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Comments or Suggestions?
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By Kevin Temple, President of ValueVision Associates.
The most critical impact on revenue generation in the current market is in creating need and avoiding stalled decisions.
In the recent past, most companies made their revenue goals with less than 20% of their product or service offerings. Now with fewer opportunities, each one has to be maximized. This means developing the skills in creating need for additional products and services that you offer to increase the average transaction size. Further, most sales executives have been losing sleep over forecast misses, mainly affected by stalled decisions.
So how does the sales person get the buyer's attention and create the need for their solution?
I'll illustrate the process with a real example that I experienced. I made a trip to a popular electronics store to purchase a home theater system. I noticed that they displayed each manufacturers offerings with the most expensive model at eye level, the mid-priced model at waist level, and the lowest-cost model next to the floor.
I'm sure the sales rep had seen my behavior before, standing up, crouching back down, over and over, trying to compare features. After a short time he approached me and confirmed that I was trying to decide what model to purchase. When I acknowledged my intent, he said, "Let me ask you one question: Do you anticipate entertaining adults in one room or on the patio, while your kids watch TV in another room?" I thought about his question and agreed that this situation would come up.
He then pointed to the most expensive system and informed me that this was the only model that would allow two different channels in different
locations.
Guess which model I purchased?
The seller followed a fundamental need creation and differentiation process:
- Identify a problem that only your solution can address, or can address it better than other solutions. Now the buyer is paying attention, because it is something important to them personally.
- Then link it to your unique capability or and additional capability that was not originally on the buyer's agenda.
- And the final step is to solidify their commitment to the identified capability by helping the buyer understand the value of the unique
capability by asking some questions about how "the solution" might impact the buyer.
One of our clients came to ValueVision Associates because they were not achieving their goals for selling professional services. We identified that their sales people were regularly informing their prospects that they could provide professional services, but unfortunately the prospects were not engaging them on the subject, and their sales suffered.
We changd their process by arming the sales people with some simple problem identification questions:
- Is the customer finding it difficult to recruit qualified people?
- Is their current staff up to speed on all the latest technology?
- What quantifiable impact were these unanswered issues having on the
customer's goals?
Although this seems trivial, the results were outstanding. Their professional services bookings doubled in less than six months!
Kevin Temple is cofounder and president of ValueVision Associates, creators of the Value Selling framework. Prior to ValueVision Associates, Mr. Temple was Vice President of Sales for Cadence Design Systems, the world’s largest electronic design automation supplier. While at Cadence, Mr. Temple re-engineered the sales organization to move from product feature/function selling to high-level business impact selling using the Value Selling framework, which is now provided by ValueVision Associates. The results were outstanding -- revenue growth jumped from 6% to 38% annually, discounting dropped by 38%, and the breadth of products included in every sale increased dramatically. During his tenure at Cadence, sales increased from $48 million to over $700 million per year.
Prior to working at Cadence, his experience also includes sales and sales management responsibilities at Valid Logic, a key competitor of Cadence and eventual merger partner; Analog Design Tools, a successful start-up company focused on a subset of electronic design challenges; and Control Data, the forerunner in supercomputing technology.
As a consultant, speaker and writer, Mr. Temple travels around the world to retool medium-to-large sales organizations with the Value Selling sales process. He combines his experience and knowledge with a fast wit, comical characterizations and practical applications to motivate and educate sales and marketing organizations.
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