#solutionacumen - C-Suite Network™

So Close But Still So Far: Discounting while Perspective Selling

Conclusion of a Five Part Series.

Are you selling with great perspective but still find your sellers discounting to win opportunities? Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Selling with perspective (or insight, sometimes challenging) wins revenue by uncovering value. In the right hands, that can deliver benefits all over your company. In the wrong hands though, it means producing unprofitable revenue: making your company work just as hard for less reward.

Throughout this series, I’ve discussed perspective, knowledge or insight that expands a customer’s understanding of one or more business issues. When a seller provides perspective, they apply customer-valued (not just any) insights and expertise about unanticipated outcomes. That might mean improving a decision, or achieving a previously unknown outcome.

Selling with perspective breaks sales professionals out of a death spiral. That spiral: “since salespeople don’t add value to my decision, I’m going to self-inform. Then, I’ll invite them to bid on my self-defined solution. As a result, they will have a hard time adding any value”. Using perspective selling to break out of the death spiral is critical. Great, even. It helps win more opportunities, which is critical.

The thing is, a great perspective seller is most of the way to being able win those same opportunities at much higher margins—combined with higher customer preference. Perspective selling while discounting iso close, yet so far.

I maintain that any company (including a non-profit, if you think about it) has the same fundamental mission — the core purpose of business:

Any company exists to generate higher customer value than it cost to deliver.

To recap, perspective selling allows sellers to uncover and develop additional value – the very essence of a successful business. Since value is the basis of price (OK, strike “is”. “should be the basis of price”), perspective sellers are perfectly positioned to sell value-based prices. They just need to take their game to the next level.

The Three Pillars/Legs of the Perspective Selling Stool… and Value.

Remember the three foundational “pillars” of expertise (or three legs of a stool) a seller should master:

Business Acumen...This was the focus of part two. Basically, business expertise helps evaluate a prospective customer’s (or any company’s) operational efficiency and effectiveness, then identify value gaps.
Solution Acumen. Feature/benefit selling is dead. As discussed in part three, solution expertise improves perspective selling by translating a product or service into results/outcomes for a prospective buyer.
Customer Acumen…In part four, we described world-class customer acumen. It’s expertise in facilitating a group buying decision. At elite level, sellers incorporate decision criteria players from any (even unusual) role with a valued outcome connected to their solution.

The ingredients of selling a value-based price are all right there above…emphasized in boldface.

Perspective (plus insight selling, and to a lesser extent Challenger Selling) harnesses the most compelling buying process: causing a customer to visualize unrealized, desirable outcomes for themselves. Adding on, valuable outcomes are the foundation of priceable value. Finally, priceable value is the base of value-based pricing (Unfortunately, this isn’t as obvious as it should be. For proof, just look at how many dollars in discounts you gave out last year).

Can You Please Just Finish the Layup?

Done correctly, perspective selling is uncovers customer-valued outcomes throughout the entire selling process.

Unfortunately, most perspective selling doesn’t explicitly teach asking that one more question: “what will this outcome mean to you…monetarily”? The exact wording of that basic question varies depending on personal style and situation but could sound like:

What is [this situation] costing you every [year/month/etc.]?
It sounds like that [situation] is causing [other department/role] to spend [hours/dollars/resources] on [current work-around]. Can you tell me about that or get me in front of them to ask directly?
I just saw this at another company. For them, [describe improved outcome], resulted in X% reduction in [risk/cost/waste/etc.] and a [savings/cost avoidance] of $Y. What kind of result do you think might be realistic in your situation?
…you get the idea. Express the outcome as a result preceded by a [dollar/euro/yen/pound/yuan/rupee/etc.] sign.

Thankfully, this isn’t a “keep selling until you lose” situation. Perspective sellers uncover value early and often — way before the proposal/price negotiation stage. Remember, that’s the whole point of being an insight seller. It’s like great perspective sellers are leading a fast break with the basketball. They only need to finish the layup by helping the prospect monetize their already-expressed valued outcome.

The Three Pillars of Perspective Selling and Value Price Selling are the Same. They’re Just Used Differently.

Now, re-read the boldface text on the three pillars above. Next, go back and read the typical questions just above. Then, notice how the three pillars help a seller:

Understand the cost impact on the customer’s business? (hint: business acumen, possibly solution acumen)
Predict a secondary/related business result, (business acumen, solution acumen), then recruit a new buying influence with something to gain (customer acumen).
Refer a prior success (solution acumen) into the current prospect’s situation (business acumen), then start one persona on the path to monetizing the problem in their own world (business, solution, and customer acumen).
…you get the idea. It takes all three legs of the stool to support both perspective and value price selling.

Perspective selling carries your conversation widely and effectively around an organization. However, Value price selling can carry your conversation more effectively into the C-suite.

Perspective selling uncovers and clarifies value drivers. In contrast, Value selling monetizes drivers. Full Value Selling pushes sellers to monetize every single value driver they possibly can.

Perspective selling wins opportunities. Better still, Full Value selling builds so much monetary value for your solution that your higher price is a better bargain to the customer than the exact same proposal sold only with perspective.

Selling value is one of those areas where less is less.

More value is more price. Importantly, price is profit.

Your company exists to generate higher customer value than it cost to deliver.

If you aren’t happy with your current results, could it be because your sellers are trained — and compensated (that’s another blog post, or several careers) – to go after exactly the outcome you pointed them toward?

Contact me if you want to talk about it.

To your success!

Know Your Product/Service Through the Customer’s Perspective

Part Three of a Five-Part Series.

You need solution acumen (product or service…applied to the customer situation) to craft win-win solutions.

Previously, I introduced perspective: knowledge or insight that expands a customer’s understanding of one or more business issues. When a seller provides perspective, they apply customer-valued(not just any) insights and expertise about unanticipated outcomes.

Then, I introduced a three-legged stool: the three foundational areas of expertise a seller should possess:

Business Acumen...The focus of part two. Basically, this type of expertise equips you evaluate a prospective customer’s (or any company’s) operational efficiency and effectiveness, then identify value gaps.
Solution Acumen.
Customer Acumen…Where we will go in part four

Today’s topic: Solution Acumen

First of all, solution acumen is waaaaay more than simple product knowledge. I’ve met sellers who are experts on their products/services, but have only a vague inkling why a customer might care. Consequently, they have product knowledge without solution acumen. Ultimately, here’s the source of the disconnect:

Customers don’t buy our products or services. Instead, they buy results. That is, they buy outcomes our products or services deliver into their lives and businesses.

Importantly, solution acumen means that you can articulate a relationship between properties of your offer and customer-valued outcomes. Knowing your product or service is something. Knowing all about how your product or service adds value to a customer is everything.

In addition, the price they’ll willingly pay for your solution depends on clarity, certainty, and desirability of those outcomes.

Ultimately, profitability happens when you provide more value for your customer than it costs you to produce. You can only price profitably in two ways: by accident, or by understanding – and pricing to – your customer’s outcomes. To achieve the latter, you need solution acumen.

What Solution Acumen Typically Looks Like:

Generally, solution acumen comes in degrees. As sellers go from basic product knowledge to full solution acumen, here are some of the identifying characteristics:

Basic solution knowledge includes:

Specs, performance…information a subject-focused persona wants to know.
Available product or service options. At a basic level, every seller should understand how their offer can be stripped down, augmented, and/or bundled.
Commercial policies. Similarly, basic-level knowledge includes ordering procedures, lead times, implementation basics, pricing, available discounts, and the like.
Competitors: An essential understanding includes basic competitor profiles, product descriptions, etc.

Intermediate-level offer knowledge might look like:

Typical configurations offered, even configurations commonly purchased for specific segments.If your company has developed a standard “small business package”, this mid-level knowledge has been institutionalized.
Commercial policies: Above basic level, understand discounting flexibility, how the pricing exception system really works (how the game is played in your company), have complete knowledge of any implementation process, how to expedite orders, etc.
Competitive differentiation. In this area, sellers can articulate competitive differences, and confirm/gauge strength of customer reactions to those differences.

Advanced knowledge, aka Solution Acumen is outcome-based, and is characterized like this:

Applications/use cases have been modeled, and all affected buying personas’ interests can be articulated.
Sellers can map competitive differentiation to customer outcomes. As an aside, my value networks are one way to do this.
Ability to brief implementation teams with persona-specific outcomes identified during deal pursuit. A key part of solution acumen is delivering on world-class outcomes after the sale.
Additionally, sellers move beyond descriptions of outcomes to quantifying them (measuring outcomes in monetary terms) with prospective customers. Also, instead of mastering the ins and outs of discounting, sellers master upward pricing flexibility: understanding attainable price premium and the required customization in order to fairly and legally price at a win-win price premium.

How Solution Acumen Shapes Perspective Selling

Solution acumen enables sellers to build connections between their offer and customer-valued outcomes. To see how, look at the Venn diagram below:

Customers have value gaps, shown on the left oval. That is, they have unmet needs and aspirations. Suppliers differentiate themselves through unique capabilities. With solution acumen, sellers’ capabilities are expressed in customer terms — outcomes,– so that customers overlap the two ovals. Any overlap represents where sellers can provide value. Only in this overlap is where sellers perspective welcomed.

Solution acumen increases as sellers more clearly translate the right-hand oval from “we provide ____” to “you achieve _____”. In fact, this is why solution acumen is so important. As a result, sellers who clearly articulate a cause/effect relationship between offer/outcome become trusted business advisors.

With perspective, sellers can add to the overlap by:

Proposing new possible outcomes,
Framing the customer situation differently…in a way that promises a better outcome
Framing the decision differently…again, to yield a valued outcome.

Remember, customers don’t care about all of your capabilities, even if they are unique to your offer. Until they can clearly see one of your capabilities enabling a valued outcome, you risk showering them with irrelevance. For this reason, “perspective” outside of a customer’s desired outcomes isn’t really perspective at all.

Solution Acumen: One Key to Perspective Selling

Remember, because customers buy outcomes, perspective sellers need to articulate them. Optionally, sellers can tell stories, give fresh insights into a customer’s situation, ask questions to get the customer to consider new issues for themselves…in any combination.

Solution acumen is not the ability to explain seller capabilities as features and benefits. Instead, it’s the ability to translate their product or service into customer outcomes, then to extend single outcomes into follow-on outcomes.

In conclusion, solution acumen is what connects the seller’s offer to customers’ value gaps. While some sellers can do this naturally, most need help. To do this, I help sales organizations revamp their sales materials and product training materials to establish high-level solution acumen organization-wide.

Feel free to comment below or to share this article. If you would like to talk about building the solution acumen of your organization, let me know. I’d love to help you build that organizational capability.

To your success!

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