AI-Value-Selling Advisor & Co-founder | Axcieve
July 16, 2024 – Reading Time: 4 minutes
Introduction
Value Selling or Value-Based Selling (VBS) focuses on demonstrating the tangible (ROI) and intangible (TCO) benefits of a product or service to customers, rather than just competing on price. By teaching Generative AI into your value selling objectives, you can completely reimagine the ability to articulate your products and services with AI-driven insights and tools. Following are four key components of Value-Based Selling and how Generative AI can transform each one of them:
Main Components of Value Selling
1
Understanding Customer Needs
2
Articulating Value Propositions
3
Demonstrating ROI
4
Comprehensive Quantifiable Business Case
1. Understanding Customer Needs
Traditional Approach: Sales teams gather information through direct interactions, feedback from colleagues (who might have left the business!), and tens of scattered analytics online tools such as Owler, Forrester, HG Insights, Gartner, 6Sense, or LinkedIn that might be out of date, or not significant to your product or service. These data can be also qualitative, which leads to subjective interpretations and takes long time for analysis, a currency that is not always available for your team.
With Generative AI and through Data Analysis capabilities, Generative AI can analyze vast amounts of your historic customer data, including purchase history, preferences, and feedback, years of dead conversations, and more, to uncover deep insights about customer needs. It can draw a timeline history of your customer engagement and with Predictive Insights, AI algorithms can predict future needs and trends, allowing sales teams to proactively address customer requirements.
Example
Speak Customer Language
AXCIEVE AI-Guided Selling with Generative AI can analyze customer interactions and identify trends, values, pain points, and timely benefits of your customers. A customer might be in the eco-friendly features by the time you approach them, or maybe having budget concerns. Either-ways, Your sales team will not be shooting in the dark.
2. Articulating Value Proposition
Traditional Approach: Sales representatives manually craft value propositions based on their understanding and available resources. This results in inconsistency in messaging and a lack of personalization. The sales team needs to keep on a constant update of your organization’s Value Proposition changes, brand guidelines tweaks, and a ton of product changes and feature updates.
With Generative AI, your team can generate highly personalized value propositions based on individual customer data and company propositions. The Content Created with Generative AI can be tailored content that resonates with specific customer segments and needs, ensuring consistency with brand voice and product guidelines.
Example
Sell with them – not to them
AXCIEVE AI-Guided Selling with Generative AI – Using customer data, it crafts personalized email campaigns highlighting the specific benefits a product offers to each customer, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
3. Demonstrating ROI
Traditional Approach: ROI is usually demonstrated using standard metrics and case studies. Sellers are always limited in time and capabilities to customize ROI presentations for different clients based on their specific conditions and objectives.
With Generative AI: Sellers can generate Dynamic ROI Models that simulate the financial impact of a product or service under various scenarios specific to the customer’s context. It can consider multitude of tangible and intangible value generation factors, including stakeholders’ opinions and needs. Generative AI can create compelling visual representations of ROI, making it easier for clients to understand potential gains.
Example
Be their Trusted Consultant
AXCIEVE AI-Guided Selling can generate a detailed ROI report with graphs and projections for a prospective client, showing how their investment will pay off over long time in terms of tangible (cost-savings, financial risks) and intangible (Ex. brand-reputation, compliance) using curated data from 3rd parties. It can benchmark offering against competitors, and quantify Unique Selling Points for the client objectives.
4. Comprehensive Quantifiable Business Case
Traditional, Old, Simple Ways of Generating a Business Case usually follow a Feature-Focused Approach, Highlighting mainly technical specifications. They may have Basic Cost Savings elements, such as lower purchase prices or immediate operational savings. Their are Generic and can’t present benefit that are customized to the specific client’s context.
Qualities of AI-Driven Value-Selling Business case:
- Customer-Centric Value Proposition: Dynamically tailored value proposition to specific needs and priorities of the client, understanding their pain points, and aligning solutions accordingly.
- Holistic ROI Analysis: Incorporating Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), risk assessments, and other factors such as macroeconomics, sustainability impacts, future cost avoidance, compliance with regulations, and strategic growth, and more, over the entire lifecycle of the solution.
- Customized Tools and Visuals: Using customizable ROI tools that allow clients to input their own data and read, listen, and visualize, specific scenarios.
Example
Show Complete Story
Without AI, your team take long time to build business cases like this: “Our product is 10% cheaper than the competition and has a faster processing speed.”
With AXCIEVE AI-Guided Selling and Generative AI, a Business Cases could be dynamically configurable, consider more variables and factors to potentially be something like this: “By adopting our solution, you will save $50,000 annually in operational costs, reduce CO2 emissions by 20%, and enhance your brand reputation with our sustainability certification. “
Conclusion
Integrating Generative AI into value selling revolutionizes the sales process by enabling a deeper understanding of customer needs, company information and history of engagements, opening the door for crafting personalized value propositions, demonstrating precise ROI, and quantifying value in compelling ways.
This synergy enhances the ability of sales teams to convince customers of the true worth of their products, leading to more successful and profitable engagements.
Further Reading: For a comprehensive guide on value selling strategies and case studies, refer to “Value First, Then Price” by Andreas Hinterhuber and Todd C. Snelgrove.