Colleen’s Blog

Over the past few months, due to travel restrictions, companies have been conducting more and more product training sessions. I'm not opposed to product training, but it's critical that we don't pitch product features to our customers. Instead, what we need to do is transition product training into value training.

There’s one thing I’ve noticed with organizations and people who are really good at bringing new business: they are good at operationalizing value. These organizations and people have closing ratios higher than the average: 40% to 45%, as opposed to the average of 25% to 30%.

In my community, there is a very big named sales trainer who came out during a presentation recently and said, "Your job as a sales rep is to push your value proposition hard and often enough until the customer either buys or walks."

If you've been on this website for more than 5 minutes, you know that I love to talk about value. I want you to start thinking about value in four different ways.

Recently, I was speaking at a large conference that was focusing on sustainability and building technologies in the green space. After my presentation, someone came up to me and said, "Colleen, we need to stop focusing on the gloom and doom. We need to start telling people how great our solutions are."

Most times, companies, marketing departments, executives, and even sales teams create value statements without understanding the value they can bring to the customer.

I spent a couple of days this week with a client rebuilding their sales process and specifically, helping them define what the qualifications, needs, and solutions portion of their sales process is.

Nothing kills a proposal faster than when you add so much value and so many extra benefits that the client says, " Hey, I don't need this much. This will be too expensive. This company doesn't understand my needs. I'm just going to walk away."

Most sales reps are making a fundamental mistake when handling the pricing objection. They're always trying to get the buyer to make an apples-to-apples comparison on the pricing and that’s not what we want. We want the buyer to be faced with an apples-to-oranges comparison. Now, why do we want that?