Value proposition sales

Value proposition

A short bit about my position on what sales is and isn’t:

Sales is not about telling prospects about your latest greatest new technology.
Sales is not about telling prospects about all the “bells & whistles” of your latest product.
Sales is not about telling prospects about the prestigious lineage of your company.
Sales is about the value proposition for your customer.
To paraphrase various sales textbooks, a customer buys a product for one of four reasons:
They can save money with your product – i.e. lower cost.
They can make money with your product – i.e. a component of their product or service
They receive an ROI from your product – i.e. increased efficiency
The product is a luxury, nice to have, but no compelling reason

As the manager of the sales team and/or business development manager or account manager, my job is to understand what the form of the value proposition is for our customers. Then coach and train my sales staff to present and explain it clearly. Once this is established, the new technology, products, company lineage, support, and all of the other components available for supporting the value proposition are brought to bear.

Too often we’ve all experienced the opposite, a sales pitch that is really all about a “technology looking for a problem to solve”. When the value proposition is right, when the account manager truly creates a partnership with their customers, when the product, service, and company deliver on the promise of the value proposition, growth & success follows almost as a mathematical certainty.