Selling Value

Step 4: Improve Your Selling Process

Now that you have established the cost / value relationship between your value offerings and target markets, you must review and refine your selling, marketing and compensation programs to complement and fine-tune your value proposition. Proper education and preparation of the sales and customer support personnel could make the difference in your company's drive for recognition as the "value leader" in your marketplace.

Your selling and marketing programs and related processes must enable employees to:

	Clearly understand and describe your value proposition
	Leverage and broaden their traditional "product-focused" selling skills into "value-focused" selling skills
	Show customers the business advantages of your value offering
	Plan a customized sales proposal for targeted "high-value" accounts

The following list provides a quick review of the most important considerations for ensuring your sales and support processes are aligned for value-based selling. Use these questions to assess your company's readiness for personnel training and implementation of your value proposition. Add your own questions to those provided below.

Key Considerations for a Value-Focused Selling Process

1. Have we identified our "high-value" target customers?

2. Do we know the key decision makers?

3. Have we identified their specific business "hot buttons" (challenges/needs/expectations)?

4. Can our value proposition clearly satisfy the critical needs/expectations of our target accounts?

5. Are our value offerings properly grouped and described for easy customer understanding?

6. Have we identified tangible customer business advantages for each value offering?

7. Can we track and quantify the financial impact of our value contributions?

8. Is our sales force organized and trained to sell our value proposition?

9. Does our compensation system encourage/reward value-based selling?

10. Is our pricing strategy competitive and reflective of our value and profit objectives?

11. Are our value delivery and support systems ready to provide high customer satisfaction?

Develop A Customer Value Menu

It is essential that your sales personnel and target customers clearly grasp the central message contained in your value proposition. Regardless of the quality efforts that went into your preparations up to this point, if the buyer (your customer) and seller (you) cannot understand it or communicate their intentions, the process will fail. To guard against this possibility and enhance the education and selling process, you should carefully review your value offering descriptions and use them to develop an appealing Customer Value Menu of customer benefits that clearly relate and describe:

	The functional category of deliverable value (i.e. Core Value, Product Related Services, Special Services, etc.)
	The specific distributor value offering (i.e. Phone/fax ordering, Kitting of Materials, Custom Engineering, etc.)
	The customer's benefit(s) from receiving each value offering (i.e. Reduced search time, Reduced order time, Increased ordering efficiency, etc.)

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Let us help you evaluate your extended value selling process and prepare a customer value menu that will make a difference to your business! Please call us today at 704-892-4117.


	Contact Dr. McCleave at 704-892-4117 or send your email request to bmccleave@aol.com
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