(Newswire.net — February 14, 2020) —
In B2B marketing, it’s vital that your customer’s business find your own business valuable. For the sales end of that relationship, it means understanding value selling. Creating this mutually beneficial relationship delivers the competitive advantage every business needs but determining what your customers truly care about can be difficult at times.
Success in this area leads to increased customer loyalty, win rates, and deal sizes. So, how do you fully understand what your customers value? Before you head down the analytical path of overthinking, take a look at these three crucial areas.
1. Influences
Customers are changed by influence. These influences can be internal, which you can find a way to fix, or an external factor that may be out of your control such as government regulation or consumer preferences.
Instead of worrying about what you can’t control, look at the internal influences detracting from value. There may be pressure to increase account revenue through new prospects or bring down their department’s budget spending. Another common internal factor is the need to adopt new systems.
You need to determine what influences are having an impact on your customer’s business. Once you’ve identified them, it’s easier to understand their response to your selling tactics. This allows you to build the foundation of the value sale by simply addressing their needs.
2. Initiatives
Initiatives are how your customers are responding to their influences. Like your own, companies create new objectives and protocols to handle their challenges. Instead of looking at these as a cause and effect relationship, learn to look at them as your client’s way of telling you where their values lie.
The trick is to understand that each initiative is their way of working to achieve an outcome. So, what result are they working towards? Whatever those results are constitute their value priorities, which is your skeleton key to value selling.
3. Value Priorities
A value priority is an initiative the customer finds immensely important. If you can identify these initiatives, then you’re discovering the full picture of what your client values the most. Fail to do so, and you can guarantee that someone else is one step ahead of you.
From here, value selling is simple. Your goal is to help the customer achieve their value priorities in any way you can. Make it your mission. In doing so, you’ll need to fully understand the challenges or influences they face and become an instrumental aid in helping them overcome these obstacles.
Solving Issues
Like any problem, solving an issue means determining its roots and developing solutions. That’s the value you’re bringing to the table. Think about what changes they may have to make in order to fulfill their value priorities, then get to work on developing an intelligent solution through your products, services, and knowledge of the market as well as its customers.
That’s all there is to value selling, one of the most successful ways to engage your customer and create the value they’re desperately looking for. If you can master these three areas and be the problem solver they need, you’re on the path to highly successful career.