Is your Customer Value Proposition driving Sales Growth?
Everyone is trying to grow sales, all the time. Even if you’re not in a sales function, it’s your job, it’s everyone’s job. The challenge is to find simple ways to kick-start increased sales, but with minimal pain to the business. If it’s difficult or painful to change, it just won’t happen.
The factors influencing sales growth
Sales growth is typically, but simplistically, though to be the role of sales and sales management. Its in their job titles after all. But what is their span of control and what can they really influence. To illustrate, let me reference by a quote from one off my bosses … “ what would you rather have, the best product or the best sales team?” Both would obviously be the preference, but that’s unlikely. If the answer has to be binary, the product wins ever time.
There are many examples of organisations refreshing their sales teams with great success, but that success is typically short lived, quarters not years. There are countless more examples of innovative product companies acquired, ingested, and lost in big sales engines. New Products bring new markets, new sales teams don’t.
New Products are slow to develop and gain traction – they are painful
If a new product does not cause internal pain, it’s probably not, really, a new product.
Research by the Fournaise Group predicts 95% of FinTech companies will fail to mainstream due to “product, value proposition or messaging”. That’s a strong statement on a market that is noted for strong positioning and messaging. It also makes no reference to sales, the implication being the sales organisations are not the biggest factor driving long term success.
So, if the product is, for the purpose of discussion, constant. The value propositions and messaging are the key factors to influence – and let’s be clear, the Value Proposition subsumes the messaging, they are an intertwined entity.
Improve your Value Proposition – at minimal cost
Your Value Proposition is your Whole Product. Everything surrounding the product that makes it unique, simple, emotionally engaging and compelling to buy.
But, in the heat of battle, how often do we stop and review our model? Or do we try and run faster? Make more sales calls? Send more Linkedin Invites? Insanity may be doing the same thing over and over expecting different results; so, what is doing the same thing over and over, but faster?
Proof by Process
Let’s break down the potential areas for sales growth, assess them for potential (i.e. how much influence could they have on sales – none to very high) but then map this against the pain of implementing the change, and the likely time for any change to filter through to Sales(always longer than desired). This supplies a measure of Potential vs Difficulty.
While inherently qualitative, we can supply a weighting to each area to give it a numeric comparison. To make the this arithmetically useful, let’s take the inverse of pain i.e. ease of implementation and add that to the sales growth potential to give factors that can be effectively ranked.
The obvious sorting operation supplies a rank value of relevance and areas to target.
Unsurprisingly, the activities that add the least pain and have the quickest impact are the areas of focus. The Customer Value Proposition has the biggest leverage; you just need to believe you can influence it.
Optimise your Customer Value Proposition
The Whole Product – Customer Value Proposition (WP-CVP) is what the customer is buying from you. The complexity of your sales model determines how many factors will influence your Whole Product- Customer Value Proposition.
There are four areas that will influence the WP-CVP:
- Financial Model
- Functional Model
- Delivery Model
- Organisational Model
Each area has its own factors that need to be assessed and optimised before Aggregation for a fully optimised WP-CVP.
Starting Point – The Online Customer
The buying customer has never been more educated on your products and services. He/She comes to you ever later in the buying cycle and for ever shorter meetings; your WP-CVP needs to reflect this trend and be visible to an online Snapshot view – it’s almost like a photograph moment of what they see online.
Our next action: To simulate your customer, but don’t take your pre-conceptions of your WP-CVP – they will see it from a different perspective.
Target, Assess and Rank
With a dispassionate view of what your customer sees; break down your WP-CVP, assess its strengths and weakness, rank critical and simple improvements.
Prioritise, Aggregate and Deliver improvements
As before, a structured approach helps define how we prioritise significant changes we can implement quickly and painlessly and aggregate to assess our true potential.
If we are honest with ourselves, we can always improve our WP-CVP, regardless of who we are, where we are in the organisation or where our organisation sits in the pantheon of suppliers
What to do first?
Simulate your customer and get a snapshot of what they see, rather than what you think. This is often better done by a third party, marking your own homework isn’t always objective. Take a look at this Methodology as another starting point.