Think About It… the e-book version

by Todd Youngblood

If ever there was a concept so over-used, over-hyped and worn-out to the point of uselessness, it’s the whole notion of value-add. At one time, pouring more value into your product or service and getting really good at articulating that value add was an advanced selling strategy. Are you still stuck in that obsolete rut?

Today – actually, no – it was long before today… Ten years ago, it was nearly impossible to find a sales rep who didn’t crow about the wonderful value add that his or her firm was capable of bringing to the table. “Not only are our widgets brighter, shinier and longer-lasting, we deliver them just-in-in-time, support them with the best customer service in the land, wash & wax them twice a year, etc., etc., etc.”

Take a close look at how your sales team articulates your differentiation. (Or should I say, alleged differentiation?) How different is your value add from the competition’s value add? From a customer perspective, do any of the sales pitches really sound any different?

You can kid yourself all you want, but all products and all services are moving rapidly toward commodity status all the time. Communications and knowledge-sharing have become so amazingly efficient, that sustaining an edge by injecting more and more value add has become a going-out-of-business strategy. You can stay on the value adding path and survive, but only if all your competitors are slow and lazy.

Shift gears for a second and think about rule number one in selling; Show the customer what’s in it for him. With a value add approach, I’m focused on explaining how I add value to my product, my set of services – it’s all about me and my so-called unique value add. I’m intent on explaining how my approach is better, cheaper, faster. I’m violating rule number one! Aghhhhhhhh!

As in any competitive endeavor, continued winning means continuously taking it up another notch. One way to do so is “Process-Linkage-Finance” selling.

The key to this approach is a relentless focus on adding value to the customer’s business processes. Your products and services are secondary at best. The sales rep needs to know and understand their customer’s overall business process, all the sub-processes, the sub-sub processes …all the way down to specific activities. Armed with that knowledge, the rep can clearly identify opportunities, problems and bottlenecks and articulate how to change things for the better. (Oh by the way, not that it’s all that important to the customer, but the rep can also facilitate procurement of the products and services needed to implement those changes.)

Studying and understanding linkages among customer business processes adds another layer of selling power. For example, changing an aspect of the manufacturing process will almost certainly have an effect on the maintenance process; changing the receiving process will have an effect on the inventory management process. There are dozens of significant linkages even within small organizations. There are many, many more inter-organizational linkages. A supplier’s sales with my purchasing, a customer’s purchasing with my sales, my service with a customer’s operations. Each and every one of these linkages provides the sales rep with yet another opportunity to enhance the value of the customer’s business processes.

Then there’s finance. This is and will become an ever more important selling skill. Follow the money! Reps need to understand how each customer department head prepares his or her budget; how those budgets get rolled up into pro-forma Income Statements and Balance Sheets; how performance is tracked over time using actual, after-the-fact Income Statements and Balance Sheets; how financial ratio analysis is used to make business decisions; how cash flow is managed; how the net present value of future cash flows makes or breaks an investment decision.

Process? Linkages? Financial Management? These are critical sales skills? You bet they are. The also-ran reps will conclude that learning and applying these skills is just too different, too difficult. They’ll stick with the traditional, tried, true and tired value add approach. The winners, just like all winners from time immemorial, will step up, raise the stakes and take the selling profession up to whole new level.