Selling Value – Everything You Always Wanted to Know

Some news stories just don’t go away.  Today those stories include Ferguson, Bill Cosby, ISIS and The NFL’s Domestic Abuse Problem.  There is also Obamacare, Immigration and Ebola.  They remain in the news more because the media continues to milk these stories than readers demanding to know more.

When we look at the sales stories of the recent past, the topics that sales experts continue writing about are Social Selling, Inbound Marketing, LinkedIn, Twitter, CRM and Lead Nurturing.  They remain in the news more because the writers are attempting to sell their own services that happen to support those topics more than readers demanding to read more about it.  There’s nothing wrong with these topics of course, but sales experts should be addressing topics more closely aligned with helping sellers sell, instead of so much space being devoted to what takes place at the top and above the top of the sales funnel.

So if not those topics, then what should we all be writing about – all the time – that would be a real difference maker for salespeople?

I believe that it’s the importance of and ability to sell value.  Why, you ask?

Selling value is the one thing that all salespeople, operating without benefit of the lowest price, absolutely, positively, must be able to do well in order to consistently earn the business.  

Despite the need to effectively sell value, it happens to be one of things that salespeople do very poorly. The importance of selling value isn’t going away, but sales experts are not spending enough time talking about it, writing about it, explaining it, or providing training on it.  The most critical aspect of this topic is understanding the many factors that support a salesperson’s ability to sell value.  Selling value isn’t a specific thing that one says or does, as much as it’s an outcome of several other things.  According to Objective Management Group’s (OMG) statistics (close to one million salespeople assessed), of the 6 most important factors required to sell value, most salespeople have, on average, only 2 of them as strengths or skills.

According to a Google search on my blog, I’ve written about or mentioned selling value, in some way, shape or form, 766 times in the past 10 years.  Here are 10 of my favorite articles on selling value and when you extract the major points from each, it provides a very nice collection of guidelines for selling value:

• The One Thing Most Salespeople Are Unable to Do
• Why There is No Value When You Provide Value Via Special Pricing
• Top 10 Outcomes When Salespeople Screw Up Selling “Value Added”
• Top 5 Sales Issues Leaders Should Not Focus On
• This is the One Thing Missing from the New Way of Selling
• Do You/Should You Have a Complex Sale?
• Top 10 Reasons Why Salespeople Let Price Drive the Sale
• How to Add Value to Your Sales Offering
• New Metrics for the Sales Force – Unusual Thoughts for Unusual Times
• Boston Ballet and Money Tolerance – What it Means to Your Sales Force

As I mentioned above, selling value does not stand on its own.  You should now understand that from the value selling broadcast and the articles above,  there are several other factors that contribute to selling value.  Unless salespeople are able to effectively integrate all of the necessary factors (Sales DNA, sales process, strategy and tactics), then the end result will always be salespeople that are only able to talk about value, instead of actually becoming the value.

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