Selling value - everything you always wanted to know

Some news stories just don't go away. They remain in the news more because the media continues to milk these stories then readers demand to know more. Within sales the stories of the recent past are about Social Selling, Inbound Marketing, LinkedIn, Twitter, CRM and Lead Nurturing. Maybe it is time for sales experts to change focus and be addressing topics more closely aligned with helping sellers sell.

There's nothing wrong with these topics of course, however, they seem to remain in the news more because the writers attempt to sell their own services that happen to support issues around them more than readers demanding to read about it. So if not those topics, then what should we all be writing about - all the time - that would be a real difference maker for salespeople? 

I believe that it's the importance of and ability to sell value. Why, you ask? 

Selling value is the one thing that all salespeople, operating without benefit of the lowest price, absolutely, positively, must be able to do well in order to consistently earn the business. 

Despite the need to effectively sell value, it happens to be one of things that salespeople do very poorly. The importance of selling value isn't going away, but sales experts are not spending enough time talking about it, writing about it, explaining it, or providing training on it. The most critical aspect of this topic is understanding the many factors that support a salesperson's ability to sell value. Selling value isn't a specific thing that one says or does, as much as it's an outcome of several other things. According to Objective Management Group's statistics (close to one million salespeople assessed), of the 6 most important factors required to sell value, most salespeople have, on average, only 2 of them as strengths or skills. This is such an important topic that last week I hosted a broadcast on Selling Value in Modern Times. If you would like to watch it, run time is 46 minutes.

According to a Google search on my blog, I've written about or mentioned selling value, in some way, shape or form, 766 times in the past 10 years. Click here to see (the original post which features) 10 of my favorite articles on selling value and when you extract the major points from each, it provides a very nice collection of guidelines for selling value.

I'll be hosting a webinar on December 10 at 11 AM Eastern Time. We'll be discussing the 5 Hidden Factors that Determine the Fate of Every Sales Force. Selling Value is certainly one of those factors! It will run for about 45 minutes. If you would like to attend you can register here.