When You REALLY Need a Good Answer

My friend Vance’s shyness at 30 concealed his great qualities. One of his friends set up a blind dinner date for him with marriage-minded Kate, and evidently raved to her about what a wonderful guy he was.

Just after they arrived at the restaurant and ordered drinks, Kate (who often cuts right to the chase) asked him a rather pointed question.

“So, I’ve heard all these wonderful things about you. If you’re so great, why aren’t you already married?”

Vance paused for a moment, looked at her, and said “I’ve never asked anyone.”

Not the response she was expecting! For once she was speechless. The dinner went very well. They married a year later and are still together.

A Really Good Answer

There are times when we all need a really good answer. That’s certainly true in business, especially when you hear questions such as:

• “Why should I adopt your innovation?” or
• “Why should I buy from you when you’re more expensive?”

Whether those questions are explicitly stated or implicit, a good answer serves the prospect’s best interests as well as yours.

What constitutes a good answer? Let’s go big-picture for just a minute before I offer some actionable suggestions.

Enabling Prospective Customers to Make the Right Choice

To serve your customers/clients well, you must help them reach well-informed decisions about when and how to utilize your solutions. For both parties to enter a mutual exchange of value, the prospective buyer needs to understand very clearly how you as the seller can make them better off. You might look at the buying decision like this:

At the bottom left, we see the worst outcome for both your prospective customer and you. It’s when you get a “No” when you should have gotten a “Yes.” It would actually have been the right decision for the prospect to choose you. But because they were under-informed about the true value of choosing you and your solution, they didn’t make the right choice. This serves no one well.

I see this too often—companies that deliver great value to customers, but don’t fully understand their own value. They can’t articulate it in a clear and compelling way, let alone quantify it.

Non-apparent value serves no one well. It leaves prospective customers making under-informed “No” decisions, or hesitating to say “Yes.” The companies get fewer yeses, the sales cycle takes too long, and they experience pricing pressure because prospects aren’t seeing the true value.

Sound familiar?

The antidote for these bad outcomes is simple: You have to understand the prospective customer’s needs and pain points well enough that you can convey why choosing to buy your solution best meets their needs and wants. I usually call this a value story; others prefer the terms value proposition or sales story.

A clear, compelling value story enables the prospect to make a well-informed decision. When that’s a well-informed “Yes” (upper right), you can celebrate a great outcome for all. Even the well-informed “No” (lower right) isn’t a bad outcome. You put the prospect in a position to make a quality decision, and the credibility you earn may yield future benefit.

You serve customers well by fulfilling your duty to help them make well-informed decisions.

3 Occasions When You Really, Really, Really Need a Great Value Story

Hidden value is particularly costly at three moments of truth. All occur at times of change.

1. New Relationship

When one or more of the people representing the buyer or the seller are new, that creates a high need to clearly understand the other party. As the seller, you especially want to shape how the buyer’s people view the value you represent to them.

• A new decision-maker at a current customer creates an opportunity to validate and discover needs as well as communicate value.
• When the person who is representing your company is new to the customer, this is the perfect chance to ask fundamental questions about the customer’s needs and wants, and how your company can meet them.
• A new prospect has a discovery and qualifying process. You can be responsive to their questions, and be ready with your own thought-provoking discovery questions that may prompt new criteria.

2. New Product or Service Introduction

If you sell through channel partners, you need to make the case for getting behind the new product/service/solution. If you sell direct, you have to show why adoption of something new is worth the risk (or doesn’t pose much risk at all).

Ideally, that story is developed ahead of time. But if a launch falls behind plan, better to act immediately and get things on track.

3. Need to shake up a disadvantageous status quo

When previously loyal customers go out for competitive bids, you’re set up for squeezed margins. Nobody wants to pay more than they have to, so it’s essential to explain your value so customers appreciate and want it. If your customers don’t get why they should pay more, they’ll decide based on lowest price.

So unhide your full value!

When you’re planning the launch of a new offering, want to capitalize on a change of personnel, or are opening new customer relationships, I recommend three strategies for uncovering and conveying your biggest value so that prospects can make well-informed decisions:

• Discover what matters most in your prospect’s view (and what could matter most, if viewed in the right light).
• Deliver your message in a way that connects with what your prospect’s most important needs and desires.
• Direct some attention to a different decision scope. During his military career, Dwight D. Eisenhower was noted for saying “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”

If you can increase the effectiveness of your firm’s selling effort by just a few percent, that’s likely a huge ROI on the time and money invested in discovering and communicating your biggest value.

For more thoughts on that, I recorded a video that you can see here.