The New Power Base Selling: Master The Politics, Create Unexpected Value and Higher Margins, and Outsmart the Competition

CHAPTER 8

Moving Up the Sales Value Chain

Now my eyes are turned from the South to the North, and I want to lead one more expedition. This will be the last . . . to the North Pole.

—Sir Ernest Shackleton

A company’s value chain is a concept that has been around for a long time. As businesses use a series of steps to manufacture products, each step adds new value. At the end, the finished product has a total value that should exceed the individual value added at each step along the way. This creates a value chain. But how does this relate to selling?

Traditional Stage I and II selling actually do not involve the value chain. During these stages, sellers work to understand what the customer needs, configure a solution, sell the value of the solution to secure the order, and then install it. No real process exists that continually adds value over time. Sometimes, customers know exactly what they want. On other occasions, it is difficult to change or submit an alternative solution once sellers submit a proposal. Buyers evaluate each supplier approach against criteria that will lead to a short list and then select a single supplier. It all makes sense, as customers try very hard to fairly judge each proposed solution’s merits.

Or, does it?

Taking a nontraditional perspective, we ask: Why shouldn’t a proposed solution improve in its value to the customer just as products improve during their production cycle?

Well, for one thing, products in discrete manufacturing are often made of subassemblies ...