Selling Skills Training | The Importance of Selling Value instead of Price

It’s amazing how many people think that selling is just about the product and its price. Offer something with a fancy new feature at an attractive price and it will sell itself. But that’s just marketing, not selling. Value is the most important concept in selling.

Let’s consider some of the aspects of value in a business context:

• Needs. We can define Needs as being those drivers of positive change that will deliver the most value to the customer, because these are things the customer must have in order to achieve the improvement they seek. If we can understand how much the customer needs that improvement, we can work out the true value of helping them achieve it.

• Wants. Some drivers of positive change will be “nice to have” but not completely necessary for the customer to achieve the improvement they seek. We can call these things Wants. The customer will attach less value to these things. Make sure you are not selling to Wants alone.

“The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease”

• Creating value. As we’ll see later, our job as salespeople is to uncover Needs and Wants, and then to understand how important satisfying them will be. Great salespeople know how to connect what they are selling to the impact, or value, it will create.

• Problems, pain and opportunity. It’s highly likely that a positive change is needed or wanted because the customer currently has some kind of problem or difficulty. It’s helpful to think about these problems as business “pain” from which the customer seeks some relief. Depending on how painful the problems are, the value of solving them will increase, and our opportunity to provide a solution will develop.

• Three types of value. There are three basic types of value: Financial value is defined in money terms, Personal value relates to the buyer’s own personal agenda or interests and Business value relates to more general or strategic business aims, not necessarily quantifiable in money terms.

The customer needs to see that the value of your product or service outweighs its price.