|
Aligning Value
Communicate the Value of Products and Services to the Executive Buyer
 Program Benefits
Aligning Value, from The Real Learning Company, , changes the way salespeople think about and interact with executive buyers. This interactive, experiential learning program enables salespeople to calculate the true value of their offerings for each unique buyer. It unveils five proven techniques that allow salespeople to communicate offerings in the context of what each customer values. The program includes extensive practice with real accounts. Aligning Value empowers sales organizations with a new set of tools for calling on executive buyers. Aligning Value helps salespeople:
- calculate the qualitative and quantitative value that their offerings provide
- translate that value to each buyer’s unique situation
- identify and express the value they as individuals bring to their customers
- shift from making presentations to leading interactive, consultative conversations
- uncover the links between their offerings and the unique business challenges each buyer faces
- employ simple models to express complicated, abstract conceptions of value
- ask powerful questions that challenge business leaders to think about their challenges in new ways
- build relationships by focusing on the customer’s success
Program Description
This innovative program marks a new direction in sales training. Going far beyond existing courses that teach presentation skills, this program offers a powerful model for consultative selling through value-oriented discussions with executive buyers.
Aligning Value builds on proprietary research with leading executives at global organizations across a variety of industries. That research shows that executives give their business to salespeople who provide them with strategic advice that helps them navigate the difficult challenges they face. Executives seek trusted advisors who can add value to their businesses by offering insight, experience, wisdom, and creative solutions. Aligning Value embraces the principles of experiential and action learning. Each implementation is strategically customized to ensure relevance and participant retention. Prefaced by individual pre-work, the program leverages the breakthrough technology of learning maps. In tables of four to eight, teams tap into the full power of their collective knowledge and experience. The program concludes with extensive work on real accounts to provide practice with all the techniques the participants have learned during the session.
Map One: Calculating Value
1 – Value Calculator: Participants evaluate how their offerings provide specific value to their customers. First, they describe the profits or savings the offering generates for the customer. Then they develop a quantitative formula to estimate dollar amounts of that profit or savings.
2 – Value Calculator Cards: Participants work with a set of customized cards, each describing the value of an offering or program via both a verbal description and a formula for determining its monetary value to the average customer. Participants convert the average data to a unique situation of one of their own customers or prospects.
3 – Personal Value: Exploring the unique ways in which they bring information, experience, and ideas to the table, participants describe the personal value they individually provide to their customers.
4 – Building Value Model: Participants integrate their learning with the Building Value model for sales strategy. In the first three layers, participants explore their customer’s customer, the value their customer creates, and the business processes used to create that value. The bottom two layers of the model include solutions and products. Participants consider each Value Calculator card and match it to the layer of the model to which it has the most strategic relevance.
Map Two: Expressing Value
1 – Connecting Value to Business Challenges: Participants learn to translate all the information they gather when preparing for an executive meeting into a set of business challenges likely faced by the executive. Then they strategize about how to communicate the value of their offerings in the context of these business challenges.
2 – Communicating Value with Models: Practicing with simple models, participants learn how to efficiently express complicated or abstract concepts in a way that executives understand. Participants learn how to use this technique to stay focused on the big picture and keep the conversation focused on value, not just features and benefits
3 – High-Impact Questions: Participants learn to go beyond simple, open-ended inquiries to ask the challenging questions that mine beneath the surface and elicit the issues that drive success. These high-impact questions can be used to frame the consultative relationship. To gain a better understanding of how to build real value, participants write high-impact questions they can use with their own customers.
Participants then apply their new skills to their real customers. They identify their customers’ business challenges and definition of value; choose Value Calculator cards, create a model to discuss, and develop high-impact questions; and then role-play a meeting in which other participants play the customer. Participants use the techniques they have learned throughout the day to have an interactive, consultative conversation that builds the customer’s perception of the value of their products and services.
Implementation/Customization
Aligning Value is a one-day program appropriate for four to six teams of four to eight people each. Value Calculator cards are customized to the exact programs and offerings with which the salespeople work. Role-plays can be customized to meet client needs. Specific language, forms, and/or best practices may be integrated into the learning experience as appropriate.
|
