Is Your Sales Team Creating Real Differentiation?

To avoid the pitfalls of competing on price, salespeople are often told they need to "sell the value." Another strategy is to "value-add," by offering the customer extra services or product features without charge.

Although those strategies can be effective in the short term, neither approach produces a sustainable advantage. Selling the value assumes either that the salesperson understands what the customer values or that the value offered is perceived as significantly different from competing offerings. All too often, neither is the case.

Moreover, a value-add strategy has its own drawbacks. Though it may sometimes win a sale, it produces customer expectations of "free-stuff," erodes margins, and may be easy for the competitor to match.

Salespeople rely on those strategies, ineffective as they often are, because they find it difficult to achieve genuine differentiation based on something the customer values and is hard for the competition to replicate.

But suppose a salesperson were able to create a highly differentiated offering that provides real value that competitors can't copy—because it is unique to the customer?

The secret lies in going beyond features and services that are easily commoditized, and developing what marketing scholar Ted Levitt calls "the potential offering" in his book The Marketing Imagination.

→ end article preview
Read the Full Article