By Garrett Hollander,

“George, we can provide your sales team with sales leads for only $20 each. Cheaper than anyone else.”

“George, we can accelerate your team’s sales pipeline and do the heavy lifting involved with putting your salespeople in front of highly-qualified targets so they can do what they do best, close more deals.”

Though a simple exercise, the above statements display the difference between selling on value and selling on price. The first statement tells me nothing except the price. I don’t really know how I’ll benefit from the product. I just know the product is cheap. (The cheapness even undermines the quality). The second statement tells the prospect a little about the value they’ll receive from the product.

Your mission is to SELL THE VALUE to the prospect. If your sales approach is founded only on "sell low", you are setting yourself and your company up for failure.

Three Laws of Value Selling

Law #1: Thou Shalt Present Thy Value Proposition with Numbers.

It’s a subtle art in being able to present your "value proposition" in a way that’s compelling. One of the most important strategies is to use explicit, quantifiable measurables staged in units that the prospect can relate to. Examples include:

•    Revenue gain
•    Productivity increase
•    Cost management
•    Cash flow improvement

Let me throw out an illustration to demonstrate this idea. Tell me which of these two statements is most compelling.

"We have experience helping Enterprise organizations with their IT infrastructure."

"We can and have created IT environments that save our clients upwards of 1000 man-hours per year in lost productivity.”

Law #2: Thou Shalt Sell to the Highest Decision-Maker Available to You.

The simple fact is higher-level decision-makers are more prone to really digest the elements of value in your product or offering. Conversely, often price is of higher consideration for a lower-level contact who may be managing a budget. By no means are we saying that you should refuse to speak to lower-level prospects, but you limit yourself if you don’t at least attempt to involve a higher-level decision-maker.

Law #3: Thou Shalt Empathize with Thy Prospect and Examine Thy Product’s Value from their Perspective.

By far the most critical law laid down here because you can't rightly harness the other two laws if you can't identify a prospect's value drivers. The reality is a car doesn’t inherently have value – it’s just a bunch of metal. It only has value when the user perceives its value, then uses it. That may sound like some philosophical mumbo-jumbo but your product isn’t inherently valuable unless your customers find value in it.

Get into the head of your prospect and find out what is important to them in their role, in their job function, and in their day-to-day activities. Ask yourself, “If I were a prospect, what would really be helpful to me?”