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Published on April 13, 2022

Value-Based Selling: 5 Ways to Sell Value Rather Than Price

Selling value is one obstacle that most sales reps face, but mastering the Value Selling Process can overcome this challenge effectively.

What is Value-Based Selling

Value-based selling is the art and science of getting customers excited about the outcomes your products and services can deliver for them.  This approach helps you avoid getting stuck in the weeds of positioning your products through the usual competitive price and feature comparisons. Value-based selling focuses on demonstrating and quantifying how purchasing and implementing your solutions will make the customer’s daily work better, with emphasis on tangible outcomes like:

  • Increasing top-line revenue
  • Reducing cost
  • Operating more efficiently
  • Shortening sales and other key business cycles
  • Improving customer satisfaction and retention
  • Mitigating risk

Benefits of Value-based selling:

When you utilize your customer’s own data to show them how they can use your products to realize these tangible benefits and quantify how large those benefits can be, you:

  • Secure the customer’s attention and interest while generating excitement about your solutions
  • Equip your advocate to sell internally on your behalf
  • Immediately differentiate yourself, your company, and your solutions, separating you from your competition
  • Get to decision-makers more quickly
  • Shift focus away from the same-old, same-old feature/ price comparisons during the sales process
  • Improve win ratios

That all sounds great, right? But how to do it? Here’s a high-level five-step plan you can use to roll out value-based selling for your sales organization:

Suggested Read: How to Build a Value-Based ROI Presentation

Take ownership of the data: “Quantify business pain early in the sales process to prevent deal stalls to win the deal.”

Quantify prospect pain drivers<

You know your target market, the pain points your products have helped existing customers address, and the value those customers derive from your products. Break the drivers of that value down into questions your sales team can ask during the discovery process that are designed to produce quantifiable answers. For example, an invoice automation vendor might ask its customer:

  1. How many invoices do you send per month?
  2. What is the average invoice amount?
  3. What percent is paid on time?

With this information, you could aid your customer in understanding how much extra cash they could collect per month by improving collection rates by 20%, thus facilitating Pain Quantification.

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 Train on structured sales discovery process

Build and train your sales team on a structured discovery process centered around the pain driver questions. It is important to conduct discovery in a way that draws your customers and prospects into the process as partners by showing you understand their pains, offering relevant industry data that help determine how much their pain is likely costing them, and making sure they take ownership of the data: “Quantify business pain early in the sales process to prevent deal stalls and win the deal.” This crucial step ensures that your sales team effectively identifies customer pain points and addresses them proactively, increasing the likelihood of successful outcomes.

Leverage Value ROI Platform to crunch your numbers

Use tools from VisualizeROI to crunch the data and transform the answers into compelling visualizations (charts, graphs, images, etc.) of the current pains your customers have and the potential future rewards your products can deliver by addressing those pains. Circle back with your key contacts to confirm they still buy into and take ownership of the data and results, and adjust as necessary.

Suggested Read: Doubling Deal Size and Reducing Sales Cycle by 50% with a Compelling ROI Platform

Deploy Visualizations in the sales process

Deploy your visualizations throughout the sales process in communications, sales presentations, value propositions, and proposals, maintaining focus on the value you can help your customer achieve and drive the sale to a successful outcome. Always be attuned to your audience: personalize content to the interests, needs, and pains of different customer stakeholders. For example, C-level executives and departmental operations managers are likely to be focused on different outcomes.

Implement value in your business reviews

Implement regular (we recommend quarterly) business reviews with your customers to verify results and identify new metrics to add into your value questions and formulas.

Value-Based Selling: 5 Ways to Sell Value Rather Than Price|Value-Based Selling: 5 Ways to Sell Value Rather Than Price
Close 43% More Deals with Ease.
Become a Value Selling Expert today! 
Are you ready to start winning more deals ?

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