The topic for this week’s Tactic Tuesday is “Finding Your Value.” This is actually a continuation of what was discussed in yesterday’s Mindset Monday, where we talked about “Know Your Value.”
Know Your Value
Just to recap what we discussed yesterday, it can be difficult to maintain a good mindset when selling because you will face a lot of objections and rejection. Not only can this wear you down, but it can also cause you to have doubts about what you are selling and the job you are doing as a salesperson.
But the thing you need to keep in mind is that your product or service has value to offer because it likely helps your customers in some way or another. And we demonstrated this by showing you how even an incredibly simple product like selling gym memberships provides tremendous value to its customers.
Finding Your Value
And that brings us to this session, which is to show you a process you can use to brainstorm an optimum set of value points for the product or service you sell. I am going to show you three steps to take that will get us to a very powerful value proposition and set of value points. The first two steps should be pretty quick and painless, but the third step will likely be a little challenging and require a little brain power.
And before we go through this, I do want you to know there is a way to use AI to create all of this, and I will show you that at the end of the session. But I recommend that you still understand the steps of the process so that you will be able to modify and fix anything the AI produces, if you do decide to use AI to create your value proposition.
Step 1: Product
The first step in finding the value you have to offer is to identify the product you are selling. This should be a fairly easy step for you because you are likely very clear on what you are selling and probably already have a lot of product knowledge in your head.
But for this step, try to make a list of the main features of your product or service. And then I recommend going one step further to make a list of ways that your product or company is different or better than the competition.
Step 2: Identify the Target Audience
The second step in finding the value you offer is to identify the target audience you are communicating with or trying to sell to. In most cases or when you are just trying this process for the first time, you can just pick a broad target audience of “businesses” or “people” so that you create a sales pitch that works for all the prospects you try to sell to.
But if you are more advanced or in B2B sales, you might sell into different industries or to various types of businesses. Or you might sell to and interact with different departments in an organization. Each of those could be a different target audience, and selecting one of those could change the benefits your product or service delivers.
Step 3: Identify the Value
And the last step is to brainstorm the benefits the product we selected can or will deliver to the target audience we will be selling to. This can actually be a more difficult step to take because it is usually easy to describe the product, but it can be difficult to think about or list out the benefits the product delivers.
To help with that, I have created a checklist or cheatsheet of common ways a product might help someone.
- Make something work better
- Make something easier
- Decrease the time
- Increase revenue or income
- Decrease costs or expenses
- Improve the customer’s product
- Decrease risk
- Improve visibility
With this list, we can bring back the features and differentiation we created on the last step, and for each feature for differentiation point, we can go through the list of common improvements and ask if the detail creates an improvement in that area. If it does, we create a short description of the improvement, and this will lead us to creating an optimized value proposition to use when selling the selected product to the target audience.
