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

Value Expressions

Armed with this E-M-O Model, Stage IV Customer Advisors use a process for packaging and articulating value that is based on customer collaboration up and down the Sales Value Chain. The result is to develop insight into the customer’s business, politics, and culture in order to align your solution with the entire Sales Value Chain.

This manifests itself physically in the form of Value Statements and Value Propositions that are targeted to certain E-M-O customer levels and the business issues, initiatives, or priorities appropriate to those levels. So, as we just discussed in the prior section, the points you emphasize when meeting with operators differ greatly from those that would make sense when addressing an executive.

Value Statements refer to qualitative expressions of value, whereas Value Propositions are quantitative expressions of that same value. The former is more general and best suited to the early phases of a sales campaign when you don’t have a lot of information but need to set up meetings with people to get that information. Value Statements project value to the customer and help highlight the benefit of meeting with you.

As a sales campaign progresses and you gain more insight into the customer’s business, politics, and culture, the ultimate expression of value is when you identify the specific financial impact based on the right assumptions. This brings us back to our earlier point about customer collaboration: a Value Proposition is only as ...