Value Positioning – You Need To Be Able To Position With Compelling Value
If you can’t position your value to a customer, you’re going to struggle to close the sale. To put things in the simplest possible terms, client value has critical elements to it—recognition, realisation and ROI. Firstly, clients must be able to recognise the value before you do the work, secondly, they’ve got to understand the value during delivery, and finally, the client’s ROI must be clear once the work is completed.
When it comes to client value, it is critical to ensure transparency of activity and associated value as work streams are delivered. When it comes to the first element of client value—the perceived value before you’re engaged—this is often the stage where there is most opportunity to differentiate and demonstrate a compelling approach. It is also the stage at which the majority of opportunity is missed. The reason for this is that it can be very challenging to position in a way that removes perceived risk, demonstrates clear value and engages the potential customer to go with you on the journey—all at the same time.
When it comes to consulting, there is an automatic and additional pressure because there is often a low level of trust across the industry. This means you have an additional hurdle to overcome before you’re even out of the starting gate. The perception of the consulting industry means that before you even have a conversation with someone, the likelihood is that they don’t trust you. This problem is not unique to consulting, but it is an issue of which you need to be cognisant. It will help considerably if you have managed to realise some level of trust before you engage, through such things as your marketing approach.
In order to position effectively, the customer needs to be able to clearly define what their problem is, rather than you clearly defining the solution you’re trying to sell them. The work that you are providing is not about your solution, it’s about their problem. However, the two things need to clearly match.
If you’re not identifying the customer’s needs, understanding those needs and framing those needs in a way that is clear, concise and fully agreed upon, then there is going to be no point in talking them through the solution.
Quite often, we see consultants positioning by telling clients that they’re going to solve a particular business issue, or set of issues, and then giving the client the price for solving that issue. This is often aligned to the consultant’s core skills, experience and comfort zone.
But unless there is absolute clarity about the journey, from where you are now to what the world looks like when the problems are solved, how long it’s going to take, what the benefits will be at each point, and what the destination is, you’re going to lose opportunities. You need to create absolute clarity, because you must remove the perceived risk and do this in a way that engages your potential client on the journey.
On top of this, if a prospective client thinks that what you’re talking about makes sense, and it’s the best approach that they’ve ever heard, if they don’t trust you on a personal level, they’re still not going to proceed.
As a consultant, when it comes to new client relationships, you’re likely going to be starting with a low level of trust, because there’s a background fear that carries over from the poor reputation that consultancy can sometimes have in the industry. Again, this is where your marketing machine is critical.
As a professional service provider, you’re only doing one thing—you’re selling money. Money is a universal language. Every business runs on it, in one way or another, either through generating more revenue from a sales perspective, or delivering more profit to the bottom line through better business processes. This means that breaking down positioning to the simplest elements, the client is always buying trust, and the consultant is always selling money and return on investment.
The solution doesn’t matter to the client. Consultants get so fixed on their solution that they lose sight of the fact that the client doesn’t care about the solution. They care about fixing their problem, because fixing the problem will generate more resilience for their business, whereas the solution you provide is simply the means to that end.
This means that, from a positioning perspective, right from the first conversation with a potential customer, you are there to really understand the world from their perspective, before you can think about whether you can help them or not—and you may not be able to help them—it’s really going to depend on your capability, the tools you have at your disposal, and the expertise you have access to, in relation to the problem they’re trying to solve.
In the process of you developing an understanding of the client’s problem, the client also better understands the problem. Often, they won’t have the problem completely nailed, unless it’s something very niche and very specific, such as needing a new electronic control. But generally speaking, it’s very difficult for a customer to have absolute clarity about what the problem is and what’s driving that problem, due to all the interrelated business complexity. Therefore, a critical part of the opportunity conversion process is bringing clarity vis-à-vis the problem to the potential client.