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

Value Statements

Value Statements get you into the game, and to do that, they need to consist of four components:

1. Critical Business Issues: Goals, challenges, initiatives, or anything that is important at the E-M-O level on which you plan to focus your Value Statement. This is about relevance.

2. Area of Improvement: This includes the name of your solution, the part of the customer’s organization that it will affect, and the operational nature of that impact. It is about operational improvement.

3. Business Impact: This part of the Value Statement translates operational improvement into business value. It is about connecting your solution’s impact to the customer’s critical business issues.

4. Credibility: Outlines your company’s track record, references, experience, and/or expertise to ensure that you will be able to deliver the business impact identified. This is about customer confidence.

You need to focus on relevant customer business issues at the right organizational level with both solution clarity and supplier credibility.

Now, let’s dive into a sample Value Statement. Assume that you are an account manager for a software company that specializes in retail solutions. Your target customer is a movie theater company with 100 locations and 1,000 screens that generates about $500 million in annual revenue. Your objective is to sell your company’s new point-of-service (POS) software solution that would operate the movie theaters’ food and beverage terminals. You will ...