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

Value Relevance

Not all these aspects of value will be relevant to any one particular customer individual. Before we dive into packaging expressions of value to move up the Sales Value Chain, we need to first determine what is relevant and to whom.

Customers measure value differently based on their role and responsibility within an organization. What is of interest to one person may not be important to another. To get a handle on this, let us look at a company structure as a pyramid. At the top are executives (E), in the middle is management (M), and forming the foundation is operations (O). We label this pyramid the E-M-O Model, as you can see in Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1: The E-M-O Model of Value Relevance

Characterizing an organization in terms of levels is not new. In fact, we already looked at the departmental, business unit, and executive levels as they relate to the Sales Value Chain earlier in the book. However, it is helpful to consider where individuals reside within the company hierarchy to get a better sense of how people think and act, what is important to them, and how they might view solution value.

Executive Value

Starting at the top of the pyramid, executives set the organization’s mission, create a vision for success, and oversee every major function in the business, such as production, finance, sales, marketing, engineering, information technology (IT), and human ...