Spice up your value prop: 3 tips to attract more customers

The best way to attract new customers? Make your value proposition attractive.

It sounds obvious, but can be surprisingly hard to do. A good value prop goes beyond a high-level description of your product or service and a list of features - it shows you understand your prospect and leaves them wanting more.

After a while, the value prop that worked so well at first just doesn’t have the same spark anymore. If you’re seeing your sales KPIs plateau, or having trouble retaining sales reps, it’s probably time to try something new in the sales room. Here are some quick tips to help you improve your value prop and spice up your sales life!

Simplify

You might be really stoked on the latest product updates, but a feature dump on a cold call will only overwhelm people.

Imagine that you’re chatting with a handsome stranger and they ask what you do for a living. You’re (hopefully) not going to say: “I sell a software as a service for sales professionals like yourself that shows an organized dashboard of email and call tasks, automatically tracks KPIs, integrates with your current tech stack, etc, etc, etc.” In other words, you’re not going to spell out the functionality up front. You want to make a good impression, to get them to like your product and you as a person, and you want to get their number or set up a time to meet. But you’re not sure that they’ll understand all the jargon.

So how’re you going to explain your job/product/service to this stranger? You’re going to play it cool and make it sound as simple as possible.

Train your reps to do the same with prospects! Keep it simple, play it cool. They don’t care about all the features and functionalities (yet) and you’re much more likely to get a response if you leave them wanting more.

Sales messaging expert, Patricia Mclaren, recommends simplifying your value prop as if you were to explain it to your grandma. Very different imagery, but the outcome of the analogy is the same: simplify, simplify, simplify.

Focus on what your solution “does,” not what it “is”

“So… what does it do?”

When we focus on features, we lose sight of what the prospect actually cares about: how this product is going to help them.

Focus on the outcomes instead. What will happen after the purchase and implementation? What improvement in results and metrics will they see? How will it save them time, money, and/or headache?

Don’t even talk about how to use the solution, or how it works (unless they ask). You want your customers to think about the results, both short- and long-term. This will help you out immensely when you near the end of the deal cycle and get to the stickier conversations like pricing. When the buyer has a clear understanding of the benefits from the beginning, they won’t second-guess at the end.

Inside sales aficionado, Josh Braun, compares this process to the flower and the fireball from the Mario Bros. video game. In the game, Mario snags a fire flower to gain the power to throw fireballs. Which one do we care about more? The fireball because it blows stuff up, obviously.

Talk about the "fireball" - the expected outcome after implementing your solution - in your sales conversations at least 60% of the time to increase prospect engagement and keep deals moving forward.

How To Lose A Prospect In 10 Days

Sending emails and making phone calls is the easy part - writing great emails and having quality conversations takes more time and effort upfront.

If you want to NOT get a response, here’s what you should do:

• Drop just the prospect's company name and title into an email
• Memorize and recite product specs
• Contradict yourself or other company info
• Ignore new email regulations and best practices
• Send blanket emails

Buyers expect more effort from salespeople. Gotta risk it for the biscuit, amirite? Here’s what you should do instead:

• Craft a truly personal message that yields an emotional response
• Tell a compelling story
• Be consistent
• Update and optimize email strategy regularly
• Personalize and diversify your follow ups

It all comes down to putting in time regularly to work on your relationship with your team’s messaging. If everyone takes the time to research each prospect thoroughly, keep the sales story consistent, and stay current, you’ll see ROI as soon as next month.

Make a simple and outcome-focused value prop your sales team’s standard, add in a little more time and effort, and you’ll see more hot deals by the end of the quarter!