The Critical Mistake when Selling Your Value | Sales Strategies

I spent a couple of days this week with a client rebuilding their sales process and specifically, helping them define what the qualifications, needs, and solutions portion of their sales process is.

Here’s a tip for everybody: you have to monetize the value that you’re bringing to the customer. Now, the value that you’re bringing is either helping them solve a problem or gain something in return. The way you do that is like this:

We ask about a specific problem that they’re having in their business. Let’s say that it’s a manufacturer and they’re suffering from breakdowns. We want to find out how many breakdowns they’re having in a week or a month, and they’ll tell us. Your next and most important question is “What should it be?”, because you’re going to try and mend the gap between what it is and what it should be. That’s your value.

Then we want to find out all the costs associated with those breakdowns. Do they have to bring people in to repair it? Is there lost productivity from the worker that was on that machine? Is there a loss of product that’s shipped out and if there is, how much is that worth? Do the customers get angry and leave? When we add that all up, that’s the monetization of the value.

Maybe you work with clients who say that they need to improve their processes because their employees are stressed. Well, what does stress mean to the organization? Maybe it means that people go out on sick leave. How much does that cost? How long are people off? How do they get replacement workers? How much do they cost? Maybe there’s a high turnover at the company. How high is the turnover and what should it be?

[bctt tweet=”These are the important questions that you should be asking when it comes to the value you can bring.” username=”EngageColleen”]

Don’t be afraid to monetize your value. When we get to the end of a discovery or qualification call, we need to be asking the client certain questions. What we’re looking at doing is fixing a problem that’s costing the client a lot of money and we want to bring it down to a more reasonable cost. We want their buy-in because when we can show them that investing in us is going to save them money, it will be a no-brainer to them.

I know not a lot of salespeople like talking about money, but we need to monetize the value in the qualification phase before the proposal goes out so that your clients can justify the investment.

P.S. Are you a speaker, trainer, consultant or small business owner? Don’t miss my upcoming limited-attendance event on creating never-ending value client relationships, presented along with Alan Weiss in Miami Beach! Learn more at: www.EngageSelling.com/gro