How to Make Your Value Clear to Potential Customers

Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick Blaine: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
Casablanca, Warner Brothers, 1942

For most of us, a key part of our jobs is helping customers or internal clients solve thorny, expensive problems. To be effective in helping them make and implement the right decisions, we need good information.

The trouble is, that can be hard to come by. Maybe someone doesn’t feel comfortable telling us the truth and gives a BS answer (like broken-hearted Rick Blaine in the classic movie Casablanca)—or simply doesn’t have a full, clear picture of reality. Either way, we have to dig deeper and get to the heart of the matter.

Simple, direct questions can work when the other party knows the facts, interests align, and there’s trust between the parties. If these conditions aren’t present, we’ll be disappointed in the answers.

My client Bruce asked his biggest customers about their pain points. Their replies were along the lines of “We’re in pain because you haven’t cut your prices, nor have you let us shift all our risk to you.” That’s just a bit too transactional to be useful! Bruce concluded that these procurement professionals wouldn’t reveal their companies’ true pain points for fear of weakening their negotiating stance. (He’s since changed his approach to finding pain!)

Maybe you’re in Bruce’s situation too, where your potential or current customer doesn’t want to reveal their true pain points. Because it’s so important to have reliable information about the problem in order to connect our messaging to the customer’s situation, how can we also employ indirect methods to find out the truth of the matter?

1. Use Pattern Recognition

Since there are patterns to decision-making in organizations, we can infer what’s going on from what decision influencers do and say.

In his book, Put the Win Back in Your Sales, Dan Kreutzer explains that a problem, impending event, or a goal/opportunity provide the Apparent Reason for a buying decision. Since he argues that businesses don’t buy—people do—we also have to look for the personal motivation that drives a decision. He calls this motivation the Compelling Reason, and it comes in three varieties: pain, fear or gain. Apparent Reasons are why a company should buy, and Compelling Reasons explain why they do buy.

Kreutzer cites the example of a newspaper that has technical problems with the software that controls the daily print runs, causing printing machine shutdowns (Apparent Reason). The Compelling Reason? The IT manager is tired of 3 a.m. phone calls every time the presses shut down.

It’s crucial that our marketing and sales messaging use pattern recognition to speak to both apparent and compelling reasons.

2. Use “Power Questions” to Probe for Apparent & Compelling Reasons

Andrew Sobel’s book Power Questions is my go-to source when I need fresh perspective on questions that truly connect with what’s important to the person I’m asking. Sobel defines Power Questions as “thought-provoking questions that give power to the other person—power to talk about what’s important to them, power to lead the conversation where they want it to go, power to express their thoughts more clearly than ever before.”

One of his Power Questions I find very useful is “What’s the most important thing we should be discussing today?” That’s an open-ended question that usually provides clues to what’s going on. From there, you can work your understanding into your communications.

3. Work Your Understanding into Your Value Story

Once you’ve obtained the insights you need about Apparent and Compelling Reasons, you can apply that knowledge in demonstrating your value. It enables you to craft a powerful answer to questions such as “Why should I buy your solution from you, especially when you’re more expensive?”

That’s essential to getting your value recognized. Your value story has to connect to the truth of the customer’s situation, whether it’s something they can openly express or not.

Below are the three steps to creating an effective value story that shows the customer your full value.

1. Connect your offering with the prospective customer’s problem. The right customers for your brand have the exact problem that you’re able to solve. But they might not see that right away. That’s why it’s your job to connect the dots for them.

2. Help the customer recognize the root cause. Your prospective customer may or may not recognize the root cause of their problem. If someone has a bad headache, they may decide it’s because they’re dehydrated so they need to drink more water. Someone else with a headache may say it’s because they’re under a lot of stress, so they need Tylenol. A hypochondriac could conclude immediately it must be something extremely serious such as brain cancer. The point is, different people think of their problem in different ways. Their self-diagnosis may or may not get to the right cause. You can be valuable to a prospective customer by speaking to the problem they recognize they have, and then helping them get to the root cause.

3. Talk about the results. When you can offer a solution that’s appropriate and advantageous, make an explicit connection between what’s troubling your prospect and the results you can make possible. When you do that before you get into any details of talking about the solution, you’ll naturally tie back to the problem and consequences if left unaddressed.

Remember, sometimes your clients won’t or can’t share their real problem with you. They may be hiding the real problem intentionally, like Casablanca’s Rick, or they may just not understand it.

A well-developed value story—one that connects your offering to the customer’s problem, helps them recognize the root cause, and articulates the expected results—enables them to make a good decision about solving their problem.

If your value proposition doesn’t quite connect with prospects’ and customers’ most pressing concerns and make your value highly visible, Marketwerks can help. Click here to learn about how our VisibleValue℠ systematic story development service ensures that you and your customers aren’t missing your biggest value.