What is value?
3rd May 2022 | Bob Apollo
Exploring the changing face of value in B2B sales.
It seems as if the phrase “sell on value, not on price” must have been around since shortly after the dawn of B2B selling, and it would be hard to argue with the sentiment. But what do we actually mean by value, and perhaps more importantly, how do our customers perceive value?
The value of your product
When I started my sales career, companies were keen to boast about the “value-added” characteristics of their products. For the most part, these seemed to refer to features, functions or capabilities which they claimed to offer that their competitors could not.
This inevitably resulted in pointless features-driven “arms races” and spawned endless Harvey-ball1-based comparison lists that sought to imply that the more features you could offer, the better – regardless of the customer’s actual needs. Of course, customers soon recognised that irrelevant features often made the offering more complicated and expensive without increasing its usefulness.
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