Create Value Propositions That Get Heard -- Part I

The worst thing you can hear as a salesperson is, "We're happy with our current supplier." It's the kiss of death to a sales call because, even if that prospective client would benefit hugely from your offering, they've already decided to stick with the status quo.

Therefore, you need to wake prospective customers out of their "everything is okay" slumber by jolting them with a strong value proposition that clearly states the significant difference your offering can make. And the bigger the jolt, the better.

That means you can't just say, "We help you increase sales" or "With our products your service costs go down." Every single salesperson says that when they call.

Nor do prospective customers care about the things most salespeople love to tell them. It doesn't matter to them how long you've been in business or your personal qualifications. They don't care if you use the latest scientifically-developed technique, or a one that has proven its worth over many years.

All you accomplish by reciting those things is to put your prospective customers back to sleep. They've heard it all before – and they have better things to do.

If you really want to capture their interest, you need to be explicit – explicit about the tangible business results they'll get from using your product or service. For that, metrics are a must.

To create your value proposition, you need to know:

• How much did sales go up when a new customer started using your offering?
• What kind of savings did they realized?
• How much did you lower the cost of goods sold?
• What was the financial impact of the time saving.

The key is to be exact. A rounded number sounds made-up. Don't say you doubled sales. Say they increased by 114% in 5.33 months. The more specific your number, the higher its credibility.

Consider the difference between the following two value propositions:

1) We help companies with their new product launches. We offer a full range of services for all their marketing communications needs.

2) We help companies to shrink time-time-to-market on new product introductions. One of our recent customers was able to drive 2.8 months out of development time, resulting in an additional $3.17 million in the first year alone.

See the difference?

Prospective customers want to know the specific impact on their business that they can accept by using your offering. Anything else, from your state-of-the-art products to your unique methodologies, is only noise to them.

So if you want them to pay attention, forget that your product or service even exists. Just talk about the impact it has on clients.