mark Boundy

Since customer focus is really value focus, selling processes and methodologies must make your anyone in a customer-facing role better at discovering value gaps. The reason: customer perceived value is the life-force driving all commerce. It’s the “invisible power” inside of Adam Smith’s unseen hand. A sale only occurs when a customer perceives value in excess of price. Prospects only agree to take meetings that are worth the time. Click-throughs are positive responses to a value proposition. When a leader wants their company to be customer-centric, the kernel inside that drive is to be focused on customer value.

Sales is a process of discovering and leveraging value to influence a decision. Dissatisfaction with status quo, aspirations for a better future state, then connecting value to a proposed change.

First layer: Value Discovery

The foundation of customer value focus is conversation skills among any person touching a customer throughout the arc of the customer journey. The ability to uncover value should be a responsibility at every customer touch-point. This doesn’t have to mean sales training for the people in accounts receivable, but it does mean a purposeful development of certain abilities. For groups who interact regularly and deeply with customers, there are several sales methodologies for helping sellers facilitate needs –satisfaction discussions. I happen to love those of the Miller Heiman Group.

Surprisingly, few methodologies guide customer conversations to the critical point where a customer internalizes and measures value. Establishing a value-discovery methodology to all customer-facing roles is a huge competitive advantage for any company pursuing a customer intimacy value discipline……. A fundamental sales skill is helping a customer build a mental value picture.

Second level: Business Acumen

Understanding the customer’s world empowers us to sell conventional value propositions. Understanding their world exceptionally well allows us to connect our solution into a more detailed, more compelling value picture. For this reason, many sales leaders have realized that building business acumen for sellers and customer –facing roles is a big performance booster. Being a trusted advisor requires that a seller knows their customer’s business well enough to give valued insights…and you can’t know your customer’s business unless you know business.

Business acumen gives us the ability to look at a prospective customer’s business insightfully. Demonstrating a deep understanding of the prospective prospect’s business builds the credibility foundation needed to trust a seller’s perspective. Without that credibility, you risk being just another annoying know-it-all spewing a misdirected “credibility deck” in a prospect’s direction. Value messaging turns into old-fashioned “telling” if the perspective is not anchored in customer insight.

Business acumen is needed to discover value that is hidden to average sellers.  It supports a more detailed “map” of value landing points: personas and roles within the target company where the seller’s differentiation generates value. A tool called “value networks” builds this high-level selling practice into a repeatable system for entire sales teams.

Elite level: Achieving higher Win-Win Prices.

Gaining customer insight allows us to not only build a deeply engaging case for change., but to have the customer engage that perception of value in relation to price.

Using great customer conversation skills and methodologies with customers to define and monetize the value they perceive accomplishes two things:

1. It solidifies a higher win-win price (either minimized discounting on standard products/services or more productive price-setting on custom ones)
2. Reinforced perception of value, stronger preference. Customers pay higher prices for value received, but only pay higher prices they can’t justify in the short term. Raising prices isn’t the trick; getting them to internalize the price justification is. Once a customer has built their own value case for your pricing, that case tends to stick. When you do it right, customers build a preference for your product/service into their justification for your price

Putting it together

Building teams of elite sellers is a passion. Building businesses driven by discovering and delivering superior customer value is an even bigger calling. And it all starts with a great conversation; the ability to uncover and build value (because the only kind of value in the world is customer-perceived).

My upcoming book will expand on these subjects. If you don’t want to wait for publication date, feel free to contact me; I’d love to learn how I can provide some value and perspective.

To Your Success!

#customerfocus, #methodology, #MHIGlobal, #MillerHeiman, #MillerHeimanGroup, #Perspectiveselling, #process, #salesmethodology, #salesprocess, #value, #valueculture, #valuepricing, #worldclasssales, #salesperformance

You’ve read the literature; you’ve bought into the rewards. You want a customer centric organization. A lot of leaders with the same aspirations get stuck at this point, asking “so what does Customer Centric look like”? More importantly, they want to know how do I implement it? While it’s relatively easy to develop a sophisticated customer satisfaction measurement capability, that doesn’t illuminate the predictive behaviors your company needs to move those ratings. As most executives have learned, there’s a lot that goes into being customer focused.

Customer focus is not just a sales thing…

While you need to customer-focus your sales organization, this isn’t even close to being the whole solution. Everyone in the company plays a part in gathering customer insights, and delivering value to customers. Sales methodology and sales skills help, because sellers have a lot of customer contact. Especially in today’s business-to-business complex selling world, sales represent only one element of the solution.

…but great sales tools are a great start.

Let’s examine an effort to transform your organization’s culture into one of continuous customer-value improvement. Every organization must develop a few levels of capability.

First, you must address the area of sales. “Sales process” often refers to a seller-centric process: progressive seller actions required during the course of a sale.  There is another kind of “process”.  For clarity, I’ll use the word methodology: “tools a seller uses to align themselves with a customer buying process“. Methodology and process are linked and parallel. “Process” currently enjoys increasing emphasis in CRM systems (and in a lot of other sales enablement investments), while methodology remains a relatively dark art.

Many companies hire and pray.  Others think they are in the vanguard when they test for a certain personality type, then hire and pray.  In contrast, there are providers who can help install a methodology (as defined here — the word is used more loosely by a lot of sales training organizations) into a sales organization. If you would like to discuss methodology and what it can do for customer focus, contact me.

The business of business: basic commercial literacy

Second, your people need broad “Customer Acumen”.  You can’t be a trusted advisor to a customer/prospect/client until you become expert in their business.  And, you can’t become expert in their business unless you know business.  That is, sellers must come to the client with some basic business acumen, and should walk in the door having a strong feel for that company’s operational health. In my upcoming book, I describe what “business acumen for sellers” looks like (example:  analyzing financial statements for operational health instead of the usual: financial health). If you’d like to preview a chapter on this topic, let me know.

With business acumen, your people understand how they can most effectively impact and grow your customers’ businesses. This will move your company beyond simple customer focus to a sharper focus on customer value.

Customer focus to align with marketing and product groups.

At a third level–maybe a combination of the first two — you align your offer (products and/or services) to the customer’s operation.  There are many facets to understanding your differentiation and connecting that to each prospect’s unique situation:  Augment product training with persona-based differentiation/value tools. Align marketing messages with these differentiators and their likely value. To execute fully on customer value focus, implement a selling methodology to help build consensus among all personas (I’m partial to those of the Miler Heiman Group).  Bonus points for a methodology that drives the customer/prospect to engage the full value of your offer, not just “enough value to win the deal” (I’m partial to mine).

Implementing a culture of continuous value improvement.

In today’s (especially business-to-business) world, we have splintered customer touches among far more roles than sales:  marketing, bizdev, sales, technical sales/sales engineering/application engineering, customer success, implementation/delivery, logistics, underwriting, customer service, tech support, billing, channel partners, you get the idea.  Every one of these touch points has access to a different facet of the customer, and can gain unique insights.

Fourth, engage your entire customer-facing organization with the entire buying organization.  The challenge is to have tools that are easy for all of your employees to learn and adopt, which dovetail well with your sales methodology, and which can be easily disseminated throughout your company.

Using these tools, every employee can contribute to a more holistic view of the customer. A closed loop system which integrates all of these levels is the result.

Simple tools for a complex job

Finally, your company must adopt a language of customer value, importantly, these tools must efficiently describe and communicate customer value throughout your company. To enable smooth adoption, make these tools simple to learn and use.

I’ve been refining such tools for decades. I am passionate about helping clients adopt them. I’ll be discussing them in more detail in my upcoming book… Feel free to contact me to learn more…. about either the tools or the book.

To your success!

#value, #valuefocus. #valueselling, #sales, #salesprocess, #salesmethodology, #salesperformance, #customerfocus, #strategy, #millerheiman, #millerheimangroup, #valueculture, #businesacumen, #challengersale, #strategicselling

Selling value is more widespread than most think…and at the same time, more narrowly practiced than it should be.

“Selling Value” isn’t just the domain of sales methodologies with variations of that term in a sales training course title. Most selling methodologies I’ve ever come across implicitly sell value whether they use that term or not.  All of those in the “needs satisfaction” family, and even some in the “tricky conversational box-building” school of selling, help sellers to connect aspects of their offer to a gap experienced by a customer. Full disclosure:  I work with Miller Heiman Group, whose skills and methodology offerings build a value connection with a customer’s solution image extremely effectively throughout the selling process.

As pervasive as a seller-centric emphasis on value is, it falls short.  I was exposed to the concept of creating customer value before I’d even heard before I started carrying a bag and was coached to “sell the value”.  As a Product Manager, I developed new products to provide specific unique value to customers.  I certainly collaborated with my company’s sales professionals.  I, and everyone who contacted a customer — even many who didn’t –maintained our primary focus on what each customer valued, then worked hard to provide it.

Here’s the Mind Shift

When I say that selling value is almost always performed too narrowly, I mean:

Stop selling value only as a sales methodology

Especially in today’s complex B2B world, the arc of the customer experience is slivered into contacts with a multitude of organizations/roles in your company:  Marketing, sales development, inside sales, outside sales, application engineering,/technical sales, underwriting, account management, implementation teams, customer success managers, account managers, customer service, technical support, billing/accounts receivable…and more, I’m sure. Every touchpoint with your customer represents a human connection with some aspect of customer value.  As a sales performance professional, I can guarantee you that your sellers have only a tunnel-vision view into the full arc of customer value that your company creates with any customer.

Knowing this, how crazy is it to assume that the only group whose job it is to gather information on value..and then sell it.. is your sales force?

It gets worse.  How crazy is it to use customer value only to sell?  A huge resource goes untapped when (only) sales fails to carry value insights back to those in product/service design, product management, shipping, servicing, manufacturing, logistics, purchasing, scheduling, etc.  I have lived a corporate culture where customer-perceived value is the pervasive mantra.