No New Features: Expanding Value

Think you're selling value? For many of you, you’re just pitching features—and it’s costing you deals. Let’s talk about why seasoned sales pros and rookies alike get this wrong, and how you can unlock *real* value to stand out and drive decision-makers to act.

Don't forget to check out last week's top tip: 4 Ways to Succeed with Gatekeepers!

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If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

I've been in front of a lot of sales team is recently working on value: selling value, value expansion, operational value, multi-threaded value, and really creating a true value based experience for the buyer. And it’s really hit me the most seasoned salespeople I'm working with and the newest salespeople I'm working with, are struggling to understand the difference between value and features. Value is just another word for benefit. And when I talk about value expansion inside an organization, I'm not talking about feature expansion.

If you have a product that adds productivity to a certain division of an organization, value expansion says who else in the organization benefits from that? If it increases salespeople productivity, who else benefits from that? Operations benefits because they can put more stuff through. The drivers benefit because they can keep their trucks on the road longer. Marketing benefits because it makes their campaigns look better. HR benefits because salespeople stay longer. Because they're earning more and more successful. The ownership, the board, the shareholders value because they get value because you increasing the overall organizational profitability. That's what I mean by organizational value.

Far too many people, when I say, hey, how can we expand that value in the organization they layer on features. They say, well, we can also give them this and we can also give them this, and we can also give them x. That's not increasing value, that's increasing the features that they use. But it's actually decreasing your profit.

So think about it this way: the value is the benefit. What value does your customer get? How do they save time? How do they make more money? How do they reduce their stress? How do they reduce their liability? Their risk? Their injury? How do they improve productivity?

The benefit is the same as the value. What are you going to do with the value you create? How does that overall improve your organization? And if you can take one feature that you sell and create value in multiple different parts of the organization, you create a multi-threaded or an operational value that your competition can't sell against.