Value Biz Blog

Price Increases in a Competitive Market: How to Stay Ahead of the Game

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 07:22:46 GMT

Price increases are among the most impactful activities for salespeople but, simultaneously, one of the most challenging and unpopular, especially in times of cost increases, inflation, and uncertainty.

The following challenges for price increases are widespread:

Customer resistance: Customers may be reluctant to pay higher prices, leading to decreased demand or even losing customers.
Competition: Other businesses may not need to increase prices or drive another strategy, making it challenging to remain competitive.
Market conditions: Economic or market conditions make it difficult to raise prices, such as a recession or saturation of the market.
Perception: if your customer perceives the price increase as unreasonable or unfair, you might negatively impact your customer's perception of your company and its products.
Communication: Effectively communicating the reason for the price increase to customers is vital in minimizing resistance and maintaining their trust.

To better understand what the most relevant factors are,

I asked my network recently where the most significant challenge lies:

Understanding why you need to make the price increase
Lack of justification/reasons
Concern about the relationship

More than 50% of respondents said that concern for the relationship was their biggest challenge in negotiating. The second biggest challenge (nearly 1/3) is that salespeople do not have the right package to justify the price increases.

What can you do to improve the situation?

As a sales leader, ensure your sales teams have the right skills and competencies to make the most impact in every negotiation.

Regarding the need for more justification, I am always surprised how many companies leave their sales teams in the dark, alone on this issue. In many companies, salespeople must gather information, data, and trends to adequately justify price increases when negotiating with customers. This extra workload leads to frustration, waste of time, and even inadequate justifications for price increases. Sometimes salespeople are in front of the customer, using inappropriate arguments on cost increases that lead to a challenging situation during the negotiation process. Ultimately, your sales teams leave money on the table during the negotiations.

A key recommendation is to break down the silos between sales and marketing to jointly develop, review and rehearse the ammunition package for and with your sales teams.

A much more complicated issue is the concern about the relationship and subsequent loss of the customer and associated business. Many salespeople are concerned about damaging the relationship with their customers that lasts for years over many years. A damaged relationship can lead to a loss of business, making it difficult for them to achieve their goals.

As a sales leader, you ensure that your sales teams have enough confidence to handle the challenges of price negotiations since many purchasers are using the argument of damaging the relationship to avoid the price increase.

Therefore a key recommendation is to ensure that your teams clearly understand that they may also lose some business when negotiating price increases and that it is ok to do so. I have seen the importance of repeatedly communicating this message to your sales teams.

During the negotiation process, your customers may challenge your relationship. However, be as transparent as possible to maintain trust and credibility.

As a sales leader, emphasize your leadership on coaching and supporting your team to improve your sales team's ability and confidence in price increases.

Another big challenge many customers face is when is the right time for a price increase.

Imagine you are a pricing manager, and your management asks you to increase prices.

You've adjusted prices several times in recent months due to raw material, freight, energy costs, and possibly other cost increases.

Now you are approaching the annual negotiations at the beginning of next year and are wondering whether you should push through another price increase, e.g., due to increased energy costs. At the same time, you are still determining how substantial the cost increases will be.

Of course, we have yet to find a simple and straightforward answer. We have identified some key aspects to consider when assessing the situation and deciding whether to adjust prices now or early next year:

What is your position in the market? Are you a leader or a follower?
How urgent is this price adjustment? Is your profitability level so low that you urgently need price increases?
How quickly can your retail organization implement the price increases?

Answering these questions will help you decide when to make the price adjustments.

As a pricing manager, ensure that you have the right insights on the market and competition and a clear strategy to help guide your sales teams through the pricing increase that makes the relevant impact and maintains the right level of customer relationship.

Find attached an infographic to summarize the key steps: HERE

It would be great to hear about your experience with price increases!

#valuebizbooster #b2b #pricing #sales #salesleadership

How cozy is your comfort zone?

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 12:21:43 GMT

Change is always for the others...right?

leaving the comfort zone is very challenging for many people. Especially if the sense of urgency is not there or not understood. In short, WHY should I change, it is working as it is.

Marc, one of my customers, is a project manager in a B2B environment working on sales enablement, is just about to finalize the CRM roll-out phase. The last time we talked, he said something that surprised me, as he is being close to the roll-out phase of his project:

"I do not understand why sales do not want to use the CRM that I have just rolled out.".

Though Marc is not the only project leader that has underestimated the impact of the change.

Learning from past change initiatives can provide a lot of learnings to improve the success of an initiative.

“It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”Bill Gates.

Even being in a well-advanced phase of the project, I recommended talking to his key stakeholders.

Marc realizes that he didn't involve so far the sales and marketing teams. Now he is worried if the impacted teams will adopt the new way of working and wondering how to catch up to ensure the required cooperation.

What would you if you would be in Marc's situation?

Interesting to see based on the results from #Statista that a stronger focus on change management is present in larger corporations compared to smaller companies.

This is in line with what I have been experiencing, though interesting to see that still between 30% and 13%, depending on the size of the company, are only sporadically taking care of change management.
The focus on change management is a key to success for any project and adoption in new ways of working, especially in sales and marketing initiatives.

I wanted to share some of the main pitfalls that I observed during my career and my customers to avoid your projects to fail:

underestimating the work
overestimating the maturity and capacity of an organization to change
not having a clear communication about the expectations and key milestones of an initiative
Do not underestimate the impact of change

Let's go deeper into each of those pitfalls:

Underestimating the work:

While many projects are focusing only on the factual content of the sales & marketing-related initiative, the people aspects are forgotten in a change management initiative. In many cases, the change is focusing on the factual changes and some communications. Unfortunately, the reasoning and motivations of your key stakeholders and users are getting forgotten.

Overestimating the maturity and capacity of an organization to change

It is key to success to well understand where does the organization stands from the current challenge and what are their key needs. Far too often the maturity of the organization and capacity to adapt is underestimated.

Clear communication about the expectations and key milestones

Regular communication is required, sometimes it feels like over-communicating but do not forget even though you might use many channels such as town halls, regional meetings, intranet, emails, internal social media platforms like chatter or yammer, etc... You will not reach everybody, therefore keep repeating your message. That message should be tailored to the different targeted groups you are communicated to.

Do not underestimate the impact of change...

Change needs to be considered in a very early phase of the project, which can be taking various forms and has to play a major part in your roadmap of any initiative.

Have you experienced one of those pitfalls during your career?

Like Marc, are you struggling currently being in the middle of a change initiative and you do know how to get out of it?

Reach out to me and we can have an exchange to identify the path forward towards a successful change initiative.

#valuebizbooster #change #leadership #projectmanagement #salesmanagement #salesenablement #CRM

Do you know who is hiding behind your customer?

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 14:21:21 GMT

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The fairy tales of sales enablement

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 08:47:15 GMT

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I would like to share five myths that I met along my journey in commercial excellence. In the coming article, I am going to share some of the myths I encountered around commercial excellence and some strange expectations that top management has or might have about running commercial excellence. Obviously, this isn’t an exhaustive list, I am sure you have your own ones. So please share those!

You will find for each of the myths some challenging questions to reflect on as well as some insights on how to demystify those challenges

❓ MYTH #1: The CRM will solve all your sales effectiveness challenges.

�� I have heard many times that by implementing a CRM tool, like a San Gral it will solve all the challenges you have with your sales and marketing organization.

�� The answer is ultimately NO a CRM tool will not solve everything, you need to have your basics in place. Your commercial strategy, basics such as customer segmentation strategies, business models, and processes need to be in place.

❓ MYTH #2: Few trainings and your sales teams are ready to sell value-based

�� I have met so many management teams who are wondering their value selling is not picking up even though few trainings have been provided

�� Yes trainings are needed for the sales teams, BUT yes there is a but: it is not enough! Even if you provide on top of your training a powerful tool, sales teams need more than that: they need confidence and understand WIIFM to sell value-based. The best practice I have seen is by combining training, tools with some effective engagement steps such as getting your team to understand the value of doing value-based selling and support them in their daily challenges through on the job coaching journey.

❓ MYTH #3: Having a customer segmentation is good enough and the commercial teams know exactly what to do!

�� Have you experienced the same: you get told or introduced as a sales rep here is the customer segmentation and please act accordingly? You ask yourself: so what, customer segmentation stays a piece of theory!

�� Yes, customer segmentation is needed; they can be fact-, need- or behavior-based. Customer segmentation stays theoretical until you have translated it into some actionable strategies that provide clear guidance for sales teams to act towards the different customer segments.

❓ MYTH #4: Getting a commercial excellence setup and all our sales reps will be more efficient and all our customers will be happy!

�� Do you know this situation: a freshly built team is labeled commercial excellence and now as of day #1 from top management through middle and management everybody expects that all issues related to commercial teams will be solved and at the same time all our customers will be happy?

�� Yes, a commercial excellence initiative is needed, BUT consider as management that it takes time to build, change, and engage the ways of working to get access to the expected impacts. It does not mean that you can’t earn some quick wins too. As you will realize, the change in ways of working is taking time for your commercial teams, so you can expect that the impact and happiness improvement on your customers will take a bit longer. Further, do you want to have all customers to be happy?

❓ MYTH #5: Fill-up the top of your opportunity funnel to get many leads.

�� Have you already experienced this: your manager pushes or even micromanage to get you filling up the pipeline with leads or you get useless “leads” out of a marketing campaign from your marketing peers?

�� Indeed you will possibly manage many leads but are those relevant for your business and will they be leading to business or will you waste your time? Do not misunderstand me, yes a funnel and opportunity management is crucial but quality over quantity needs to be applied. How do you ensure that you focus on quality instead of quantity: the leads need to be well qualified. Do you have the right metrics in place to qualify your leads? How does an ideal lead/opportunity look like?

Now that you had a read through those myths and some food for thoughts, what is your take-away or experiences around commercial excellence? Would be great if you can share those in your comments?

#salesenablement #commercialexcellence #salestips #salesmanagement #marketingexcellence #CRM #valueselling #salesfunnel

How to make value-based selling part of the organization DNA?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 08:57:53 GMT

The challenges companies with possibly lower sales or low cash flow are even more relevant those days with the COVID-19. Hence the need to build a strong organization focusing on capturing value has become even more crucial and critical to ensuring companies to catch-up the gap created through the current situation. Many management and sales & marketing leaders know how difficult it is to build a successful organization around value-based selling and it is even more challenging to keep it up running. You might ask why is it like that?

From the experience that I gathered the last 20 years, here the main roadblocks that slow-down typically value-based selling initiatives:

Lack of confidence of the sales organization on how to approach their customers with this different approach from usual
Too theoretical approach and not actionable enough: for the sales teams it is not clear where to start with.
Too much focused on trainings and not on providing continuous support through coaching: the teams feel left alone after the trainings and not getting the support on a regular basis that they would need.

How can you actually see that the value-based selling initiative that you have started a few years ago isn’t sticking?

There are few signs that you can get from your organization that show that your initiative around value-selling is not as effective as you would have wished:

The sales teams when you talk about value-based selling they do not know what you are talking about.
Marketing is creating great ammunition packages for your sales teams, but nobody is using them
Management is asking for RoI and you can nearly report any progress

Does this sound familiar to you?

Then keep reading, as it might give you some food for thought:

What to do to get teams working successfully in value creation and capture at the same time?

Consider that, even value-based selling is a cross-functional effort, the main part of the organization it is addressed to are salespeople. Just stating here the obvious, sales is typically busy running from one customer to another or Nowadays from one call to an other or possibly doing some firefighting to solve customer's issues. Hence salespeople do not have typically the time to sit down for long and work themselves through theoritical, complicated and cumbersome concepts. This means that the approach needs to be:

Simple: the methodology should be based on the KISS approach, should be easily understandable and not feeling overwhelming for the sales organization
Practical: the cases that you are working on need to be concrete, related to the job, and as tangible as possible.
Step by Step: The methodology needs to be scalable, to build on the capabilities gradually over time and that means no Big Bang to ensure that the sales teams can digest the content and the approach

It sounds easy to have an approach or method that is simple, practical, and built step by step, but as you all know what sounds simple is typically a bit more complicated. The approach that I have seen working has been focusing on empowerment, engagement, coaching, and sharing best practices. From my experience, I have seen ambassador team working best to engage and scale-up competences and new behaviors.

here my recommendation on how to build an ambassador organization in few very simple steps:

Select the right champions or early adopters : It is key to select the right people. I am not saying that you should run a heavy assessment. Typically, you know already the candidates who could be part of this pool of value champions. Those candidates have few specific behaviors and skills that will support your initiative. The key elements should be their level of motivation as well as the basic understanding and mindset on value-based selling.
Build-up the competences and confidence : Even though early in this article I stated that training is not enough, they will be still needed. You will need to make the biggest part of the competence build-up through on-the-job learning and coaching on very practical situations that the teams encountered during the customer calls. That will not only build-up the competences and capabilities of your team, but it will also at the same time increase the confidence of the team. By increasing the confidence, the engagement of the team will be stronger and increase the opportunities to sell more towards value selling.
Create traction and support the scale-up : This is a very important part of the whole process, since if you are not able to engage and scale-up you will fail. Hence you need to create excitement around those value selling projects. I have seen that sharing success stories through the ambassadors in a peer-to-peer communication is well received by organizations.

At what stage is your commercial team actually from a value selling perspective, do you want to have a quick sanity check, then take the short survey here:

GO TO SURVEY

Maybe to get a bit more concrete, let’s have a look at how a coaching journey for individual team members could look like:

The approach again is simple and practical in such a way that the coaches get what they need during the session focusing on their customer calls. It is key to have a tailored approach for the individual team members to ensure that you focus on the right challenges. It is key to build into the process some check-points where you continue to broaden the competences and skills of your teams. Further, a clear plan needs to be in place to ensure a proper scale-up, a coach the coach approach is ideal.

Let’s conclude:

The approach is simple and powerful to engage an organization towards value-based selling, especially if you drive it along “Share the glory and dilute the pain”. Still, it will require a lot of effort during the scale-up as you might hear many times “We’ve done it always that way”. In those cases, do not forget to use the voice of your ambassadors to talk to their peers.

Happy to share further my thoughts and spar on your questions around how to engage organizations towards value-based selling.

You can directly book a call to discuss if you like here:

How to ensure a successful digitalization with your sales teams? What about happy customers?

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 18:02:05 GMT

Digitalization, as well as agile, are part of the popular buzz words currently to be "à la page", but what does it really mean and did you check that before going towards a digital transformation you have all your basics in place?

Don’t forget, as Grady Booch said: „ A fool with a tool is still a fool “

If your organization is not well prepared, you are going to waste a lot of resources and money by starting the race into a digital transformation of your sales force.

What do I mean with the basics? In the case of customer excellence transformation: customer segmentation, channel management, earning logics, pricing, S&M processes, and much more need to be in place and adopted by the organization before aiming to make a full-blown digital transformation. A few examples of basics as S&M processes that each B2B company should have in place:

a clear customer segmentation that clearly defines the strategy and more essentially how the sales teams should behave with the different customers.
building on the customer segmentation, it is key to have a clear channel strategy and management of it based on the customer segmentation to address customers or even regions that need to be served differently to ensure the right level of service and related cost-to-serve
Let’s not forget about pricing the key lever to drive profitability. There is a clear need to have processes, guidelines, and R&Rs how prices are set, approved as well as discount rules in place before having all the digital change
Overall I recommend having a critical review of the processes in place and those need before the digital transformation. Ideally, some processes won’t be needed so why trying to digitalize them?

Your customer should be at the center of what you do!

So whatever you want to digitalize think about what will the customer get from it? Get your customer satisfaction measured before, during and after the digital transformation to ensure that you are focusing on the right development areas.

All studies show that if your organization, especially the sales teams, is happy, you will have happy customers. Happy customers mean loyal customers and loyal customers are ready to pay more. On top as you know to gain a customer back is 7 to 10 times more expensive than to retain him.

So keeping your sales teams happy, aligned and not overloaded, will keep your customers happy and will keep you and your shareholders happy as well since you will get the right profitability, RoI and customer satisfaction.

Obviously, the whole transformation should be supported by engagement management activities to ensure success within the implementation through a proper buy-in of your organization, top management, and your customers.

To summarize: to get a successful digital transformation you need to take care of two aspects mainly:

Keep your customers happy
Focus on the basics first before moving ahead with a digital transformation
Have a clear engagement management plan in place to support the transformation

#digitaltransformation #CustomerExcellence #ReturnOnInverst #salesandmarketing #b2b

What do mega trends and value selling have in common?

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 20:33:20 GMT

Let me tell a little own story about the importance of insights and being a true expert:

About 13 years ago, I took up a challenge as a technical marketing manager for APAC region just two years after my study, replacing a colleague that was going to retire. Before he left, about a few weeks after I started in that role, we went to Japan for a standard senior/junior handover at our main customers there. As you can imagine that early in my career, how I was feeling in general. But it became even more challenging. At one of the main customers, I got asked to make some technical presentations, which even though being stressed, I thought I would manage. But when I entered the room, I was shocked. It was not a meeting room, instead, it was an amphitheater with approximately 30 Japanese senior scientists. I suppose you can see how my heart dropped into my shoes. Indeed I was overwhelmed and not that confident and even though It went well, I would have wished to be better prepared: more insights and more knowledge. This would have given me some more confidence to run those experts through the presentations.

Out of this experience, my key learnings were:

Be well prepared
Get to know as many insights as possible about the industry and customers
If you cannot be prepared, be ready to improvise

Why is it so important to be an expert?

Upfront, it is not about you to shine in front of the customer, it is about being able to show that you are an expert, so you will build trust and credibility. Those two points are critical to building a good relationship with your customers and that will help you further to ask questions, to get access to customers’s challenges hence the possibility to do value selling. Imagine yourself in the situation where a sales guy meets you and has no understanding of the industry at all and doesn’t bring any insights, would you trust him or her? Of course not, because he or she hasn’t yet shown that he or she is trustworthy and credible as an expert.

As already mentioned in previous blogs, preparation is key. As a salesperson, you should be aware of the key megatrends as well as possible industry-specific challenges.

I would like to share a useful overview of the current megatrends, that will be a good starting point to collect targeted insights:

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/nl/Documents/public-sector/deloitte-nl-ps-megatrends-2ndedition.pdf

This overview will be able to get prepared at a high level and can at least help you to initiate a discussion with your customers. A great point to then dig into the details based on the input from your customer.

To summarize, getting access to industry-specific insights can help you to build trust and credibility that will give you access to value-based opportunities. I have developed a short checklist for value identification that might help you further: HERE

If you have been reading the whole article and wondering « HOW AM I GOING TO DO THAT », and need some help. Give me a call and we can define together the way forward:

HAVE A SHORT CALL WITH STEVE!

The recession is coming, so are you ready to cut jobs?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 18:09:10 GMT

In the last months, many articles talking about the possible recession to come in 2020 and some others saying that the slow-down is not coming. Here you can read some online articles related to the possibility of a recession either strong or mild from Bloomberg , Forbes , and UStoday .

Anyway, is your company ready if it would be coming?

I have seen this happening so many times, companies are starting to cut costs and jobs in anticipation of the hard time ahead, hoping to get them to overcome the crisis. I have been wondering is this really the right solution or more a drop of water on a hot stone?

From my experience, cutting costs and jobs are actually only actions on a very short term to prepare for the slowdown, and these actions might give some relief to your bottom line for a few months or quarters. And then? I have seen that too many times after the recession when the economy picks up again, it does take so much time to get the sales activities as well as the customer excellence projects at full speed. That once the economy picks up again, as a company you are not capable of capturing all the value, profitability and growth that you could be getting.

What is your approach when your company is getting under pressure due to the recession? So if you do not cut costs or jobs, what is the alternative to bring your company through a slow down?

What if you would be building on sustainable value capture instead of destroying value with cost-cutting initiatives?

The benefits of focusing on a value approach with your customer base would:

make your business sustainable
Strong and less incline to economical cycles
Impact positively the customer experience

Of course, this is not happening overnight and should not be taken just before the wave is going to hit. So a clear plan and preparation are required to build the capabilities of your organization. Here the quote that I like very much to explain the importance of preparation:

The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression

John Preston

Does your sales organization have the right mindset, skills, and competences to capture effectively and quickly value at the customer-end to ensure the company stays profitable independently of the economic situation?

Are you satisfied with the performance of your sales teams when considering the value selling capabilities?

If yes, you can stop to read here. If not, I encourage you to continue reading!

What if, your sales teams would always look at not only creating value for the customers but also automatically consider to capture as much as a possible value for your company?

I have been working many years in the sales and marketing arena in B2B industries to know that it requires a lot of effort and time to invest in people to develop their skills in value selling. The good thing about it: is that if you do it properly it delivers the right profitability.

Most of the time, it is more than developing the skills of a group of sales reps. It is actually to get the right mindset and attitude for this new way of working and interacting with customers that do matter most. Indeed, you need to shift your farmers to hunters and from talker to listener. Obviously, easier said than done, but not impossible.

As always, from a change/engagement perspective, I would focus first on the early adopters and big mass of the team to get them moving towards the new way of working.
But please do not forget the so-called "back sheeps" because as you may know the bad news spread much faster than the good news, almost like forest fires. This means that even you might have a lot of success with the early adopters including some of the more undecided ones, if suddenly some failures show up, then those will lead to the undecided ones to move towards resistance.
By the way, it is normal to have failures in a change process and even it is recommended. So, do not forget to talk about the learnings from the failures.

To get these teams moving you need to build their understanding and confidence to make your change a success.

How do you do that?

To get their understanding, you need to focus on communication but not only. You need to make sure that they get the information, but also that they understand it. This can only be made sure if the communication is in both ways and in such a way that they understand What Is In For Them.
To get your teams having enough confidence, you need to give them the right skills and at the same time, let them feel that failure is ok or even wished to happen.

If you feel that this resonates a lot with the challenges that you have in your organization, and you are not sure how to take this further, l et´s get in touch and find out together on how we can get you ready !

Don’t under-estimate the impact of culture when working on customer cases.

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 19:17:51 GMT

As already stated in previous blogs: " It is too expensive ", understanding the customers is a key part of the whole case development as you need to be able to make the case and the value proposition meaningful for our customers. How to gather the understanding is a blended approach between non-avoidable online research and direct customer interaction by asking questions and even more actively listening. The question here is doing this work for all the cultures across the globe: As you might guess, of course, it does not work the same way for all the culture around the globe, which means obviously that you need to be well prepared and well understand how to interact with your customer. One key aspect, for instance, is to well understand the meaning of « Silence » in various cultures or how positive is overall culture to better assess the willingness of your customers. But many more parameters are relevant when considering cultural aspects in customer interactions. Let´s focus on three parameters that might have a major impact on your interaction with your customers when meeting those cultures. The key here is obviously to accommodate the culture that you are in and the culture that your customer is in order to communicate in the most meaningful way to get the most successful outcome.

https://www.hofstede-insights.com

Based on Hofstede insights[1], I have taken 4 quite different countries on purpose. You can see from the graph above the comparison of four countries showing some very different characteristics such as Germany, the USA, China and Finland. I have selected the three following criteria as I see those as the most important for customer interaction: masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long term orientation.

Let‘s start with masculinity , meaning how much is this culture driven by competition, achievement, and success: when a high score or more driven by caring and quality of life with a low score. The key here is to understand what are the main drivers in a culture when talking to your customers. Considering a country with a high score, equal to have a culture driven by achievement, the approach should be supporting the aim to reach success. Or on the other hand, if you meet customers with a culture more focusing on caring or quality of life, the approach should be moving towards the quality of life.

The next aspect when working with customers in different regions and cultures is the dimension of avoiding uncertainty . How much are they aiming to control the future or just believe in what is coming? This impacts a lot the way that you prepare your cases and explains it from a challenge or risk perspective. In a case like Germany, having a high score, the tendency to avoid uncertainty is high, hence most of the project or case must be cleared, structured and well prepared. In this case, for example, a clear and quantified value proposition needs to be developed as well as concrete deliverables before moving ahead. On the opposite, in China, the parameter is much lower so not everything needs to be clarified but worked along the timeline.

The last dimension that we are going to look at is long term orientation . Low score countries tend to focus on the tradition from the past and are suspicious towards the future and possibly reluctant to change, such as Finland. This tells you that the journey, to introduce a new opportunity that might be more radical even though providing a lot of value, will be more cumbersome. On the opposite,

How would you handle this during your customer cases?

Obviously, here one of the first things to do is to be well prepared. What does it mean to be prepared?

Clearly understand the people you are meeting at the customer, and in particular, the cultures represented in the Decision-Making Unit (DMU) to best understand what is the best approach to those people and get the most value of the discussion. If you want to learn more about DMU, have a look at the blog: Don´t be stupid! Chase every single opportunity!
Once you have an understanding of the cultural mix of your customer interface, you can prepare your meetings accordingly to focus on elements such as masculinity, avoid uncertainty or long-term orientation. Especially the preparation phase, you can focus on the active listening, the techniques with the open-ended questions and in general the GROW model. If you would like to learn more about how to use those, you can download the free Ebook " The 8 ultimate tools for Value-based Selling ".

Next to the preparation, you need to be very attentive during the meetings to ensure that you are talking about the "cultural language" of each of the key participants to ensure their highest understanding and engagement

Please note that this blog provides some high-level guidance, but as always the devil is in the details. Hence consider those thoughts carefully but do not get blinded: listen carefully and ask questions to validate those hypotheses. Do not take them for granted!

Nevertheless, hope you will find the article useful.

If you want to learn more or see how we can use the approach to further develop your teams and get some successful customer cases, book a short session with me HERE

[1] https://www.hofstede-insights.com

Why Sales and Marketing should not stay in their silos?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 22:05:15 GMT

« Can you please prepare a brochure for my customer… ?»

As a marketer, I am sure you have heard these words quite often. In manufacturing industries, especially in the chemical industry, the business is led by sales and marketing is more seen as a support function.

In the past, that might have been a viable setup, as the buyer journey was very liner in time, sales were mainly interacting with the customers, making the deals and getting the rewards, on the other side marketing was more to provide the marketing and communication material.

Nowadays, as the buyer´s journey is increasingly getting digital, between 50 to 70% [1], decisions are made much earlier and online, hence the customer calls when the decision has already been taken.

How do we ensure that the customers do get the right information?

Based on recent work research from Gartner [2], 50% of the buyers surveyed (n = 966) found the content too confusing and on average the buyers used 4 to 5 channels. Considering those findings, it does make it clear that an omnichannel experience is required; meaning combining the different channels to reach the customer: direct contact, online interactions, website, e-commerce platforms.

Those facts show how the role of marketing is getting even more important than in the past. Marketing is the part of the organization to develop such omnichannel strategies and content to ensure that the customers are taking the right decision when going through their online buying process.

Key obviously is that the message across various channels including direct interactions with the customers through sales is coherent. Since the importance of marketing in this new environment raising and still physical customer interactions by sales are still needed in many places. At the end of the day, it is all about creating and capturing value, demonstrating differentiation through various offline and online channels. Hence, the alignment between sales and marketing is even more than ever required.

[1] CEB 2018, B2B buying survey, [2] Gartner 2019, Sales B2B buyer survey

Are you ready for the recession?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 09:34:06 GMT

The concerns around economical slow down or recession are increasing: more and more articles and publications focus on slow-down and recession. Many companies are starting to prepare for it and start the first initiatives or actions to limit or reduce costs. Based on a recent Harward Business Review article: the last recession, producer prices fell by nearly 8% and took nearly two years to recover. Even nobody knows exactly when the recession will take place, are you prepared for the challenge?

In a recession, you must be able to call

into question everything you've done before.

Francois-Henri Pinault

Looking at your customers, they are preparing as well for the slow down and this means that they will ask you as a supplier for price decreases. So are you aiming to follow that request whatever the customer asks?

Of course not, you can train your salesforce with some negotiation training to limit that your salespeople are giving away to much price reduction or discounts. The question at this point is: will that be enough to ensure that you are not losing too much profitability and bring your company in a crisis.

What if, instead of in order to limit such discussions with your customer, your salespeople would be able to demonstrate, communicate the value and the differentiation of your offering in a continuous way to your customers.

What does this mean in practice?

Identify the benefits and value drivers that your offering is providing to your customer
Translate those value drivers into quantified impacts such as additional revenue or cost savings. Obviously, during a slow down of the economy, the cost-saving element might be more relevant
Communicate as a salesperson to your customer in a clear and confident way the value that you and your offering are providing
Don´t forget to do these steps 1 - 3 in a continuous mode, as your customers meet your competitors too. One time exercise is not enough.

I hope that these 4 steps will help you to structure an approach to protect your margins and profitability also during the slow down and recession time.

If you are not sure where to start and need some help to structure your value-selling approach, you can download the free E-book HERE

The 5 simple steps to create a strong value speech

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 15:20:32 GMT

Based on a recent study from Simon-Kucher Partner:

Out of the 61 interviewed leaders from the chemical industry:

4 of 5 companies do still sell primarily on price rather than value.

This is an example from the chemical industry, but similar experiences can be seen in other industries. Even though most of the companies and management understand that selling value is upmost important to generate higher profitability and create differentiation, why do they still prioritize price focus approaches?

One of the key challenges that I have observed in the last 15 years is why organizations do not sell through value. Even though management pushes initiatives to develop value selling capabilities, the reason is that mainly the salespeople do not have a clear understanding of how and what to communicate to their customers when talking about the value that their offering is providing. Going one step further: one key element of communicating value to your customer is to properly understand what is the value that you provide in monetary means proving the tangible benefits. So this means that salespeople´s confidence to communicate the value to their customers can be increased if they better understand what is the value in a quantified manner that can be provided to their customer. Obviously you should not forget the intangible benefits as those will be supporting the customer´s perception of the value.

In this article, let´s focus on how to quantify the value or in other words to define the key parameters that impact the value, the so-called value drivers. This is the base of clear and confident communication of value towards your customers. You will realize while starting the value quantification exercise that many parameters might be unknown. Don´t be scared here, educated assumptions can be a good starting point that can be further discussed and validated with the customer in a later stage.

Value quantification can become a very complicated, cumbersome exercise: the key is to keep it as simple and pragmatic as possible and here don´t forget: „good enough is good enough“.

What are the key steps that are required to make a strong value quantification:

Based on the USP and identified benefits, qualify the key parameters in Customer´s process that will impact (positively or negatively)
For each of the key parameters, identify the KPI and value that can be measured including the generic price for your solution
Build a simulation of those key parameters leading to the benefits such as revenue increase, cost reduction, CAPEX reduction, production improvement
This will help you to understand what is the value that you possibly are able to create for your customer and you can simulate at the same time what is the share of value that you can capture. Typically, a value-sharing of 100 - 70 % for the customer and 0 - 30% for you is seen as fair. Obviously this is highly related to the potential innovation that your offering provides.
By making a few iterations, you will be able to get a sense of what’s the reasonable value to create and to capture. Additionally, this will give you more confidence in the price to apply and later in the negotiation process you will have more insights to relativize the price discussion/squeezing

By using these 5 steps, you will be able to build a strong understanding of the USPs of your offering, the benefits delivered to your customers and even being able to quantify the impact and at the same time the value sharing proposal. You have the capabilities to then communicate the value and the impact of your offering with much higher confidence.

If you can't wait until my next blog and want to learn more about practical tips around value selling: you can download the free ebook " THE 8 ULTIMATE TOOLS FOR VALUE_BASED SELLING ".

Enjoy the reading! Steve

Dont be stupid! Chase every single opportunity!

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 17:07:16 GMT

If you have been reading my previous blogs about value-based selling, you have already realized that it is time and resource consuming as it requires a lot of preparation and investigation work to understand better your customers in a such a way that you can define benefits that you offering can provide or the value that can be created for your customer and obviously what share you can capture. While reading this, you realize that next to the fact that you need to focus and limit your work in a 80/20 manner as described in my previous blog: "success or perfection?" to develop your value cases, you need as well to focus on specific customers since not all are equal. Maybe you have already realized that meetings and discussions with certain customers work better than others when you trying to sell value-based.

Have you actually even thougth about what could be the difference between the cases where you have been successful and the one where you have been less successful?

"All customers are important but some are

more important than others.”

Philip Kotler

Obviously, the first way of selecting the right customers is linked to the question: "is this customer worth it?", meaning the one having enough potential to ensure that you are able to generate a ROI (Return On Invest) on this project.
The buying behavior of your customer is a critical aspect. As mentioned earlier you might have realized that the value-based approach works better with some customers than others. This is clearly link to the buying behavior: is the customer more price or value-oriented. Later in this article I am giving you some tips and tricks how to find this out.
What customer or better said what part of the customer: procurement, technical management, top management, etc... do we need to look at? It is critical to understand here the buying process and define who has the power of influencing and taking decision at your customer. The group of people having these powers are part of the so-called Decision Making Unit (DMU)

Key now is to qualify the members of the DMU along their power, influencer or decision maker and along their buying behavior. You can find here a short template to qualify your Decision Making Unit to better understand what could be the approach: value selling and a more transactional strategy:

The latest research shows that the average number of stakeholders in a typical high-value complex B2B buying decision has steadily risen to 6.8. That statistic data point shows you how important it is to focus on the right customer and at the same time on the right stakeholders at the customer.

While finding of if someone in a DMU is influencer or decision maker might be relatively simple, you might it find more complicated or challenging to identify if you have a price shopper or value buyer in front of you.

I have a simple trick here, how to identify if you deal with a price or value buyer: consider that every single stakeholder in the DMU is a human being in professional and privat life and thinks or behaves typically in a similar way in both parts of his/her life. Hence if you are able to discuss some privat life related buying habits which are not related directly to the professional life, such as what type of car or type of vacation your stakeholder is enjoying. You might be able to find if that person is in general more price or value-oriented. Of course, please use this with caution since some other elements such as what are the KPI and incentives in place might influence the professional behavior.

You would like to learn more how to apply this and much more in practice, download here the FREE E-BOOK :

Are you SMART with your customers?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 17:07:13 GMT

You might wonder while starting to read this blog, what do I actually mean by being SMART with your customers. Leave that question for later in the blog, I am going to show you the connection between SMART and customers.

First, let's look at value propositions. What is a value proposition?

A value proposition is a key sentence that combines the benefits and the unique selling points provided to your customer through your offering. It is important to mention that the customer should be at the center of the value proposition. This implies that the sentence is focusing on the customer, so you start with its name, talk about "your" and avoid to talk about your own company or say "our product".

Hence a value proposition needs to be customer-focused, clear, structured and crispy to make the value to your customer perceivable. You might ask how can you do that?

Before you start to write-up a value proposition, you will need to identify customer needs, your unique selling points, and the related benefits. If you want to learn more about how to map the benefits of your customers, related needs, you can read more about this subject in one of my previous blogs " Great features are enough to sell value, do you agree? "

Why is a value proposition needed?

summarize the benefits in one sentence. This can compare to the three bullet points of an elevator pitch to a CEO, the value proposition communicates clearly in a structured manner the value of your offering to your customers

internal agreement along with the commercial team, between sales, marketing, and other functions, to what we provide to our customers

The link between the title of this blog and the value proposition:

I have been using a very well known tool for target settings, SMART target settings, to build a value proposition. For those reading this article and not being aware of SMART target settings , SMART stands for Specific / Measurable / Achievable / Realistic / Timely. How does this relate to building value propositions:

Specific: the value proposition should be specific to a customer and its processes. In the value proposition, you add the customer name, the related benefit/improvement you are providing e.g. revenue or performance increase, cost risk or investment reduction. "Customer 123, you will increase your performance"
Measurable : clear benefits and parameters such as revenue, costs, ... should be quantified and measurable - here that means that the value provided by your offering should be quantified with hard numbers: " increase by 10% to 125.000 €"

Achievable : the quantified value and related targets should be ambitious but achievable, so don't overpromise to your customers
Realistic : the overall value proposition should be achievable and realistic and here as well it is key not to over-promise.

Timely : the value proposition should include a time element to communicate to the customer within which timeframe the promise benefits and value should be realized. Some examples could be that you mention for example "in the next 6 months"

Here one simple example of how a value proposition built with SMART does look like:

Customer "123", you will be able to improve your production by 15% leading to 150.000 Euro in the next 6 months through our solution ABC

A key element in the SMART built value proposition is that it is measurable. You need to be able to quantify the value that your offer is providing to your customer. The value quantification is a wide and complex topic, hence stay tuned I will be developing the subject further in one of my next blogs.

If you can't wait until my next blog and want to learn more about practical tips around value selling: you can download the free ebook .

Success or perfection?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 16:41:50 GMT

Often I encounter teams that are struggling between success and perfection while trying to launch a new product or new tool or project. In many situation, either in our private or business life we strive for perfection.

Does actually this aspiration for perfection not hinder us to be successful?

Imagine you are working on the value case for one of your customer and you are improving the information, data and guesstimates to evaluate the value that your offering is providing to your customer. Currently you are working with your team internally without involving your customer, refine the case and refine it further and further. While you are working on that case, your competitor is interacting quickly with the same customer and develop the case to the final stage together. Your customer calls you on Friday afternoon to tell you that he is going to continue with your competitor. Does this sound familiar?

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted the 80/20 connection while at the University of Lausanne in 1896, as published in his first work, Cours d'économie politique. A proverb of business management says, "80% of sales come from 20% of clients". Richard Koch authored the book The 80/20 Principle, which illustrates some practical applications of the Pareto principle in business management and life.

So how can the Pareto principle be used in cases related to value-based selling and customers interaction: perfection can be a huge limitation/challenges in developing value-based cases with your customer. Especially when you are building the understanding of customers needs, benefits and related value. Hence knowing that value-based cases are resource intensive, it is critical to apply the 80/20 principle to avoid to lose to much time in the effort to define the needs, benefits, the quantified value.

To be successful keep in mind that good is good enough and no need to be perfect.

If you want to learn more about this, you can download the free E-BOOK on value-based selling

In the future, we won't need a sales force anymore...?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 18:28:44 GMT

A very contreversial topic that we have been discussed among sales and marketing peers the last days. Let me explain where this statement is coming from.

If you look at current focus in the manufacturing industries, especially the chemical industry the trend toward industry 4.0 or digitalization in various areas is well on his way as well as the use of big data or better said the testing of artificial intelligence to understand and predict the future of the business from a sales or manufacturing perspective . Hence came up the question if we automatize many part of the seller journey and at the same time the buyers move to more and more digitalized channels to discover, assess and purchase products and services:

Do we actually still need a sales force

in the future?

If you consider that the development of the computer capacity is increasing faster and faster ( see Moore´s law): soon the calculation capabilities will be going over the one of the whole population on hearth and many human touch point will not be needed anymore.

Maybe the first question is what do we mean with future? Of course, the word is changing and fast: the digitalization is taking up more and more in our private and professional life, the new generation entering the work market have completely different expectations of their job in the companies. Nevertheless not everything is happening over night.
In the next 5 to 10 years, I am convinced that commercial teams will be still needed in the future to interact with the customers, but the role of the sales person in the teams might be different to the one that is in place currently. Hence it will be really critical to develop our commercial teams towards the right set of skills and competences.

The digital part will take over the "simple" and redundant parts of the seller and buyer processes. Hence the different steps in the buying process are pushed towards commoditization or in simple terms "Yes / No" decisions without emotions: this looks like a big challenge at a first. On the other hand, that means a lot of opportunities: the commercial teams will be able to differentiate at the customer front with skills such as better understanding customers, more active listening and better identifying value at the customers to differentiate from competitors.

So in summary, in the next years sales might be not the same, nevertheless some commercial teams will be required to interact with our customers in order to make even stronger the difference against the digital procurement processes that aren't highlighting enough the benefits and value that your offering can provide to the customers.

If you need some tips and tricks how to start quickly to develop your capabilities on value capture and understanding of your customers download the free ebook HERE

It is too expensive!!!

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 17:15:17 GMT

Those are the 4 most threatening words for sales guy:

It is too expensive

Surely it is such a typical situation that you are at negotiation and sitting in front of your customer's purchasing manager and suddenly the sentence is spoken out: "It is too expensive". Does this situation sound familiar to you?

For many salespeople, this sentence is very threatening, but what does it mean actually? The purchaser on the other side of the table has been using this sentence to strategically reduce the overall cost of your offering. Do not forget that a purchaser has as a first target to ensure the security of supply of raw materials so that own production can continue, price is only secondary.

Most probably you did not invest enough time in identifying the needs of your customer to understand the potential benefits and related value that your offering can provide. As a consequence, the customer does not perceive the benefits nor value.

How do you get away from the fear of hearing those 4 words:

Being able to understand the value that your offering provides to your customer will give you enough confidence and not fear anymore the 4 words "It is too expensive".

Once you have this understanding in mind you get also the importance of:

Understand the value that you provide to your customers
But also to communicate about the value so that he/she can also perceive the value

While reading this, I suppose you are asking your self but I do already understand your customer. I have been in my past believing this too until I have realized that only by asking questions and actively listen I can get really to what a needs or problems a customer does have. In some of my previous blogs, I have been introducing some simple methods and tools on how to actively listen and ask the right questions. One simple method is using the GROW model to structure the discussion with your customer:

The communication to the customer of the benefits and value is key to ensure that the customer perceives the value of your offering. To be able to properly communicate the value, you need to have a structured approach in finding customer's needs or problems to link them to the features of your offering to identify the benefits and unique selling proposition. Finally, quantifying value or in other words calculate a numerical impact of those benefits to clearly show what is in for the customer and hence perceive the value.

If you want to learn more about this, you can download my free E-BOOK

What does keep your customer awake at night?

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 10:04:03 GMT

In the last years value-based selling or value-based pricing have been coming up as a more and more crucial topic for companies especially in the chemical industry to differentiate and increase their profitability. In a lot of case there is a belief that taking an existing product adding next to it some additional service or equipment elements to form a packaged offering or so-called solution and raise prices will be leading to value-based selling. Unfortunately value-based selling means something completely different: In order to perform successfully value-based selling, you need to start from the customer end. Value-based selling is clearly a customer centric approach. This means that you do need to start talking to your customers to identify what are their needs. In short you could start by asking your customer: “what does keep you awake at night?”.

By identifying customer´s real needs you will able also to determine what are the benefits that your offering can bring to them as well the value behind it. Please do not assume what are the needs of your customers, but ask them! Do not forget that if customer´s needs aren´t answered by your technical features and capabilities, those features will stay as features and will definitely not be perceived by your customers as benefits. And if your customer is not perceiving the value of your offering, he will not be willing to pay for it.

Typically in chemical industry, companies sell their key offering, their manufactured product portfolio in means of € per kg or ton. By doing this the seller is not taking at all in account any customer needs and related benefits which could be provided. A common excuse why sellers aren´t using value-based approach is the high level of resource and time required to apply it.

Why should you be doing value-based selling, if it does take more investment and time from the supplier perspective?

Focusing clearly on customer needs, and the value linked to the benefits, will allow the seller to create more value and differentiation for the customers. By clearly articulating a value proposition and demonstrate a value through clear quantification, a seller would be able to reach higher prices and thus higher profitability for his offering. The process of quantifying a value for a customer case can be summarized in different steps:

Identify the benefits
Select the key benefits
Assess the value or cost savings generated compared your offering to a benchmark being either the current situation or a competitive technology.

This value quantification will provide several benefits for the preparation of the negotiation with the customer:

During the quantification process, the sales person will be able to understand the sensibility or elasticity of his price and cost impact from customer´s perspective and will be able to adjust the price tag by repeating several iterations.
Mainly the sales person in charge of going through the negotiation process with customer´s buyer will have a higher confidence since he/she has a better understanding of the benefits and value which could be given to the customer and be able to defocus the discussion from the price per unit.

This value determination process will help also the sales person to articulate and communicate the value to customer´s stakeholders and thus support customer to perceive the value of your offering. The value verification through articulation is a critical aspect in demonstrating the value to the customer.

In order to support sales to generate such value quantifications simple tools adding up costs and revenues for your offering and the benchmark (either current customer´s situation or alternative competitive technologies).

As described earlier, value based selling is requiring intensive resourcing to be able to identify customer’s needs, determine a value proposition and its quantification thus this makes it clear that a clear focus need to be defined from a customer as well as application or industry point of view. One size fits all doesn´t work for Value-based selling, thus it is required to well select the right customers, industries or applications as well as the sales channel and its earning logic. Customer segmentation, sales channels and thus resulting business model are critical elements to be defined in order to make value-based selling successful.

What does keep you awake at night?

Great features are enough sell value, do you agree?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 10:03:17 GMT

As the second blog in the series on value-based selling, I am going to focus on benefits mapping and share some thoughts and hints on how to deal with benefits.

In many projects I have been working with various sales and marketing teams, I have asked the teams to brainstorm about the benefits of a product or solution and typically a long list of features is written down on the whiteboard. This is unfortunately often the case that features and benefits get mixed up.

A very simple reminder to identify how to get to the benefits:

Benefits do not exist without features

answering customer's needs.

That means that even you have a product or a solution with great features to offer, only they become benefits if a customer has needs.

Of course, not all the features are relevant to provide a benefit to customer´s needs or problems, therefore it is key to understand what is the USP, Unique Selling Proposition, of your offering. You might have heard about USP, but what does it mean exactly?

In simple terms, the USP or Unique Selling Proposition is what features provides the key benefits to your customer and make the difference compared to your competitor(s) or the current situation at your customers. Obviously this USP should answer the key needs and hence show key benefits to your customer. While reading this sentence, I suppose you already understand that the USP:

Might differ from customer to customer
It is critical that you understand your customer's needs and/or problems.

So now that we have briefly touched the reasons why benefit mapping is so important, let’s look at an easy way how to map those. Let me share a simple 5 steps method that I used in many cases to structure the discussion with the sales and marketing teams and that you can use for your brainstorming when preparing a meeting with customers where you aim to apply value-based selling.

I would always recommend to focus on the customer and list the possible needs that your customer might have
As the second step, I would list all the features that you’re offering has. This part is typically the easiest.
As the next step, I would link the features that answer the needs and translate those pairs into benefits.
Now having done work in « isolation » meaning away from your customer, it is paramount to talk to your customer to understand what are the most important benefits that will answer his/her needs. That will help you to find the key USP.
As last you need to benchmark this USP against a competitor(s) or current situation at your customer to compare and estimate the level of differentiation of your solution.

Once all the benefits, customer’s needs and USP are summarized your have a great overview and understanding of your customer. That will help you in the next steps to build the value proposition and the relevant value quantification.

You can learn more about the method on how to identify customers needs in my free Ebook or in my previous blog.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks, I am

publishing some more blogs about value

proposition and value quantification.

Looking forward to your comments and feedback!

How many of you are in front of or in the middle of a change management initiative?

Sat, 24 Aug 2019 21:08:30 GMT

How many of you are in front of or in the middle of a change management initiative?

You might have been asked to take the lead or being part of change initiative in your organization and aren´t yet sure how to tackle this nice challenge. In last 10 years, I have been working in different functions and running many projects or programs related to R&D, Marketing or Commercial Excellence. Building on a previous blog on change management and the experience I gathered while participating or running many change management initiatives some key learning. I would like to share some thoughts and little practical tools to help you to get started in your initiative. When I started to work in roles related to change management I would have wished to get such hints.

As mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, there are three key aspects to make a change initiative successful: Leadership, WIIFM and the consequent communication. Let´s walk through those one by one:

Leadership needs to walk the talk, demonstrating to the organization what is the expected behavior or change what is expected from the crowd. Of course as change manager being typically in the middle management it is easier said than done. Since it is a rather uncomfortable situation to tell your boss or boss of bosses what is the behavior you are expecting from the top management. Unfortunately there is no way around for a successful change management initiative. So the best way is to start yourself as a change agent to behave as you expect the others to and then providing feedback to the leadership team in a of course diplomatic approach will support further the development towards the desired behavior.

To support the understanding of your leaders I like to use one simple tool: the persona canvas. You can find some examples of canvas under: https://strategyzer.com/canvas

What is in for me? So how are you going to find out what others are expecting from your initiative? There are different techniques to get towards gathering this understanding. Typically I start to reach out to my closest network to get a first picture of what could be expected. This first step will help to collect the main positive aspects but also some of the possible show stoppers. While doing this your network and you need to put your feet in the shoes of your different stakeholders to understand what might be the benefits of your initiative as well as the elements which might create resistance obviously. Thus a stakeholder analysis as a first step is critical. Here naturally you should look at this with the glasses of the stakeholder or possibly even perform some interviews: avoiding assumptions is the key recommendation. The analysis of the stakeholder isn´t enough, this is the right starting point, however the situation might change. Thus you do need to manage those stakeholder based on the findings and monitor the change of perception and resistance during the process of change to be able to adjust your plan adequately.

To support the understanding of key stakeholders I like to use one tool: the team charter canva and then use a more generic stakeholder analysis to understand the support and resistance to be expected. You can find some examples under: https://strategyzer.com/canvas

· Change Management & Communication plan: Once the stakeholder analysis done, you can derive the change and communication plan from it. Do not forget to consider the culture difference in your analysis and plans. There is a great quote from Peter Drücker well summarizing this: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Keep in mind that change management is only done one and then it is ready. Change management is a continuous process, having several iterations based on the findings identified along the initiative. In order to consider the continuity of the change the communication plan needs to take this in account. Critical here is to ensure that you are following the plan and do not stop in the middle of the process because it feels that everything is working fine. This will probably lead to some challenges.

My recommendation here is to use some basic tools from the coaching corner such as the GROW model as well as active listening.

If you like to learn more follow the link: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_89.htm

This should be giving you a great and simple starter kit for your change management initiative.

Looking forward to get your thoughts and experiences

Why do we have one mouth and two ears?

183:784491583 (Steve Laborda) — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 20:25:01 GMT

How critical is it to understand your customer's needs and problems to best create value for your customer and capture most value for your company?

Based on my experience collected over the past 15 years, understanding customer's need and problems are really critical. In my early days, I based my discussion with customers on the input provided by my colleagues as they told me they know the customer and his/her needs. Guess what: yes, I failed as my customers were not buying into the proposal as they were not seen as relevant. After these initial failures, I started to ask questions during the customer meetings and realized how powerful that is and that I need to work on developing my technique to ask questions.

I want to take it directly here away: understanding your customer doesn't mean that you make suppositions because you believe that you know your customer. Yes, that might be a good starting point, but it is really important to ask your customer directly to get all the needed insights to determine the needs or problems of your customer. One key quote that I keep in my mind and telling to sales teams to remind me and the teams to listen more than talking while being at the customer:

Pay attention to and use the natural ratio: 2 ears and one mouth

The question obviously is how do you approach this. As you can understand, you cannot just visit your customer and start to ask questions. You need to approach this in a prepared and structured manner to get most out of the interaction with your customer without awaking the feeling that it is an interrogation.

So I would like to share with you what I have been using successfully the last years. This is not the only method, but I have been using, practicing this approach in many projects and cases. I have been looking at an approach/method that emphasize active listening and questioning techniques. Thus, I have been using the GROW model to structure the discussion with my customers to identify the needs and problems. The GROW model is originally coming from coaching methods and as understanding customers means more listening than talking as well as asking the right questions.

The acronym GROW stands for: Goal, Reality, Options and Will do. You will find more related to GROW in the Ebook, customer needs identification and value-based selling. It will give you some more insight on the how to structure the discussion and how to ask the right questions to determine customer needs and problems. You can even learn more as it contains many tools and tips and tricks that I have collected during my career to develop your value-based cases.

By finding the real needs and problems of your customer, you will be able to define the relevant benefits hence the related value that can be created for your customer.

Stay tuned as I will be publishing more of these blogs and sharing my experience as well as insights on how to approach pragmatically and practically your value-based selling cases.

Download the E-book HERE

If you have questions, want to share your experiences or feedback on the Ebook, feel free to comment this article or to send me a message.

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The recession is coming, so are you ready to cut jobs?

Don’t under-estimate the impact of culture when working on customer cases.

Why Sales and Marketing should not stay in their silos?

« Can you please prepare a brochure for my customer… ?»

Are you ready for the recession?

The 5 simple steps to create a strong value speech

Dont be stupid! Chase every single opportunity!

Are you SMART with your customers?​

Success or perfection?

In the future, we won't need a sales force anymore...?

It is too expensive!!!

What does keep your customer awake at night?

Great features are enough sell value, do you agree?

How many of you are in front of or in the middle of a change management initiative?

How many of you are in front of or in the middle of a change management initiative?

Why do we have one mouth and two ears?

How critical is it to understand your customer's needs and problems to best create value for your customer and capture most value for your company?

Are you SMART with your customers?