Value Selling

John Richards, DVFlora; WF&FSA Board of Director


John RichardsMEMO TO SALES MANAGERS AND SALES REPS:
  

Keep selling based on price and it’s a race to the bottom you are sure to lose.

How many times, especially at holidays, do your customers make their purchasing decisions based on price? If your customer is conditioned on buying on price alone, get out the glass cleaner – the blue stuff – and a clean rag. Spray and wipe. Who is responsible for the customer always wearing you down? Take a good look in that mirror. Yup. We have met the enemy and it could be us.

Many buyers are generally conditioned to buy at the lowest cost or price possible. It’s what they do, and in some cases their jobs and businesses depend on it. Sales reps & Managers, generally motivated by sales volumes and perhaps some sort of incentive pay component are eager to meet the challenge of trying to provide the best price to get the customer’s orders and confidence thinking that “sales” are a good thing and volume matters. That all works well and to a point. That is until your competitor understands where your price points are and lowers theirs to become the new “low price” provider. Where does it end? As mentioned, the end game is low profitability on sales and often not pretty to the bottom line. Heaven forbid if this same customer is slower on the payment side and asks for credits.

How do you stop the cycle and begin selling Value in you, your products and your company? There are a number of different approaches you can take, but one of the first and most important things you can do is pretty simple.

Value SellingLearn More About Your Customer
Take off the sales hat and put on the detective hat. If you are a local wholesaler, this is best done by visiting the customer and getting to know the locale, the store merchandising, the price points, the quality level and how the operation works. Improving your personal rapport with your customer during these visits can be a huge differentiator. If you have invested the time and energy and your competitor has not, you have created value for yourself and the customer’s opinion of you.

Not to mention solidifying a relationship is a sure fire key to having your customer’s confidence in you improve. When that confidence goes up, so does their trust in you to deliver solutions to their business and not just products or price. If travel or time is a hindrance or you are selling from a remote location, a web-site visit or the customer’s social media based content is in order. You’ll find that investigation also opens up clues to what could lead to a line of inquiry that scores you points in knowledge, professionalism and an interest that your competitor may not be doing.

Improve Timing & Efficiency With Deliverability
Once there, question and listen. Probe and understand. Uncover needs and pain points. The more needs you can uncover; the more benefits you can deliver. Keep delivering benefits and you can begin to not only increase your personal value to the business and buyer, but you’ll also see an increase in the value of the products you sell. 

Improved Selection
This means greater convenience for your customer, a huge differentiator in today’s need it now mentality.

Accessibility and Availability
How you handle orders frees up valuable time for the customer so they work on other tasks. These are just some methods of deploying value added tactics to help your customer become more efficient and productive. When an operation runs smoother and more efficient, costs can be reduced and that has nothing to do with price. Customers notice. There’s tremendous value to be gained that can get you out of the price gutter, but only if you understand first through probing and listening to what is important to the customer.

Unless you are THE low price leader in your market, which is an extremely difficult way to maintain profitability with ever rising costs, Value Selling is essential to the success of your business.

Share your thoughts or comments below! 

 

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2 Comments

Marla Odell   on Thursday 04/19/2018 at 03:50 PM

Great blog John and so true. We have the opportunity in our industry to increase touch points in an effort to be understand and service customers.

Alan Tanouye   on Thursday 04/19/2018 at 05:30 PM

Great advice John we should all take to heart!

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the comments shown above are those of the individual comment authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of this organization.