The evolving landscape of B2B sales is marked by cautious buyers, prolonged sales cycles, and a frequent tendency towards discounted pricing. Surprisingly, over half—56% to be precise—of potential customers who initially seem enthusiastic, find themselves tethered to a ‘no decision’ outcome. This presents the most significant hurdle for sales leaders to tackle.
What’s the Antidote to Stalled Sales?
The remedy to this stagnation is rooted in value-selling. The current sales paradigm mandates sellers to transcend traditional sales pitches focused on features, capabilities, and price. Instead, they must pivot towards a value-driven narrative. This involves giving decision-makers a clear picture of their present challenges, quantifying the cost of inaction, and presenting the financial merits of their proposal.
Mediafly, a leading sales enablement firm, sheds light on this through a revealing study. Their findings underscore that top-tier organizations are 19% more inclined to embrace value-selling techniques compared to their less successful peers. Additionally, these high performers showcase a staggering 38% greater tendency to weave in business value assessments during their sales journey. This isn’t merely a cursory application of methodologies but a structured approach encompassing value discovery, in-depth analysis, and a business-centric proposal.
In the modern sales arena, representatives need to master the art of identifying value propositions first and subsequently project the tangible benefits of their offerings.
The Pitfalls of Half-Baked Value Programs
Despite the evident merits of value-selling, many organizations falter in its effective implementation. Common missteps include:
- Oversimplifying value representation to a single slide in a sales presentation.
- Initiating generic value-selling training devoid of the requisite content and tools for value outreach, discovery, articulation, or even quantification.
- Launching intricate spreadsheets to the sales team without considering user-friendliness, leading to minimal uptake.
- Over-reliance on value engineers for value discovery and analysis, thereby limiting its application to only premium deals.
To truly revive stalled deals and integrate value-selling effectively, organizations need to adopt a more encompassing strategy. This involves empowering their commercial teams with compelling value-centric narratives, automating value proposals, offering targeted training, and most crucially, embedding value throughout the entire customer lifecycle, rather than confining it to the pre-sale phase.
THE BOTTOM-LINE
Top-tier performers have identified and addressed the elephant in the room—stalled deals. They’ve championed value selling methodologies and seamlessly incorporated business value assessments (BVAs) to surmount this challenge.
To genuinely harness the power of value, organizations need to adopt a forward-thinking approach. This means moving past token gestures and initiating a comprehensive value enablement program coupled with an all-encompassing value lifecycle strategy.
For a deeper dive into the Value Lifecycle approach, explore our insights here.
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