“Find the right price for an irresistible offer, which, by the way, isn’t necessarily the lower price.”
– W. Chan Kim, South Korean business strategist / theorist (b. 1952) in “Blue Ocean Strategy: Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant”
The right price for an irresistible offer. That’s the concept of a value bridge.
There are three scenarios that require a value bridge.
Scenario 1: Marketing to and targeting the right buyers.
I buy Levenger™ paper. It costs more than regular yellow pads. It’s also better paper. It soaks up ink like nothing else. When you journal, note-take, noodle and cipher as much as I do, the way ink goes into the paper matters. Levenger is a company that also sells really expensive pens. I do not buy their pens, because I am equally loyal to Pentel EnerGel .7 mm pens. Levenger only markets to paper snobs. They don’t want the yellow-pad-buyer, because there’s no value bridge for them. The yellow-pad-buyer just wants cheap paper. Knowing our buyer tells us what kind of value bridge we need, and it’s often not related to price, to Mr. Kim’s subtitle.
Scenario 2: Your price is higher than the competition.
Maybe it’s because your product is better. The value bridge is how you describe and define “better.” Maybe it’s because your costs are higher and you’re less efficient than a competitor. The value bridge is how you frame the differential in terms that are valuable to the buyer. “We need to be able to make a profit” is not a value bridge. That’s an excuse and a really weak one at that. Your profits are not your customer’s problem.
“Whenever you need help, our phones are answered by live people, twenty-four hours a day. That means you’re never left wondering what happens next,” is a value bridge. And, if the customer values service, reliability, and access — there’s real value there.
Scenario 3: Your phone isn’t ringing with unsolicited offers to pay full price for your product or service, and you’re not the low-cost provider.
Professional selling involves changing people’s minds. If it didn’t, guess who would be obsolete? Professional salespeople. In order to change people’s minds, we need to know what is on their minds. Therefore, we need to ask a lot of questions. We need to know what problem they’re trying to solve, which often is not the problem they think they’re trying to solve.
A client once told me that they wanted to consider our service because of a 22-minute outage by a competitor, followed by a 17-minute outage by that same competitor. Our service was 43% more expensive than the one they had. We asked until we found out that the 39 minutes of downtime didn’t just cost them the price of the service times 39 minutes. It cost them $500,000 in lost business. That they knew of!
Our $375 per month price difference seemed like a nit compared to $500,000 in actual, already-incurred losses. The value bridge? “How many half-million-dollar losses do you need to avoid to rationalize $375 per month over three years?”
Summary: Value bridges provide solid footing for buyers to get from the problem they need us to solve to the solution we provide, on terms in which we both see the value. And learning to build them is much simpler than you think.
If this type of sales training will make a difference for your team, your company, or someone you know, let’s talk! Shoot me an e-mail @ steve@thehestongroup.com
#sales #leadership #differencemaking #dailydifference #morebetterselling
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