SKILLS

Delivering Value Messages

How to equip your salespeople to create, elevate, and capture your value

Q. #1 Reason salespeople don’t hit quota?

A: Inability to articulate value! SiriusDecisions 1

CRM Leads Process Products Training

Analyst firm SiriusDecisions recently asked hundreds of sales managers at B2B companies: What’s the #1 reason
your salespeople don’t hit quota?

It wasn’t because they didn’t have enough leads. It wasn’t because the sales process was broken. It wasn’t because
they didn’t have the right products or product mix. It wasn’t because they didn’t have enough training. It wasn’t
because profitable
Securing the CRM system wasn’t
pricing doing
is more what
than justitawas supposed
challenge for to
thedo.
sales organization. Securing profitable pricing is
also a mission-critical profitability issue for corporate management.
Sales managers agreed: The #1 reason salespeople don’t hit their quota is their inability to articulate value.
Why? Because pricing, more than almost any other factor, drives bottom-line profitability.
You can do everything right as a company — design the right products, put the right strategies in place, promote
Consider the immense impact of pricing on the margins of a typical Global 1200 corporation. According to
the right campaigns — but the one thing that stands between you and your customer saying “yes” is your
McKinsey & Company,
salespeople with their alips
price increase of 1% (assuming stable volume) generates an 11% increase in operating
moving.
profits. This one factor has greater impact than comparable percentage improvements in any other metric,
including variable
Do they create costs value?
enough or sales
Dovolume. And of
they elevate course,
that value ato1%
thedecrease inof
right level average price
decision reduces
maker? operation
And do profits
they capture
bythat
thevalue
sameand11%. 1
maximize the size of your opportunities?
With so much on the line, it is not surprising that companies are focusing on securing price increases or defending
The three
current great
price levels or conversations
that buyers are pushing back with new intensity for lower prices.
Every buying cycle comes down to three great business conversation “moments of truth.” And your salespeople
have to be great at all of them. Think of it as the Customer Conversation Continuum.

1
Source: SiriusDecisions, PMM 2010 Survey
The Differentiation Conversation
The Differentiation Conversation is where your salespeople create value in the mind’s eye of your prospects and
customers by advising them on a problem, threat or missed opportunity they didn’t know they had — showing
them why their status quo is unsafe, and building the buying vision for a new solution. Once they’ve demonstrated
why your prospects need to change, they then articulate why your prospects need to change with you by creating
contrast between you and your arch rival competitors.

The Justification Conversation

The Justification Conversation is where your salespeople elevate the value of your offering to your prospect’s
senior-level decision makers. The value you created can quickly evaporate if your salespeople don’t have the
business and financial acumen required to defend and justify the purchasing decision, especially at the CXO level.
Your salespeople must have the competence and confidence to make a compelling, credible business case for your
solution, and appeal to those executive decision makers’ business and financial objectives.

The Maximization Conversation

The Maximization Conversation is where you capture and protect the value of your opportunity from unnecessary
discounting. Negotiation doesn’t just happen at the end of the sales cycle. Profitable conversations are a result
of a disciplined, purposeful set of interactions that take place throughout the entire selling process — identifying
unconsidered needs that only your solution solves, exchanging instead of giving away value, and embracing the
natural tension that occurs between buyers and sellers.

Your salespeople need to be equipped with three distinct but complementary conversation skills and approaches.
Only Corporate Visions can help enable your reps to be great at all three of these dialogues. Visit
www.corporatevisions.com/solutions/the-right-skills/ for more information on our products and services.

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