A VALUE HAS A VALUE IF AND ONLY IF ITS VALUE IS VALUED

I am a member of many subject groups on the various networking sites. The title of this post is the title of a discussion on one of the groups.

I first read this title and thought to myself, whoever started this discussion had to be on drugs! But the more I read it, and the more I thought about it, the more it had VALUE. (Amazing how I worked that into the sentence isn’t it)

It doesn’t matter if you are selling a product, a service, or selling yourself during a sale or an interview what you perceive as VALUE is only going to have VALUE if the customer or future employer views it as VALUBLE!

Let’s start with a product; you start your sales presentation talking about the product being versatile. You tell the customer how many uses the product has and how your one product will do the work of 3 or 4 different products they use now. This sounds like a great reason to buy your product doesn’t it? Maybe not, what if one of the products that you are trying to replace is being supplied by the bosses’ son. OOPS! What if the company doesn’t do a lot of training (I can’t believe I said that) and they want one product to do one job to simplify things. What if the customer doesn’t even do most of the processes you are talking about and views your product as overkill for their business?

Let’s talk about a service. You think you are building added value by telling a customer everything that comes along with your service. Then you come to find out that the customer has no use for any of it but the very basics. The customer immediately thinks that they will be paying for a lot of things that they don’t need.

Finally, let’s address selling yourself. You tell a perspective employer about all the things you do in the community. You think this shows the employer how civic minded you are, in fact the employer starts to think you will put a higher priority on your civic duties than your professional duties.

All of these are examples of A VALUE having NO VALUE because its VALUE isn’t VALUED.

How can we avoid this mistake? Simple, ASK QUESTIONS! How would your sales presentation change if you had asked the customer, “do you prefer a product to be multifunctional or each product having its own application?” and the customer replied, I need each product to do just one job, I don’t do a lot of training (OMG I said it again) and things need to be kept simple. I am going to guess that you wouldn’t mention all the things your product does and just talk about the one main job it does best.

If you had listed out all the details about your service and then asked the customer, “Which of the items on the list are most important to you?” I bet you would have never mentioned the rest of the items would you.

Finally, what if you asked a perspective employer about the company’s policy on community action. If they said they don’t get involved in such things, you better not be telling them how many days a year you take off to help the needy and volunteer on community projects!

Before you assume what is VALUABLE to your customers, find out. Remember, added VALUE can be synonymous to added expense, if the customer doesn’t agree with your definition of VALUE.

Lorin