How to successfully talk to customers about business value

In this article we discuss what business value is and some key considerations for talking to your customers about it.

Shark Finesse
April 18, 2023
Articles

How customers perceive the value of your products or services is one of the most important elements of selling in any business. Communicating this value can be difficult as you are trying to explain how your product or service will make a positive difference to customers on an individual basis. We will discuss some of the ways to help you talk successfully about business value to your customers.

What is business value?

Business value can be described as the benefits a business generates for its stakeholders. These stakeholders can be anyone from a customer, client or investor. Business value can be the physical assets your business owns as well as a business’ employees as all of these elements contribute to the overall business value.

Ways to successfully talk to customers about business value

Before starting the conversation with your customer make sure you understand what makes your business different as a whole to others in the marketplace. You should consider what your customer’s value the most and look at weaker aspects of your competitors.

The next thing to do (and in our opinion the most important aspect of this whole process) to successfully talk to customers about business value is to focus on the benefits of your product or service before talking about features and functionality. This will show the value your product or service may bring to your customer, before just describing what the product or service does. Make sure you have the correct tools in place to do this in a collaborative way. At the end of the day, your customer knows their business better than you, so ask them questions about their current business situation and discuss how your solution or service could potentially help. Take a look at the value journey Shark software takes your customer on to get a better understanding of best practice.

Another way to successfully talk to customers about business value (which is also linked to the above) is to ensure that you understand the customer’s needs and listen to their current business problems. Doing this will ensure you can direct them to the right product and reassures them that you are assisting their needs, all with the ultimate goal of being viewed as a trusted advisor by your customer instead of 'just another salesperson'.

A final way to successfully talk to customers about business value is to collect and share testimonials from previous customers. Sharing these with potential leads proves to them how your customers in the past have gained value from your business. This may include creating customer success stories that your potential lead can relate to, proving that other customers have gained value from your business.

For more information on value, examples in the real world, how you calculate it, as well as how to communicate value in business, check out 'What is Value'.

What we do

At Shark Finesse we have developed an enterprise-grade cloud application to help businesses standardise and simplify their value engagements across the entire customer journey.

Shark, a business value engagement platform used by 1000’s of customer-facing teams globally (e.g. pre-sales, sales, value teams, and customer success) is easy to use, intuitive and usable directly with the customer to negotiate the likely business returns from investing in a solution.

By adopting the Shark approach you will fundamentally transform conversations with new and existing customers, close more business, and differentiate from the competition.