How will corporate buyers respond?  Taking time to understand what you or your organization can control these next few quarters can turn this unexpected challenge into an unprecedented opportunity.  How will YOU respond? 

1. Reactively– which means lowering prices and “reducing” costs.  Selling and marketing to buyers the same as before. 
2. Proactively– repositioning your value propositions to align with the marketplace. This means selling the outcome of your offering, not the cost. 

The problem is that value is contextual and will differ for every customer, industry, and market segment you choose to work with.  Which raises the question, what can you do today to serve your clients and prospects while increasing the value of your products or services in this new market? 

Ask The Right Questions 

“Common sense is not always common practice.” -some smart person 

Now more than ever, anyone associated with revenue growth (regardless of their rank or title) should be investing time into learning about their client needs, business challenges, and business drivers. Instead of assuming you know their goals, remember: 

• Short-term questions rule the day for businesses in survival mode. In these uncertain times, discussions that focus exclusively on the long-term can cause your client to feel more insecure and unsure. 
• Use empathy-based questions to understand their priority objectives. 

Try this approach when speaking to your client or prospect: “Everyone is a little bit out of their comfort zone these days, and we are seeing many organizations respond to this crisis in very interesting ways. What has your organization learned from the current disruption?  How have you been able to support your clients as they navigate these next few months?” 

The key takeaway here is not focusing solely on what your offering is or what it does.  This might have helped close deals last month, but it won’t work now, because it completely ignores what is important to the end client.  

Know What Makes You Different 

“Seek first to understand, then be understood” – Stephen Covey 

Now that you understand where your value fits into your customer’s world, you can begin to reevaluate your value propositions. To be clear, your value propositions SHOULD NOT include the following phrases:  “X Years of Experience”, “Best-in-Class”, “Customer Service Award”, “Client Focused Approach”, “We Put Clients First”, “Our People”, etc..  These answers are vague and used by every company on earth. Try the following exercises with your sales team, step by step. 

• Identify your true differentiators, per offering. 
  • Reflect on what makes your offerings different? How can you prove it?  
  •  Ask your clients what they value most about your organization and your offerings. Who better to outline your value than the end users?
• The Power of Why  
  • Take note of the answers you, your team, and your clients provide, then ask “Why do these answers exist?”
  • Here’s the key: repeat the question “Why?” 5 times to find your value. 

Example: Let’s focus on a feature your offering provides, called “Feature ABC”   

• Why? Because a bunch of our clients told us they valued “ABC” during client interviews.  
• Why? Because it fixed a problem they were having.  
• Why was fixing that problem important to them? Because the problem was becoming costly.  
• Why? Because it was eating up additional resources (hurting client relationships, creating waste, reducing capacity, etc.).  
• Why? Because they could not achieve their goals in the anticipated time-frame, or compete if they didn’t make a change. “ABC” made the problem go away. 

Remember, your clients did not buy from you because of your features!  They bought because they had a problem that was keeping their business from reaching goals, and your offering helped them overcome those challenges.  It was their new outcome that validated your value. 

Articulate your Return On Investment (ROI) 

CFO and buyer approval during these next 3-6 months will most likely go to the vendors that prove how they help save companies money. Instead of dropping prices or offering free trials for 3 months, increase your value by doing the following: 

• Take the answer to your 5th “Why?” question and quantify it by attaching a dollar amount to it.  If you do not know what the impact of your value is, reach back to your client and ask them to confirm.   
• Engage your prospects with your new found and quantified value, and get them to validate what it might be for them. (there are some tools mentioned at the end of this article that can help). 

CFOs will have no choice but to approve fewer projects, which means departments within companies will be fighting over fewer budget dollars. To get their project approved, the people responsible for vendor selections will require tangible return on investment metrics and a clear understanding of what their future state will look like.   

Put It All Together  

“It is not about doing things right, it is about doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker 

1. Schedule appointments with prospects and clients to understand what they need to survive.   
2. Have internal discussions with your sales teams, and don’t end the call until you can validate your business impact.  To expedite the process, check out https://www.asalesguy.com/ and you’ll learn how to “fill the GAP”.  
3. Be prepared to quantify value, not cost, for your clients and prospects.  Having a hard time articulating your value? Check out a collaboration tool that was made by a salesperson, for a salesperson https://www.theroishop.com/.
4. Realize and take advantage of the financial opportunity to increasing value. To learn ways to measure these impacts, visit www.accounted4llc.com.

• • Value leads to higher prices, which means increased margins. 
  • Value leads to an increase in demand, which means lower acquisition costs. 
  • Value leads to an increase in client tenure, which means the increased lifetime value of a client.

Despite today’s uncertain business environment, companies throughout the globe still need to buy products, services, and software that improves their outcomes by reducing their business challenges.  For the foreseeable future, buyer behavior is going to be a lot different than what 99% of sales people have been trained for.  While lowering costs might help this week, there is little long-term value.  Understanding how your value fits into your buyer’s business process will keep you and your sales organization productive, locked and loaded for when better days arrive.