The Challenge of Selling Ill-Defined “Value” and Asking the Wrong Audience

A colleague recently sent me a link to an opinion piece (read here) about how salespeople in the software industry struggle with selling “value” (the piece put the word in quotes – more on that in a moment). The basis of the article was a survey of 212 sales executives throughout the world, conducted by Blue Sky, a UK sales performance company, which aimed to uncover sales challenges of Fortune 1000 companies.

The survey showed that sales executives felt that the top issue facing companies was that salespeople were not able to find new ways to deliver value to the customer. However, the piece failed to identify what is meant by “add value for the customer.” Ironically, understanding that would provide real value to me. From the quotes that the author used in his article, I got the sense that he also was unable to identify the definition of “value” as it related to the survey.

Additionally, it would probably be just as – if not more – valuable to sales professionals in the software industry if Blue Sky had asked software buyers instead of sales executives what they felt that salespeople could do better. While I don’t dispute the idea that it would help salespeople if they better understood what was expected of them by their managers, my sense is if they – and their bosses – had more insight into what their target audience wanted, it would lead to better results for all parties involved.

I run into this at times with clients and prospective clients: the need to better define terms like “value” and “service” as it relates to what they provide to customers. When someone tells me that they “provide value” or “service” better than their competitors, I ask how they define those terms. And then I ask how their target audiences define those terms – because that’s really the key. What a company defines as “service” may be limited to what they feel they can deliver, and could have no relation to what their customers feel “service” should be. If a company doesn’t understand what their target audiences expect when it comes to things like value or service, they don’t have an accurate assessment of whether or not they are meeting marketplace needs.

The next time you talk about “value” or “service” in your company, take a couple of steps back. Ask yourself to put as fine a point on what those terms mean, and then ask if your target audiences define those words in the same way. If you don’t know, then it might be time to start finding that out.

Tags: Blue Sky, delivering value, fortune 1000, marketing and sales, sales executives, salespeople