What does it mean to sell with business value?
Selling with business value means shifting the conversation away from product features and toward the measurable financial impact your solution delivers — the ROI, cost savings, and quantifiable outcomes a buyer can use to justify the investment internally. Instead of explaining what a product does, value selling equips the buyer to build a defensible business case for change.
Episode overview
Sellers struggle with selling business value. They are taught to sell products, but not how to sell based on business value. In this episode, my former college roommate, business partner, and lifelong friend, Darrin Fleming, speaks about why we should be selling based on business value. Darrin is the founder and CEO of ROI-Selling.com and a business leader with experience in marketing and sales across different sizes of businesses, from small companies to huge multinational corporations. He helps his clients build their strategic marketing capability, and is a specialist in honing his clients’ business value propositions and assisting sellers to sell based on business value.
How did Darrin get involved in value selling?
- Began as an economic evaluator for an engineering plant:
- Left manufacturing/engineering and moved into consulting:
- Tom Siebel:
Why is a business value discussion critical to the sales conversation?
- Customers at some point need to do their own cost-justification when investing in an expensive product.
- It is essential to go beyond the product that you are selling, and it is necessary to talk about the problem that you are solving. It is even more critical to have a business case to garner buyer approval.
- Being able to quantify value and having a hard ROI– the business case can be the #1 catalyst.
- An ROI is a qualification tool that can help you focus your efforts on customers where you are going to deliver the most value.
What inhibitors get in the way of a business value conversation?
- Darrin spoke about a joke he uses when training sales reps mentioning he tells them the goal of the training program is to turn them into “accountants,” and that includes removing their personality. Again, it’s just a joke.
- Thinking about the way a company works as not a financial discussion:
What are the practical steps to carry a business value conversation?
- A lot of sales discussion is modeled around solving a problem from the customers perspective
How can you learn more about value-based selling?
- Darrin’s blog focuses on different aspects of value-based selling.
- Darrin’s Linkedin group helps to engage in conversation with topics on value-based selling.
Frequently asked questions
Value selling is a sales approach that focuses on the measurable business impact of a solution — ROI, cost savings, and outcomes — rather than product features, helping buyers justify and defend the purchase internally.
Buyers must cost-justify significant investments. A quantified business case gives them the economic logic to gain internal approval, making it one of the strongest catalysts for closing a deal.
The most common inhibitors are a fear of working with numbers and not understanding how the customer’s business actually makes money and where its financial drivers lie.
Quantify the customer’s problem: how big it is, what it costs, and what can be eliminated. Frame it in the customer’s terms — cost, time, or quality — from an income-statement perspective.
About ValuePros
ValuePros is a value enablement firm for organizations selling big-ticket B2B solutions. We help revenue teams work with their buyers to see, quantify, and capture real value, so their CFO can say “yes.”
We do that through a program we call the Value Edge: value narratives, CFO-ready value calculators, and value enablement training.
Let’s talk about how to lead your buyers with value.
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