It is tempting to believe that the relationships developed with customers are valued by both parties. Although they sometimes are, there are other times when relationships wane. If your sales conversations are only about the product and its price, your relationship with the client is likely at risk. To keep partnerships vibrant, sales professionals must add value… and that involves doing homework, understanding customers’ needs, and bringing new ideas that help them to grow their businesses.
Keeping current on the available capabilities is a best practice for sales teams, but it is even more important to understand how your capabilities and solutions solve problems and add value. It’s easy to become complacent in conversations and focus only on the product and its price, but learning everything you can about your customers’ needs and the industries they serve will add depth and value to your sales conversations and proposals.
Key Highlights
- Rather than swimming in the “red ocean” of bloody competition, a “blue ocean” strategy creates a vast, uncontested market space with infinite possibilities for profitable growth.
- If print service providers offer buyers a huge leap in value, this will give rise to new markets and shift the conversation away from price.
- The best salespeople have the power to see beyond what’s presumed or evident to provide better ideas, best practices, and new innovations.
- If you take the time to listen and offer alternatives, your best customers and prospects will view you as a partner and not just a provider of print.
What is Value, Anyway?
Let’s Talk About the Blue Ocean!
A true business classic was written in 2005 when Professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne published Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. The concepts in this book have never been more important to the printing industry than they are today. Too many companies are swimming in the “red ocean” of bloody competition, where there is limited room for real growth. The authors assert that a “blue ocean” strategy is about creating a vast, uncontested market space with infinite possibilities for profitable growth.
To create your blue ocean, value-based innovation should be the guiding principle for your business strategy. Companies in the red ocean typically pursue incremental improvements for customers through lower costs and/or low differentiation. Value-based innovation helps companies make giant leaps in the value provided to customers through the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and client need alignment.
Are you concerned about your competitors’ pricing strategy? It’s time to stop benchmarking the competition. The more benchmarking you do, the more you tend to resemble your competitors. No matter what industry you are playing in or how cutthroat the competition is, you can always create an uncontested space.
Exceptional value and innovation should be inseparable—there doesn’t need to be a trade-off. If print service providers offer buyers a huge leap in value, this will give rise to new markets and shift the conversation away from price. It is time to change the competitive landscape through value and innovation.
Show Your Value by Solving Your Customers’ Problems
According to Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends’ research study entitled Best Practices of High-Performance Print Sales Organizations, over half of the organizations surveyed believes their sales teams lack a clear understanding of their prospects’ buying motivations. In addition, half of the businesses feel that their reps don’t ask the right questions when attempting to uncover the client’s needs.
Figure 1: What are the top mistakes that you’ve seen your sales reps make
By not asking the right questions and solving customer problems, sales are more commonly won and lost based on product and price rather than the prospect’s or client’s influences, needs, and goals. It’s important to remember to focus on what your client needs rather than putting a spotlight on your products, services, and capabilities. To put this another way, value is delivered when you solve a problem, not when you deliver an order.
The Path to Value
There are many paths to demonstrating value, but it all starts with a well-defined strategy and a keen understanding of the things that your prospects and clients value. A quick assessment of your sales practices can highlight opportunities to develop stronger value-based relationships. Start by asking these questions:
- Do you bring value to your customer and prospect meetings?
- What are you doing to add value today?
- Are you sure what you’re doing is adding value?
- What problems are you solving with your proposal?
- Can you quantify the value of solving those problems and demonstrate the value you deliver in monetary terms?
- Can you clearly articulate what you do, and why people buy from you, without including words like value, service, and price?
Now that you have a picture of the difference between value and price, it’s time to find out where you fit on the price-to-value continuum. Ask yourself:
- Are your customers asking for ideas or only estimates?
- How many estimates or proposals convert to orders?
- Are there things that your best customers are not buying from you?
- How much turnover do you see among your customers?
- How much work comes in from regular customers?
- How much business comes from referrals?
The more you see open estimates, client turnover, and gaps in the products and services that your customers turn to you for, the closer to selling on the price you are likely to be. No matter where you are on that gamut, it’s time to develop a strategy that leads to more value-based selling. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to execute your plan.
Execute Value
Naturally, part of every strategy includes designing and developing your messaging imperatives. What’s more important to your addressable market… that you’ve been in business for three generations or that you’ve helped your clients improve response rates to ultimately drove more sales? Many salespeople and leaders find it much easier to talk about their businesses than the problems that their firms can solve. Consider how your sales team delivers your value message. Can they consistently and effectively express your product and service differentiators AND the value they deliver to the client or prospect they’re speaking with? If you’re asking your prospects and customers to see you differently, you must act differently and speak differently. By preparing your sales team to articulate the positive impact your services and solutions deliver, you can command a different perception.
Your sales team can become a new channel of information. Customers value industry knowledge and they want to work with sales professionals with strong business acumen. The best salespeople have the power to see beyond what’s presumed or evident to provide better ideas, best practices, and innovations. Examples might be improvements in managing the client supply chain, addressing time-to-market constraints, and thinking differently about the function of print.
Creating strong relationships based on the value of the services provided is the lynchpin of customer growth. Although the price will always become part of the equation at some point in the process, the goal of any organization should be to make price a secondary or tertiary consideration compared to the relationship and the value you deliver. If you take the time to listen and offer alternatives, your best customers and prospects will view you as a partner and not just a provider of print. This is the path to ensuring that both parties find the relationship valuable and profitable.
InfoTrends’ Opinion
Selling based on value is becoming increasingly important and is often required for business growth. Smart print service providers are focusing their energies on delivering memorable value messages. They have invested in developing and coaching their sales teams to recognize new opportunities. By delivering innovative solutions, savvy businesses can transform the bloody red ocean of price-based discussions into a lucrative and profitable blue ocean that cultivates relationships and revenue.
