“The reason that you want to start with level four is because it’s going to differentiate you and make sure that you win the deals that you pursue.” – Anthony Iannarino in today’s Tip 1462
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Anthony Iannarino. Hopefully, you already know who Anthony is. He’s a keynote speaker, the author of The Sales Blog, and a whole bunch of great sales books. Here he is:
Anthony Iannarino: This is a video about a concept called Level Four Value Creation. So let me give you a very short tutorial in level four. There are four levels of value that you can create for your client.
The first is level one, which means you’re going to sound like a commodity because you’re talking about your company and you’re talking about your products.
The second level is the experience. So if you’ve got great support, you got great service, it’s easy to do business with you. You’re probably level two.
Level three means that you can get somebody the results. So let’s say that you sell widgets and the widgets show up and the widgets work, you’re level three.
To get to level four though, what you have to do is you have to have a strategic outcome that’s greater than the widgets, which would be something like being able to reduce our cost, being able to be more profitable, or something that a senior leader would want.
My formative years in sales and sales leadership was in the staffing industry. The staffing industry is highly commoditized. There is little differentiation in every company has a database and a large part of that database shows up in their competitors databases. All but the most transactional companies provide screening and background checks, providing no real differentiation.
Over time as my experience made me an authority on staffing and labor markets, I realized I knew more than my clients. I started to teach my clients what they needed to know to improve their results. One distinction I noticed is that all the salespeople started the conversation by trying to prove they were credible by sharing information about their company, their clients, and their processes.
When you work in an industry long enough, you already know your clients’ problems and pain points. You also have the experience to know why they are not producing the results they want. At some point, I recognized that the C-level contacts I was calling on weren’t interested in the legacy approach. Because I knew what my prospective clients really wanted, I started to reverse the sales conversation, starting with the strategic outcome the decision-makers really needed.
They didn’t want temporary employees. They wanted to meet their daily or weekly production numbers. The only reason they needed temporary employees is to generate the production. They also didn’t want temporaries, but they did want to avoid paying the taxes and the increase to their cost. They were buying a lower-cost structure. Other companies who didn’t have a large HR team used staffing to be able to hire employees that had already proven they were reliable.
The first level of value is your company and products. The second level is the customer’s experience. The third level is delivering what you sell, a level that’s now completely commoditized. You provide what you sell and soak in your competitors. By starting the conversation with the strategic outcomes, you differentiate yourself and your company from your competitors.
To execute this strategy, you need to have the business acumen to be able to educate your clients on the changes they need to make and how they should go about pursuing strategic outcomes. The reason that you want to start with level four is because it’s going to differentiate you and make sure that you win the deals that you pursue.
I’m Anthony Iannarino. Hit the like button, hit the subscribe, and I’ll see you on the next video.
Scott Ingram: For a link to the original video version of this tip, The Sales Blog, and Anthony’s books, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1462. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!