Creating Value When Selling Technology

Although this does apply to some other industries, it is particularly in the selling of technology that prospective customers can most of the time be divided in to two groups. Those customers who are intent on purchasing the cheapest solution to their problem, and those who will pay out more, as long as they feel that they are receiving added value that they wouldn’t get from other suppliers. I.e. value that you have tailored to their situation.

Many organisations have not seen the opportunities that these customers present, and they also haven’t consolidated ways of adding value to their sales process that isn’t simply adding new features to their products or services.

The key to value creation is providing insight rather than information. Insight helps the customer plan for the future — not just solve today’s problems. To provide insight requires that companies tap into their own expertise.

Companies that sell technology sometimes simply use information on their product as their main selling points, however companies that use this kind of selling strategy are really nothing more than human web pages as customers can find all of the information about the products online, or if they cant they should be able to.

There are two main ways in which salespeople can create value in the minds of potential customers, and they are as follows:

-Make them aware of a problem that they had not seen before. Use knowledge of the customers company and industry to point out a problem that they may not have seen before through carefully planned and placed questioning. By doing this, and then of course, providing the answer to that question, you can add limitless value to your sales process.

-Offering a solution that the customer has not anticipated can add a huge amount of value to your selling process as your expertise will have helped the customer implement a solution to future problems that they may not have seen coming, therefore the product you’re recommending seems more valuable.

The customer must fall into one of these three categories in order for you to provide them with an unanticipated solution:

-The customer is aware of the need, and feels the pain

-The customer has some general idea of a solution to the problem

-They know exactly what their desired outcome is

If one of these situations exists you are in a prime position to help the customer identify a better alternative through an unanticipated solution.