Discovering Needs-to-Value

Aug. 14, 2013
Business owners and salespeople face many challenges. One of the greatest challenges is connecting your business value to your customers’ needs and influencing their buying decisions.

The ability to discover opportunities that your customer knowingly or unknowingly brings to you is a vital part of both satisfying them and bringing in more business.

A part of this process is being able to articulate why your business is the best one to satisfy customer’s needs. You must differentiate, resonate, and most importantly, ask for the sale. Be bold so the customer understands your business expertise and capabilities.

To confidently state that your business is in fact the best option for the customer comes from a thorough evaluation. Assess the customer’s needs versus your business’ value. Don’t be ashamed to admit if their needs are better met elsewhere.

Assess the Needs and Value
1.    What does the customer need? What do they want? Is it realistic?
2.    Does your business specialize in the service(s) your customer needs?
3.    Is there a problem you see that the customer may have missed?
4.    Is there an opportunity to use additional services to solve that problem?
5.    Why should your client choose your business instead of the competition?
6.    How can you improve your services to better meet customer needs?
7.    How can you enhance your value proposition?
8.    What is your action plan to improve insight selling?

The goal is to discover new opportunities for business and then take advantage. By doing this, you will be the customers’ ultimate unique solution.

Mike Moore is the HVAC Training Director at HVAC Learning Solutions, an HVAC industry expert in sales, technical, and business training. Visit Mike’s blog for more insights. Mike can be reached on Twitter @hvaclearning or on Google+ at gplus.to/hvactraining.