Value Based Selling: How to Talk About Your Customer's Problem

Business Problems How you talk about a customer’s problem makes all the difference. The best salespeople understand how to leverage value based selling tools to provide business reasons for a customer's need to buy. The next time you want to justify your solution and build business case, try one of these three advanced selling techniques.

Cost-to-Delay

The cost-to-delay is the amount of money your prospect is losing (per month, per week, per year) if they don’t move forward with your solution. It’s an easy number to calculate. Simply divide the yearly value of your solution by 12. When you say, “Not doing anything to solve the problem is costing you $25,000 a month,” it helps the prospect think about the situation with new sense of urgency.

Payback Period

Your prospects want to know how long it’s going to take to see results. Lower your buyer’s perception of risk by calculating the project’s payback period. Many buyers ascribe a shorter payback period, believing less can go wrong in the short term. You can use this to your advantage by telling your prospects, for example, “If we start now, you’ll already be ahead three months from now.”

Value Drivers

You have more influence with prospects when you build your business case around the biggest value drivers. Use a value calculator to provide prospects with a cost breakdown and savings summary for your solutions. Users can enter their own data or use the pre-populated data to estimate cost savings in categories. Once buyers realize how much they can save, and where the savings come from, Salespeople can provide real numbers to justify the value.

When deals stall it’s often because the buyer lacks the financial justification for your solution. You have to give buyers an economic reason to make a change. When you present a compelling business case and can justify the value of your solution, buyers recognize it’s a smart decision to work with you.