Transcript
Intro
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. The last month or so, we've had a real focus within the podcast around understanding what's changing in sales, the rise of AI, the fall of salespeople as a profession, or as you'll hear next week, the soon to be revised salesperson rather than the fall of the salesperson, but really, really been zeroing in hard on how things are changing in our broad sales environment.
Today, I'd actually like to take a few moments to work through what's not changing, and that's creating great value and great outcomes for our customers. But recently, and when I say recently, the last six months, the number of times that I've been asked to talk through, how do we really nail what our value proposition is for our customers… I can't count on one or two hands. In fact, it's coming up almost as frequently as how do we grow revenue, how do we generate leads, and how do I get the best out of my people.
So what better topic to talk about today than a five step process to really nailing your unique value proposition. Now, for most people when we talk unique value proposition, they're going to be thinking the elevator pitch. You're in front of someone, you deliver them a magic silver bullet style spiel that just results in, deal done. I'd love to know someone who's got that nailed and does deals in the elevator, but I haven't met too many of them in my life.
However, I see huge value in really understanding what your elevator pitch is. And that's for two reasons. Number one is it helps you clearly articulate to any customer any contact, any prospect at any point in time exactly what you do. And when you know what you do and that value you provide or the outcomes that you will generate for your customers, that is very, very powerful because it gives us a level of confidence to be able to meet with our customers in any environment at any time. The second thing that I find really valuable in understanding your unique value proposition, or your elevator pitch, as we call it, is that customers can get really clear really early on the value you provide. Now, that doesn't mean you're closing deals in an elevator or in a networking environment or when you're meeting new people at any point in life. But what it does do is it allows you to really quickly then identify at a customer and a personal level if that value might be something worth talking about in more detail.
So the key change here is being able to articulate the value and the outcomes you provide in a succinct manner versus just communicating features and benefits. Or as I've heard just today, the first time, a newly coined phrase for me is just being able to recite a brochure. Because if that's all we're doing, if we're just talking about a brochure, then we may as well send our customers online or where they can read something themselves. But if we can really clearly articulate the value and the outcomes that we're providing to that customer, that's when we're adding value. That's when we're getting past 70% of customers who currently don't want to deal with salespeople. That's when we're getting to those people, because we're providing them value.
So the point of what I'm trying to say is that as a team, there is no time, no time lost if we can be really clear on what our value proposition or our elevator pitch is in a very succinct manner. So how do you do that? Because it's certainly not easy to distil down what you do into two sentences that's repeatable and engages customers or prospects in a really easy fashion.
Well, today we're going to go through five steps that you can take to get there. It will take you about half an hour to do this yourself, or probably an hour with your team, but it's a really fun exercise because it gets to challenge your current status quo. And then from there, once we're challenging, we get to learn and grow and be better at what we do.
So let's go through these five steps. Step number one, we need to understand who your ideal customer is first. QI role, cue people listening that say, I know that my challenge is to be able to articulate that in 30 seconds, to anyone within your business that you talk to. That's where I often find this exercise falls down, because the ideal customer profile is often very broad, loose and non structured. So for this exercise, if we can get really specific in terms of who our ideal customer is, then we know that we can create a really specific value for them, because we understand exactly who they are.
So how do we create our ideal customer profile? Very simple. Whiteboard, butcher's paper, Miro board, or a share screen if you're running on a video call. But a way to collect data. And what we want to be looking at is all the categories where our ideal customers might sit. So it's the type of product or service that we're selling them. It's the segment that they exist in, manufacturing. It's the geography where they're located, the size of the business, how they make decisions, the ownership structure of the business, and when the owners are involved, whether or not they have to be involved in your decision making, previous experience that you have. So these are industries where you've had lots of prior work that you might want to roll into your ideal customer profile. Any no go’s or must haves. Recently I met with a great business that I'm working with, and one of their no go’s was they won't deal with any customers who are renting their premises. Yes, that really zeros in and narrows down who they want to work with, but they were only prepared to deal with businesses that own their premises, and there are a number of reasons behind it. So, understanding these, when you're profiling your ideal customer is super important. And then lastly, being able to rank all of these.
So if I look at these in just a little bit more detail, product in terms of your ideal customer, that's actually understanding which product or service you want to be offering to your ideal customer. So that's the one and only one that's about you as a business. But if we know that product first, then it just helps when we're trying to decide who our ideal customer is. Geography, well, that comes down to, are they state based? Is it a national based customer? Are they regional versus metro? Do you, do you have any carve out areas? Do you even have specific regions of a city that you might be targeting and that might be based around different socioeconomic levels, different size blocks of land, if that's important to you, or different types of business operations that exist within geographic hubs of cities. The segment that they plan. This is really, really important. Are they in healthcare? Are they in tech? Are they in manufacturing education? Or is it really specific that they are in dental implants, for example? It doesn't matter what our segment is, but we need to be defining it more than just a B2B business based in the southern hemisphere, predominantly Australia, who operate nine to five, Monday to Friday. That's just too broad because there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of businesses in there that make it really difficult for us to get clear on what our value is. The size element is around the type of business size. It could be revenue, it could be number of staff, it could be premises size or number of premises. It doesn't just have to be based on dollars. A lot of great businesses I know will actually determine their ideal customer based on employee numbers because they see that that gives them enough scale, more than revenue or any other factor to be able to work with. Decision making. So how they make decisions, at what level a business makes decision on, will help you determine who your ideal customer is. So if we know that the key decisions are made by people in the procurement department, or that they become part of our ideal customer profile. Is it CFO's? Is it CEO's? Is it simply people using the product at a frontline level? Once we know these, we can start to think about the value we're going to provide. Ownership. Are they owned by a small business owner operator? Do they have owners with investors? Are they a stock market listed? When we understand that type of our ideal customer, we can then start to really become targeted. Previous experience, this one. And I said there was only one related to us, but I lied. There's two apologies, this one around. Previous experience is where we've had lots of experience in the past and where we might be able to provide extra value because of our experience that we have gained any no go’s must have. I spoke with them a little bit more, and last but not least, how we're going to rank our customers, or certainly determine if they are in our ICP when they come in as a lead, or we go out to prospect towards them. And this is simply a way of just keeping ourselves honest to make sure that we are targeting those who are most valuable to us.
Okay? So number one, get your ideal customer profile down pat. I think most people on this podcast will have heard this, but it's an exercise that I really encourage you to do so that you're very, very clear in 30 seconds as to who you're targeting.
Next step. And this is where I see lots of our partners aspirationally want to work down, but often struggle to find the time to do it and that is understanding why customers do or don't choose us. So that is how we are different or the reasons in the past that we know have worked for us. And this is often around time that we've been in the industry, quality of product, technical superiority, delivery price, our sales consultation processes, or just basic things like how we made our customers feel. The best way to work through understanding how, why, when our customers choose us is to go back and survey those who have and those who haven't chosen us. So what I recommend here is we get out to twelve to 15 of our most recent customers who have chosen us and twelve to 15 of our most recent customers who haven't chosen us. What we want to understand is why they did or didn't make that choice. Those that didn't choose us, quite straightforward, hoping for some feedback, looking to really improve our business. It's very important to us and we spent lots of time trying to help you. Could you please share with us exactly why you chose blah or why you didn't choose us? Nice and easy. I do often receive a little bit of trepidation when I'm working with my partners around going back to recent customers that we've won to ask why they chose us. And the feedback is often we don't want to rock the boat, we're still mid delivery, we want to make sure that they really enjoy the service with us and I'm just worried that this might cause some waves. For me, this is the most important time to be understanding why customers chose us because it's still fresh in their minds and time does dull why decisions are made. And we want to understand why at the point of needing to make that decision, our customers chose us. So what I encourage my partners or businesses I work with to do here is to go to their customers and ask them for that feedback, but to coin it in a way that it will help us deliver their product or service better than we would have without it. So something along the lines of “hi mister customer, thank you very much for working with us. We're very grateful. I'm about to brief our delivery team around your project or your upcoming service or product, whatever it may be, and I'd be really grateful if we could just go through what was really important in the reasons that you chose us, so that I can make sure we most effectively deliver to those outcomes.” Done. That's how we've then asked a question. We've phrased it in a terminology that is important to our customers and by the way it is important that we go and give that feedback to our operations team. I am not for the hollow question that gets us what we like without providing that value. But it certainly allows us to get what we need out of that interaction to be finding out exactly why customers choose us.
So, number one, it's all about understanding who our target market is. Number two is brainstorming why customers choose us or why they don't choose us. Because when we know that, it can allow us to pair with our ideal customer exactly what our value and our outcomes are.
And this is where we get to point number three. And this is the hardest part of the five step process here. And that is to determine what the value or the outcomes you provide your ideal customer are. So how do we do this? Well, why don't I start with an example before we get into it, and then I'll follow up with another one at the end. But for me, we have just bought a veggie garden for our family. It's a two by 1-metre square garden. It's got a cover over it. Pests don't get in. And it was expensive. It was $800, even a little bit more once we put in 400 kilos of soil and the early seedlings. We're growing strawberries, tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers and broccoli for those that are interested. And every day, my little one is out there looking at the tomato plant growing. So we knew the features and benefits of this product, and we could find them out online. And a lot of them were very similar. Automatic watering, easy to put up, off the ground, protection from pests, all those types of things. But what really got us was that one company in particular focused around the outcomes that that veggie garden provided our family, and then specifically how it related to their product. So this was all about being able to teach our young one the importance of sustainable farming, the importance of being able to grow your own food, understanding where food comes from. Right. It doesn't just go to the shops and buy some, as my little one often says to me, but they really focused in heavily around the outcomes that it would provide our family, and that for us, built an affiliation with that brand. Now, when it came down to making the choice, if that brand was twice the price, was that outcome strong enough for us? No, it wasn't. But when we're talking plus or -10% which is very often the competitive outcome or the competitive environment that you're existing in, this is where it made a difference. Because for us, we were then looking for reasons to use this brand the whole way along, rather than an even playing field. They put themselves ahead of the pack by really understanding the outcomes that were important to us.
So that's what we as sales leaders and sales teams need to be able to do to outpoint ourselves against the competition. So how do we do this? Well, this starts with understanding your customer, understanding why they've chosen us, and then linking in our features and benefits. So what we would like to be able to do here is take one of our key features and benefits. For example, in a veggie garden, a feature of having a hood that is easily openable. We take that feature and say, easy openable hood for the youngest members of your family to be able to engage and enjoy your process. And here what we see is that it's not just an easy clip cover on your vegetable garden, but it is an easy clip cover that little ones can open up themselves. Which relates back to our outcome of wanting to have our family involved. Where we can relate our features and benefits to why our customers chose us and the specific customer segment we're working with. That's when things start to get really powerful.
So if we take an example of an ideal customer who we know that we want to be dealing with only the owners of a business, the owners of a business who own their own premises, let's make it even more specific. And we know that customers in the past have chosen us because as the owners of the business and the owners of the premise, we're expecting they're going to be in that business for a long period of time. And they like the very strong balance sheet that our business has. We know one of our features and benefits is that we can provide a service with a really long warranty period because we have the strength in balance sheet to provide it. So where the outcomes become really important is that when we're offering a product to this customer that, for example, saves them money, we can be positioning that the outcome is long term certainty of the money you will save through an extended warranty period. If we get really sharp here, we can then extrapolate that to long term savings to allow you to invest in other areas to grow your business, or long term savings that allow you to invest in more technology in your business to make more sales. That then becomes a message that can be backed up through our warranty, because we have a strong balance sheet, because we're dealing with owners of a business, owners of a premise who really value that part of our service. Now, that's quite different to talking about the features of a long warranty. It's stepping through the outcomes by knowing exactly who we're targeting and what's important to them.
Now, we could go down a rabbit hole here, and this is one I absolutely encourage you. If you're having trouble with it, reach out and someone from our team can get in touch. But number one, all about getting your ideal customer profile down pat. Number two, brainstorming why customers choose us. Number three is getting really clear on the outcomes you provide based on why customers choose us, your ideal customer, who it is, and the features and benefits.
And the fourth one here is determine how your best placed to engage with a customer. And this one here is just really to allow you to have the best modality to communicate your value proposition. So is that being face to face, is that video driven? Is it online? Is it through emails? Is it through text messages? Whatever your modality is to be delivering your value proposition, we need to make sure that it suits the people you're meeting. So if you're meeting someone face to face, it's much easier that your elevator pitch could be a little bit longer and have some show and tell with that. So it's a two pitch or a two sentence elevator pitch where you show something in your hand, for example. Whereas if it's written, we need to make sure that that written value proposition engages from the first couple of words because we don't get two sentences to get someone, we've got to get them really quickly in those initial few words. So when we can understand our modality, pair it with outcomes, why customers choose us, and knowing who our ideal customers are, we then have the makings of building out our two sentence elevator pitch or value proposition. I like them to change those words because we hear them so often out in the market.
All right, so we're moving to number five. Five. And last but not least, this is actually creating your elevator pitch.
Now, this, I will say really quickly, is something that takes a little bit of time and a few iterations. My elevator pitch, I think I still play with it, I still tweak it along the journey, and it took me three or four goes to get it to a position where I felt it was something I'd be happy to present in the market. So how do we structure that elevator pitch? It is all about having the first sentence being about what you do with something interesting that proves your validity in the market. So in our instance, if you're a sales consultant, we're going to be talking about the name of our business and some evidence of what we do. So for someone like me, I'm Ben Wright, owner of Stronger Sales Teams, and have been involved in over $1 billion of deals, 1800 sales pitches, just myself, but thousands and billions of dollars more through the teams that I've led. Now, that's slightly longer than one sentence, but for me, when I'm meeting someone face to face, that immediately stakes out credibility in what I do because I've carried the bag and had boots on the ground.
The second piece is the outcome you provide. So if you're dealing with a smaller business, so an outcome for someone like me might be after working with our business, you'll go home with less worry and concern about where your next sales will come from. Fantastic if I'm targeting a customer who is really focused on getting sales into their business as that next step, or for a larger business, I might focus on bringing certainty to their team. After working with us, you will have certainty and predictability to allow your teams to deliver results again and again and again. So I'm not talking about the features and benefits that I provide, the training, the coaching, all the different types of frameworks we use. I'm talking about the outcomes, which is your teams delivering again and again and again. So what we want to really be focusing on here is a sentence around what we do and some validation around why we're doing it and why we have the runs on the board to be delivering this. And then the second part of that value proposition is purely based on the outcomes that you determined earlier. We don't worry about features and benefits, we worry about the outcomes that it will deliver because that's all you've got time for in a very short elevator pitch.
So let me go through those again very briefly. Number one, in getting your unique value proposition or your elevator pitch down pat, is to understand who your ideal customer is.
Number two is to then brainstorm why those customers choose us. And the best way we can do that is going back to recent wins and losses to find out exactly the reasons that they did or didn't choose us.
Number three is to be clear on the outcomes or the value that you're providing these customers. So this is taking your features and benefits, why customers choose you, and targeting these at your ideal customer to really narrow in what the outcomes you are providing are.
Fourth, knowing your modality, because that will determine how you're going to build your unique value proposition, face to face, video, email, whatever it may be, phone.
And then fifth is to build that elevator pitch. One sentence, who we are plus proof of life. Second, sentence the outcomes that we provide.
So once we get this right, your teams will have more confidence in prospecting, dealing with new customers, and simply talking about what you do more often. Because the more you're talking about what your business does, the more opportunities that are being opened because you're putting yourself in the right places more and more often. So I really encourage you now to get your team together, work through that framework. Get in touch with me if you're not sure what it is, and we're more than happy to help you. Very easy to have an hour with us. There's links everywhere and we generally won't charge for that first session. So use it. Use it to your advantage, because once you do that, you'll find that there are more conversations about your product and service more often, which, as I said, opens more doors for you to be able to talk to customers.
Okay, so that's it for today around developing your unique value proposition. But before I go, health and fitness tip. We are still doing these every single time we have a solo pitch. And at the moment, what we're seeing is that it's starting to get a little bit colder. And when it gets colder, we can often go more for comfort food. We tend to sleep in, we hit that snooze button a little bit more, and there's more sedentary time in front of the fire or tv or reading, whatever is your choice of leisure activity. So how do we get through that to make sure that during the colder months, we don't step down to a point where our personal health suffers? Well, for me, the magic and the silver bullet that I use here, and yes, one of the rare times I will talk about a silver bullet, is that I aim to be active in as many forms as possible. So whenever I have the option to take stairs instead of elevator, I do it. Whenever I have the option to walk to a shop rather than drive, I take that option. When I have the option to be playing with my daughter where I'm active, rather than sitting down and doing something passive with them, I take that opportunity. And these moments of being active, of getting out in the garden, of taking any point in time where you can to stop sitting down and start moving, those little actions add up over and over and over and over again for me, and it's resulted in me having a really common and predictable method to keep looking after the movement side of my physical health. So have a think about how you could use that for yourself once you practise it and it moves to the front of your mind, it becomes really easy to continue to get down pat. So something a little bit different that I think anyone listening to this has in their capability to nail.
So that's it from us today. So stay tuned for next week. We've got a great guest, Alex McNaughton, who is going to talk about some of the really significant things changing in sales and sales leadership. But until that point in time, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.
The 5 Step Process to Nailing a Unique Value Proposition that Will Close More Deals
