The Value Add is not Your Product….It’s You!
Over the last few months, it seems that all anyone is talking about is the economy, bank failures, sub-prime loans, stock market declines, the price of a barrel of oil and unemployment numbers. And yes, if you listen to the media, read the papers and magazines, it can get pretty depressing.
I recently asked my network of sales professionals what were the top three challenges that they were facing in hitting their sales quotas. I did get some insightful comments. But I also got a lot of negative, depressing comments about the economy and budgets being cut and quotas being too high.
Here is my thought, now, more than ever, we need to stop thinking about ourselves, worrying abour ourselves and hunker down and spend more time focused on our customers. The old saying “It’s not about me, it’s about you” is true. Yes, it is hard not to get worried about sales and company income and personal income. But we must spend more time digging deeper into our customers business and finding solutions to help them solve their problems, find solutions to help them enhance their products, so that they can sell more.
The value add is not really your product or your company or the brand. The value add is you. The difference between you and your competitor is not the lastest widget, it’s you. The most successful sales organizations are the ones that understand that the way they sell is the largest difference between success and failure.
So, maybe, stop reading the papers. Stop watching CNN. Start reading your customers web pages, annual reports, 10-K reports, press releases and brochures. Reach out and meet more people than you know today in your customers. Ask more questions. Ask better questions. Start helping them find something that will differentiate themselves from their competitors. I think if you do that, your sales will appear and you will hit your numbers, and the doom and gloom in the media will wash right over you!
November 26th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Marty,
What a great way to put it! Think about who controls the flow of information in a sales process, who asks the questions, who delivers the presentation, it is the sales person. I have seen it time and time again where a sales person says, “stop me when you hear something you like” or “we have a standard demo we can show you.” Yikes.
We can be so much more and the really good ones are. They frame the conversation in terms of specific benefits to whom they are speaking. They are empathetic, offer a vision of improvement, and business justification. They understand that change is hard and offer reassurances that they can be counted on after the ink dries on the contract.
Product superiority comes and goes but a trusted advisor withstands the test of time.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
You are right on again Marty — connecting to the customer with a heart and soul 100% focused on serving their personal/professional needs. This along with skilled questioning and sales training make for perpetual success.