Seriously! Are they? Do they have any freakin' idea what "value" is?

As you know, OMG partners have measured sales competencies in over 2 million reps. Look at this chart. We measure 12 components of the Selling Value Competency. The average rep has 55% of the components. The best reps (top 10%) have only 80% of the components and the bottom 10% have less than 4 of the 12 components. No wonder reps hear "too expensive", "not in the budget" or "can you do better?" and have to discount?

Think about this question for a minute and write down the answer.

What is the sum total of all the discounts that all of your reps gave to all of your customers this year?

Please write it down somewhere.

If you are a rep, the question is "What would the commissions, escalators and bonuses have been on those dollars that got discounted away?" Write it down.

Let's start with Which Sales Process Does Your Buyer Need?. Have you ever listened to your rep sell? Do they focus on what they can do or what the buyer needs? Are they 'me' focused or 'them' focused? Selling Value requires mastery of Consultative Selling. It requires early involvement of the decision maker. However, one of the components of the Selling Value Competency is that you feel 'Not Compelled to Quote'. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't quote. It means that you shouldn't quote until you have a big enough problem with a big enough downside to justify investing in a solution.

Here are the simplified major steps in my 'Selling Value' process.

• What's the problem? What are the spin-off problems?
• What are the consequences of 'doing nothing'? i.e. - not fixing the problem?
• How much does not fixing those consequences cost? Lost sales? Profits? Turnover? Damaged reputation? yada, yada, yada. Remember, you need a dollar value to each of those consequences.
• I'll typically add, How long has this been going on? and help them do the math. If a company typically needs to discount by 10% to get a deal and they did $10 million last year and $5 million the year before, they gave up over $1.5 million in revenue over the past two years. If I could help their reps sell value and eliminate the problem, consequence and get that lost revenue, would it be worth $100-$200K?

Wrapping up:

• It's not about you.
• Focus on the problem.
• Understand the consequences.
• Value is in the elimination of the cost of consequences and needs to be a multiple of your price.

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