How to use value propositions to select the right sales opportunities to pursue.

In large sales teams today, and in complex sales and business development teams such as in consulting, the way of controlling sales costs – more than any other mechanism – is bidding on the pieces you can win, over-resourcing them and ultimately winning them.

Now, how do you decide which opportunities you can win? If you’ve got one, two or even three opportunities, where do you put your effort?

What’s the issue?

Bad selling, Good selling
Well, bad selling is putting a third of your effort into all three opportunities. Good selling is saying ‘this is the one we can win, let’s put all our effort into that’. But how do we know? Someone has to make the decision – and this is where sales & marketing can work together to produce a value proposition for each opportunity; defining that which is the most powerful.

Value propositions are extremely important for selling but they’ve had a really bad rap. In their early days, value propositions were used for all the wrong things: sales thought that value propositions were a message that got delivered to the customer – a sort of elevator message or silver bullet; a sentence or two that would have a very positive impact; whereas marketing wasn’t clear about the role of a value proposition in selling.

Opportunity selection
Interestingly, possibly the most important role of a value proposition in selling isn’t necessarily one that you might imagine: the most important role is in helping you choose the right opportunity to pursue. For example, a company like IBM spends around $480,000 pursuing a new opportunity – it’s an expensive long-term proposition – but there’s no point in spending half a million dollars if you’re not going to get the piece of business in the end. So you really need to know what you’re going to win.

What to do

Questions from your perspective
There are some standard questions that always need to be asked when qualifying a sales opportunity, such as:
• Does your prospect have a budget and what is it?
• Are you talking to the decision maker?
• In what timeframe will they make a decision?

Importantly, however, you must also ask questions from your client’s perspective.

Questions from your prospect’s perspective
You must also evaluate each of your three sales opportunities from your client’s perspective and ask the value proposition questions below. Evaluate your three opportunities together and give them an honest ranking of Strong (we are strong here), Medium (we are neither strong nor weak) and Weak (we are weak here):

• Market – who are you selling to (in detail) and what do they know about you? e.g. the board or purchasing manager.
• Value experience – what experience have they had of you and your firm and how was that experience for them?
• Offering – what are you selling them - what mix of products and services?
• Benefits – list the benefits (not features) that they will get from buying from you. Separate out the benefits they expect (the hygiene factors) from the real ‘wow’ benefits.
• Alternatives and substitutes – in addition to ‘do nothing’ and ‘we’ll do it ourselves in-house’, what other alternatives does your client have if not you?
• Proof – how convincingly can you substantiate and prove that you can deliver the results you say you can? E.g. do you have good client testimonials and case studies, do you have a total cost of ownership calculator, etc.

Using this checklist process and ranking each opportunity will show you very clearly where to devote your time, effort and valuable resources to secure the business you are most likely to win.



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Cindy Barnes is CEO of Futurecurve, a sales and marketing optimisation consultancy. She is co-author of Creating and Delivering your Value Proposition: Managing Customer Experience for Profit published by Kogan Page, October 2009 - www.creatinganddeliveringyourvalueproposition.com.