Elevating B2B Sales: Mastering Value Creation for Lasting Client Relationships

Uncover the secrets to transforming B2B sales experiences by prioritizing value creation over mere transactions.

As B2B sales organizations continue regressing to transactional approaches, buyers complain about their experiences with salespeople. These complaints are evidence that buyers need more help pursuing their change initiatives. Sales organizations that fail to provide their contacts with what they need to make change with confidence and certainty will find their competitors stepping in to give buyers what they need.

When we use the idea of value creation, we are not talking about the value of your solution. Instead, we are describing the value of the sales conversation and its ability to provide your contact and their stakeholders. When you create value, you improve the experience, especially when compared to the legacy approach. To do this, you will need to invest in value creation.

Strategies for Value Creation in Sales

Let’s explore some of the investments that will help you win more deals by being the most helpful salesperson when compared to your competitors. These investments will stack up as you increase your investments.

1. Research and Reading: It takes time and energy to do the research and reading necessary to understand the client’s industry and their company. Your research will be improved if you do some internal research by looking at your existing clients in the same industry, what they were struggling with, and what they needed to change to improve their results. Not knowing anything about the client or their industry will cause you to miss opportunities to create value.
2. Investment in the Relationship: Some salespeople sell to acquire an order. Others sell for a deal and a contract. But effective salespeople play for the client’s relationship, something more valuable for your client and equally valuable for you. By investing in the relationship, you have a durable strategic advantage. This is a long-game strategy with dividends that accrue over years and decades.
3. Preparation for Your First Meeting: To prepare for your meeting, start with a list of questions that will guide your conversation with your contacts. You should also have several outcomes you want to generate in the first meeting. One way to score points in the first meeting is to create value. To do this, you can use an executive briefing that provides your contacts with insights where your industry and your prospective client’s meet.
4. Valuable Client Questions: You may have been taught and trained to ask questions to learn what you need to know. But it is unlikely you have been exposed to a set of questions that help your client understand why they are failing to produce the results they need. In a modern sales approach, you invest in helping the client learn something about themselves, as they acquire a deeper understanding. See Elite Sales Strategies for more on this strategy.
5. Investment in Time: You may have been told that you need velocity. You are supposed to be trying to speed up the acquisition of a new client. In a time where the rate of change is so fast it increases uncertainty, investing in time is one way to create value by spending more time, and ensuring your contacts gain what they need to be able to move forward with the change they need.
6. Investment in Providing Counsel: For some time, salespeople were taught to believe the client knows more than the salesperson. You are right to be incredulous that your client knows more than you and doesn’t need your help. But it is more than unlikely that your contacts know what you know, as you sell every day, giving you many more experiences to draw from. Your buyer makes the decision you help your client make on a rare occasion, meaning there is information disparity. You need to invest in providing a consultative sales approach.
7. Facilitating the Buyer’s Journey: Some believe the client should determine how best to pursue the process of making change. Like the investment in providing counsel, here too you need to provide the advice and recommendations that will ensure your contacts make the commitments and the conversations that will ensure they make it safely to the end of their buyer’s journey and the decision that will produce the strategic outcomes that caused them to start their journey. See The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments that Drive Sales.
8. Investment in Building Consensus: This is part of the buyer’s journey, but because of the difficult nature of building consensus, this is a separate investment in this important value creation. One powerful strategy here is to start as early as you can by identifying the stakeholders and what you and your contacts will need to do to be able to build consensus.

Challenges to Value Creation in B2B Sales

If there is something we call value, then we must acknowledge that there is an opposite, something we can call Anti-Value. You create Anti-Value when you fail to do the research and the reading, winging it instead of preparing for a meeting with your client. Instead of scoring points, you end up with a zero, as you didn’t provide the experience they needed from you.

You also create Anti-Value when you start your first meeting by spending time positioning your company and your solutions, as it feels like a pitch delivered way too early and making the meeting way too transactional.

You may also create Anti-Value by asking a set of questions that every other salesperson has asked them. “Tell me about your problem... tell me about your pain points.” These are pedestrian questions that create no value for your contacts.

But perhaps one of the most destructive ways to create Anti-Value is failing to provide counsel, advice, and recommendations. When your contacts need more help, you must fill the gaps in their knowledge and experience by being a consultative salesperson.