Let’s pretend for a moment I’m a sales or company executive. (I actually used to be one but that was long ago.) Sales are in the tank this year thanks to the global economy. We finished last month OK but H1 was a disaster, a bad Q1 followed by a worse Q2.

Staff reductions have been implemented earlier this year and we’ve cut budgets severely so thus far our numbers don’t look so bad to the street. Orders are down about 15% year to year, several of our largest customers have gone out of business, but our sales team sales they have some deals in the pipeline that should close soon.

I receive about 30 emails a day it seems from sales training firms. They must really be feeling the pinch too, each email reinforcing how their version of sales improvement will help improve business results. Boy, they must be desperate based on some of their headlines;

• “Easy ways to get a sure-fire boost to your sales productivity”
• “Convince me; why should we buy your product and not your competitors?”
• “Do your customer’s see your value? How do you know?”

These email messages remind me of SCUD missiles used in the Middle East a few years back; imprecise area bombs designed to impact perhaps more psychological damage than physical. Back to reality, I wonder “do our customers really understand the value we deliver?”

Recently I’ve heard a few stories of negotiations with customers where they continue to do business with us “because they like us, and we have a good relationship”, but I wonder what do they really value about doing business with us?

Wait a minute, do our salespeople really know the value we provide? I’ve noticed recently many of our reps are resisting putting too much information into our CRM system, and we continue to suffer through very high turnover of our reps.

And at dinner during our last sales meeting, I heard at least 6 different versions (from 6 sales reps) of the value we provide to our customers! I’m beginning to wonder…once upon a time we had a strong value proposition, now there seems to be lots of confusion and even resistance to selling value…perhaps we should look at updating it?

Hmmm…what about last month when one of our top 5 customers told us they wanted a 25% reduction in our prices. I asked the rep; what services do they not want us to provide anymore? She told me “they still want everything we’ve always provided just for less money”. And then she asked me to agree, so that we don’t lose one of our largest customers!

I wonder; is this some sort of tectonic shift in buyer/seller dynamics? Have buyers really become so much more professional, or as sellers have we just lost confidence is our own value? Who is supposed to be in charge of value anyway? Sales, marketing, executives…?

More questions flood my brain…

• What if the customers that cherry-pick us and those who stay because they like us aren’t so wrong?
• What if our customers have a better sense of our value than we do?
• What if our value is too hard to understand at the deal specific level?
• I wonder; is there any connection between what our salespeople say and do at the customer level, and our value proposition?

WHAT IF our value proposition has been on the shelf too long and our salespeople are having a hard time netting out value so that it makes sense to each customer? Maybe it is time to take it down, dust it off, and reassess our actual value at the street level. 

Hmmm…maybe I won’t be able to get away on vacation later this month…