Are you Co-Creating? Part 2
Is your product really, truly unique? Hand on heart? Because if it isn’t, why should a buyer care? The answer is you.
Part one of this series is here.
A lot of organisations still believe that only the products and services their customers buy create value.
“Choose my product because it… is cheaper, is faster, is energy-efficient, is in the cloud, is IoT, is digital.” Pick three. There’s your pitch. You’re welcome.
To be clear, I am not de-valuing product-based benefits, I’m saying they shouldn’t be your focus. The actual business-based outcomes we enable for our clients should be priority. Today, the value for our clients has to be based on their needs, not our benefits. And whilst a customer-first approach may sound simple, how many of us are, in reality, sitting down with our clients and genuinely listening?
Getting the job done
Outside of our own small space and traditional sphere of influence, how many of us know the business outcomes our customers are really looking to achieve?
When evaluating the above, some effective questions to ask would be:
* What is the value we have traditionally delivered for our clients, and what are they looking for now?
* How have we made their organisations more profitable?
* How have we made their lives easier?
* What can we do that others have not been able to help with?
* What is their experience from top to tail in working and communicating with our business? How can we improve our communications?
* How can we adapt our processes to fit theirs?
We need to move away from solely viewing value as the “ends” our products deliver, and begin to judge ourselves by how easy, enjoyable and effective we are to work with (as rated by our customers). Whilst our products may offer the “ends”, we offer the “means” and the only criterion that really matters is how successful both are in getting the job done.
The truly effective modern salesperson is one who delivers on the above and co-creates solutions based on a true understanding of their clients’ needs.
In Part 3: now we know good practice in value-based selling, how does the value of co-creating differ?
As always, it would be great to hear your thoughts, comments below...