WHAT DRIVES REVENUE? PROBOS Perspective #2
Your Customer Doesn't Care About Your Value Proposition......Yet.
Are your salespeople communicating what makes your organisation great, or helping customers understand what makes you valuable to them?
I've worked with some organisations that have genuinely brilliant products, services and solutions, innovative technology, exceptional expertise, impressive customer success stories, strong differentiators, beautifully crafted value propositions and yet, their salespeople still struggle to articulate value in a way that really resonates with customers. Why?....... because there's a fundamental difference between having a value proposition and creating perceived value.
and I believe we regularly confuse the two.
Your Customer Isn't Buying Your Story, They're Living Theirs.
Think about how much time organisations spend developing their proposition:
What makes us different?
What are our unique selling points?
What are our capabilities?
Why are we better than the competition?
What are our features and benefits?
All important questions but there's one question that matters even more- "Why should any of this matter to the customer?". Whilst we're busy thinking about our offering, our customers are thinking about their world, their targets, their customers, their costs, their risks, their people, their priorities, their challenges and the things keeping them awake at night. They aren't sitting there wondering how they can buy more of our products or services, they're trying to achieve something,
avoid something or change something and unless we understand what that is, our value proposition is simply information.
Value Isn't What You Tell the Customer, It's What the Customer Recognises as Valuable.
This is where I believe selling becomes much more interesting. Imagine two salespeople selling exactly the same solution. The first explains:
"We can improve operational efficiency through automation, streamlined workflows and real-time reporting."......Sounds good.
The second says:
"You mentioned your managers are spending almost two days a week manually producing reports. If you could give them even half that time back, what would they be able to do differently?"
Same solution but very different conversation. The first is describing capability.
The second is helping the customer recognise the value of that capability in their own world and that distinction matters enormously. Value is contextual.
Something that is incredibly valuable to one customer may be almost irrelevant to another which is why generic value propositions rarely do the heavy lifting on their own.
The Best Sellers Connect Three Things
I believe exceptional value conversations connect three things:
1. What the customer is trying to achieve.
Not just their immediate problem, but the business outcome behind it.
2. What's preventing them from achieving it.
The barriers, consequences, risks, frustrations and missed opportunities.
3. What would be different if those barriers were removed.
The commercial, operational, strategic and sometimes personal value of making a change.
It's that third conversation we often rush past. We identify the problem, we explain the solution
but we don't spend enough time exploring what solving the problem would actually mean.
Would it accelerate revenue?
Improve margin?
Reduce risk?
Release capacity?
Improve retention?
Give leaders better information?
Make customers happier?
Create competitive advantage?
Allow somebody to stop spending their sunday evenings worrying about monday morning?
Sometimes the value is both commercial and deeply human and both can influence a decision.
Your Customer May Not Know the Full Cost of Their Problem
Here's another thought, sometimes customers know something isn't working but they haven't really quantified what it's costing them:
They know sales conversion is disappointing but what is a small improvement worth across the year?
They know their managers aren't coaching enough but what is the consequence of inconsistent sales performance?
They know their technical teams are giving lengthy demos but how many opportunities are losing momentum because customers aren't seeing the relevance?
They know their account managers are too reactive but what opportunities for growth are being missed within existing relationships?
A great commercial conversation helps customers connect the issue to its consequences, not by manufacturing fear or exaggerating the problem but by exploring it intelligently.
The customer needs to understand the value of solving the problem before they can properly evaluate the value of your solution.
That's a very different way of thinking about sales.
Value Has to Survive Beyond the Meeting
This is particularly important in complex B2B selling. The person who loves your proposition may not be the person who approves the investment. They may need to convince Finance, Operations, IT, Procurement, their CEO or an entire leadership team and each of those stakeholders may define value differently.
The CFO might want a credible financial return.
The operational leader might want less disruption.
The end user might want something easier to use.
The CEO might want growth, differentiation or reduced strategic risk.
The person championing your solution might simply want confidence that recommending you won't damage their credibility.
One solution. Multiple perceptions of value.
Which raises an interesting question- Are we equipping our customers to explain our value internally or are we simply hoping they'll repeat our presentation because a compelling sales meeting doesn't automatically create a compelling internal business case.
If Value Is So Important, Why Do Sellers Still Lead With Features?
This is where I want to return to the human behaviour behind commercial performance.
We all know the principle : Sell value, not features. We've heard it for years so why does feature-led selling still happen? Perhaps because talking about the product feels safe- it's familiar, it's rehearsed & it's something the salesperson knows. Exploring commercial impact requires a different level of confidence. It means asking questions about money, understanding the customer's business model, challenging assumptions, exploring consequences, talking to senior stakeholders, being comfortable with uncertainty and sometimes acknowledging that our solution might not be the right answer. That's a very different skill set and for some sellers, a very different mindset.
Product knowledge gives us confidence in what we're selling. Commercial understanding gives customers confidence in why they should buy.
We need both.
The Sales Leadership Challenge
If your team struggles to articulate value, it's tempting to commission another value proposition workshop and perhaps that's exactly what's needed but before doing so, I'd want to understand what's really happening:
Do your sellers understand how their customers make money?
Can they connect your solution to commercial outcomes?
Are they comfortable discussing financial impact?
Do they know how to explore the cost of doing nothing?
Can they differentiate value for different stakeholders?
Are they confident enough to challenge a customer's thinking?
Do your technical teams know how to demonstrate outcomes rather than functionality?
Are your managers coaching value conversations or simply reviewing deal progress?
Are you measuring the quality of the value being created, or simply the volume of sales activity?
If the problem is commercial confidence, product training alone won't fix it, if the problem is shallow discovery, a new presentation won't fix it, if the problem is stakeholder engagement, a better brochure won't fix it and if your sales managers aren't reinforcing the right behaviours, even excellent training may have a short shelf life.
Best Practice Matters. Behaviour Makes It Happen.
At PROBOS, this is why we believe in understanding the commercial challenge before prescribing the solution.
Sometimes the answer is helping salespeople develop stronger value conversations.
Sometimes it's commercial acumen.
Sometimes it's better discovery.
Sometimes it's negotiation or influence.
Sometimes it's coaching the managers who are responsible for developing those behaviours.
Sometimes it's bringing sales, technical and customer teams together to create a more joined-up buying experience and sometimes it's helping an entire organisation rethink how it defines, communicates and delivers value.
The right intervention depends on what's actually getting in the way because commercial performance isn't improved by simply knowing what good looks like, it's improved when people consistently behave in ways that create better customer outcomes.
So, Does Your Customer Really Care About Your Value Proposition?
They might.....eventually, but first they need to recognise something important:
That you understand their world.
That you understand what matters.
That you can help them achieve something worth achieving.
That the value of making a change is greater than the cost, effort and risk of staying where they are.
That's when your proposition starts to mean something.
Stop telling customers why you're valuable and start helping them discover why you're valuable to them because the best value proposition isn't simply the one you can articulate beautifully, it's the one your customer can articulate without you in the room.
Leadership Reflection
If I asked five of your customers to explain the value your organisation brings to their business, would they describe your products and services, or the difference you make to their performance?
Revenue follows behaviour.
And value starts with understanding what matters to somebody else.
Find what's getting in the way of your number. Then fix the right things.
We work with commercial leaders to identify the behaviours, capabilities, leadership practices and organisational barriers affecting revenue performance.
Then we build the right intervention around the problem, combining training, coaching, leadership development and change support where it's needed.
Not training for training's sake. Commercial development designed around the outcome you're trying to achieve.
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