Don’t define yourself or your company by what you sell, define it by what you believe?
- Do you sell asset based lending or believe you are enabling growth through acquisition?
- Are you selling equipment finance or do you believe that new equipment package will give a customer a chance to profitably win that road construction bid?
- Do you make equity investments in mid-sized companies or do you believe your capital and experience will take that family owned enterprise to unimagined success?
Do you believe in it? We’re talking about the real value connection of what you do. The thing about what you do that makes a huge difference in the lives of people. It’s the absolute most important thing about you and your company. Oh…and the mistake: Where is it?
Do we get so lost in the deal structuring or the old feature, advantage, benefit selling that we lose the value connection–the connection to the emotion, the passion and the belief? Do too many of our sales pros spend too little time there? In reviewing web and materials of our commercial finance business, there are virtually no marketers that live there…ever.
We just completed a success story creation effort for one of our very well-known brands. After 30 minutes of discussing the financial deal structuring and sales process, we asked the question…what did the client do with the money? The rep, the manager, the region executive and the credit manager all represented on the call…and they didn’t know. They didn’t know.
It’s great to know the technical aspects of how companies position themselves to win business over a competitor, but what your solution actually helps people do is not a thing…it’s the most important thing. Really to us…it’s everything.
Could there be an opportunity for sales if they did a better job connecting back to the value benefit of their technical solutions so that things don’t become emotionless, robotic and overly technical? Isn’t that use of emotion a great way to win over a sea of sameness competitive landscape? And marketers, wouldn’t telling a story people could connect with fuel sales enablement, create better business conversations and generally lift your company?
Why are most companies so bad at this? You all have a great story, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be around…so tell it. And make that value connection obvious in your effort. What you sell is not who you are…what you believe is. And if you “believe” more in your sales and marketing efforts, we think the needle will move.
If you ever wanna chat about differentiating and connecting with people again, give us a holler.