Inflexion Point: Introducing the Value Selling System®

introducing the
value selling system®
inflexion-point strategy partners
www.inflexion-point.com
extensively revised for 2018
Updated 28-Dec-2017

1
introducing the value selling system®
Today’s B2B buyers are wrestling with potentially risky decisions and
often-confusing options. It’s become common, after months of
consideration, for buyers to decide to just stick with the status quo or
(in the absence of any meaningful differentiation) to buy on price and
choose what appears to be the least expensive offering from a set of
apparently similar solutions.
This is a current and urgent problem for everyone involved in complex
B2B sales. Hardly a week goes by without yet another new study
confirming a troubling pattern of lengthening sales cycles, declining
sales win rates, increasing price pressures, and a growing performance
gap between the best sales people and the rest.
It’s no wonder that B2B CEOs and sales leaders are asking: how can
we do a better job of targeting, identifying and engaging the right people
in the right organisations, differentiating ourselves from all their other
options, and persuading the prospect to commit to our solution?
a fresh perspective
Einstein famously observed that “we cannot solve our problems with the
same thinking we used when we created them”. Many organisations
have tried to implement “better” sales processes, with varying degrees
of success. Telling our sales people to sell harder clearly isn't working.
We’re convinced that what is now required is a change in focus to
facilitating our prospective customer’s buying journeys.
If we’re to achieve this, a fresh perspective is clearly necessary - one
that focuses on understanding what each of the key stakeholders in
each of our key prospective customers are most concerned about, and
what we can do to help them deal with it. And that is exactly what the
value selling system® is designed to achieve.
focus on complex sales
Our typical clients are B2B-focused tech-based businesses in “scale-
up” mode with fast-growing sales organisations, although our value
selling principles have also been very successfully applied to well-
funded high-growth start-ups as well as the more entrepreneurial
business units of well-established organisations.
Our value selling system® is optimised for complex B2B sales
environments with lengthy often-complicated customer buying
journeys that involve multiple decision-makers. The system seeks to
equip every member of your sales organisation - from your most
experienced veteran to the most recent new recruit - to progressively
create, capture and confirm your unique value in every customer
interaction.
“We cannot solve our
problems with the
same thinking we
used when we
created them”
ALBERT EINSTEIN

2
establishing your unique value
For years, sales and marketing organisations have promoted “value
added strategies” in an effort to justify premium pricing tactics, but the
harsh reality is that many of the so-called benefits turn out to be utterly
irrelevant for most of their intended targets. These ineffective “fake
value” strategies have often simply served to conceal or falsely justify
unnecessary cost and complexity.
When we talk about “establishing your unique value” we mean that
every interaction between the buyer and the seller must help to create,
capture or confirm some tangible and useful exchange of value (no
matter how small) between all the involved parties.
It also means that over the lifetime of any successful buyer-seller
relationship everybody involved should feel that a reasonable balance
has been achieved between value given and value received.
We believe this is the fundamental foundation of any win-win buyer-
seller relationship (and the philosophical basis of the value selling
system®), and it has a number of critical implications for every B2B
vendor:
- It reinforces the need to do thoughtful research before every
customer interaction, so that we can anticipate what we could do that
is likely to be of the greatest value to the prospect
- It requires that every sales person go into every call or meeting with
a prospect or customer with a clear plan for how they intend to
make the interaction valuable for the customer (and a worthwhile use
of their own time)
- It puts a stop to unbalanced “solution selling” style discovery
meetings during which the prospect is asked a series of qualifying
questions which are useful to the sales person but of very little
interest or value to the customer
- It requires that sales people get into a habit of “paying it forward”
by sharing valuable insights and information with their prospects
before expecting them to offer valuable information in return
- It means that both the sales person and the prospective customer
should always feel able to politely disengage at any point if it
becomes obvious that continuing the conversation will not result in
an exchange of mutually relevant value
Over the next few pages, we’ll explain how these key building blocks of
the value selling system® have been designed to equip every member
of your sales sales organisation to progressively create, capture and
confirm your unique value through every significant customer
interaction.

3
the building blocks of value
So - assuming that your goal is to progressively establish your
distinctive value through every customer interaction and to create a
relationship of mutual respect in the process - how can you align, guide
and co-ordinate everyone’s efforts throughout your sales and marketing
and other customer-facing organisations?
Our value selling system® revolves around what we have identified as
the three critical building blocks of value:
[1] target
Our value selling system® is designed to ensure that every member of
your sales and marketing is fully aligned around the critical business
issues you are best at solving, the organisations that are most likely to
suffer from them, the roles that are most likely to be able to champion
the case for change, and the trigger events that are most likely to
cause them to take action.
[2] position
Our value selling system® helps your prospects to recognise they have
a compelling reason to act and gives your sales people a framework
for establishing your unique solution value. The system equips your
sales people to develop personalised value messages for each key
stakeholder, and to establish your compelling differentiation against
all the other options your prospect may be considering.
[3] advance
Our value selling system® gives your sales people a clear planning
framework for maximising the value of their territories, accounts and
opportunities and for aligning their sales actions with their prospect’s
buying decision journey. The system ensures that every member of
your sales organisation understands what they need to know and do
during each phase and the incremental commitments they need to
gain from their prospects to create and maintain momentum.
It’s likely that many of your current top sales performers will already
have worked out how to do many of the above things through a
combination of innate personal talent, constant curiosity and an ability
and willingness to learn from experience. But can you imagine the
impact on revenue if you could ensure that every member of your sales
team intentionally followed the same consistent best practices?
If you decide to implement our value selling system®, we’ll work with
you to extract this accumulated learning, identify key winning habits,
combine them with the latest industry best practice, and package it all
up in a way that makes it easy for every member of your sales team to
think correctly under pressure and to make the best possible choices
at every point in the development of every sales opportunity.

4
[1] target
B2B sales and marketing organisations have an unfortunate habit of
wasting significant resources pursuing prospects that are unlikely to
ever become valuable customers, in part because there is no common
consensus about which opportunities everybody should be targeting.
The “target” module of the value selling system® is designed to
establish company-wide alignment about the issues, organisations and
roles you have chosen to focus on, and the trigger events that signal that
your prospects may be ready to actively evaluate their options.
critical issues
Our value selling system® helps you to recognise the handful of critical
issues that you are uniquely good at addressing together with their
symptoms, causes and consequences - enabling you to showcase the
value of your unique capabilities, advantages and outcomes.
target organisations
Our value selling system® enables you to establish ideal customer
profiles that reflect the common demographic, structural, behavioural
and situational characteristics of your most valuable prospects - allowing
you to target the right organisations and disqualify the wrong ones.
change agents
Our value selling system® equips your sales and marketing teams to
identify and engage with the key change agents in these target
organisations: the people that are likely to recognise the need for change
and to have the authority and ability to make it happen.
trigger events
Our value selling system® helps you to define, monitor and recognise
the trigger events that are likely to cause your potential prospects to
realise that sticking with the status quo is not going to allow them to
achieve their future objectives, and that they need to take action now.
clarity of focus
In the immortal words of US sports coach Yogi Berra, “if you don’t know
where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else”.
Our value selling system® enables you to establish absolute clarity
about these four critical focuses - issues, organisations, roles and
triggers - and ensures that your entire sales and marketing organisation
is aligned in the same direction and that everybody understands where
they need to focus their individual energies in order to ensure that you
achieve your collective objectives.

5
[2] position
Targeting the right issues, organisations, roles and triggers is a solid
foundation and an excellent start, but it can only take you so far. If you
are to successfully engage your most valuable prospective customers,
you need to position your approach and your solution in a way that
clearly stands out from the crowd and sets you apart from all the
alternative options your prospect may be tempted to consider.
The “position” module of our value selling system® is designed to help
you to tailor and deliver marketing messages and sales conversations
that create, capture and confirm distinctive value for every key
stakeholder in every every prospective customer.
compelling reason to act
Our value selling system® equips your sales people to help their
customers to identify the true cost of the problem, to acknowledge that
sticking with the status quo is not an acceptable option, and to get them
to agree that they have a compelling reason to act.
unique solution value
Our value selling system® helps your prospects to acknowledge that
there is a wide and growing value gap between their current situation
and their potential future destination and equips and enables your
salespeople to showcase your unique solution value.
personalised value messages
Our value selling system® equips your sales people to identify, assess
and engage all the key stakeholders that will be involved in the buying
journey, and to create and deliver personalised value messages for
everybody involved in the decision process.
competitive differentiation
Our value selling system® equips your sales people to establish clear
competitive differentiation against all the other competing options that
your prospective customer may be considering and enables you to
emerge as the obviously superior choice.
unique value position
These four elements of our value selling system® - a compelling reason
to act, distinctive solution value, personalised value messages and clear
competitive differentiation - will equip your sales people to progressively
create, capture and confirm your unique value in every interaction with
every prospective customer.

6
[3] advance
Most traditional “sales processes” are expressed as a linear series of
steps that sales people are expected to follow in order to drive an
opportunity towards closure. But complex B2B buying journeys aren’t
like that - they are often non-linear and frequently involve stakeholders
with different - sometimes competing - priorities and perspectives.
The breakthrough idea behind our value selling system® is that instead of
following a single rigid one-size-fits-all sales process we should instead
be focusing on understanding and facilitating our prospective customer’s
often-convoluted buying journeys. This radical new perspective has
several significant consequences:
clear planning framework
At every level - territory, account, opportunity and interaction - our value
selling system® includes templates for simple actionable plans that
guide your sales people’s actions and enable them to make intelligent
choices about their strategies, priorities and tactics.
buying decision journey
Rather than enforcing an over-rigid and inflexible sales process, our value
selling system® focuses on tracking your prospective customer’s
progress through their buying journey, and enabling your sales people to
facilitate their prospect’s movement through each phase of that journey.
critical sales activities
Based on proven best practice and the winning habits of your top sales
performers, our value selling system® highlights the critical sales
activities that need to be completed at each stage to accurately qualify
the opportunity and facilitate their prospect’s buying decision process.
progressive commitments
Our value selling system® enables your sales people to identify and
achieve the progressive commitments that they need to secure from
their prospect during each phase of the process in order to advance the
prospect’s buying decision and increase their chances of winning.
moving forward together
Unlike many no-longer-effective traditional sales methodologies, our value
selling system® is not about finding clever ways to manipulate your
prospects: it’s about finding constructive ways of collaborating with them
and moving forward together in a spirit of mutual value and shared
commitment.

7
our approach
We follow a well-proven, simple and straightforward process when
working with clients to implement their own unique customised version
of our value selling system®.
benchmark
We’ll start by quickly analysing and benchmarking your current
performance, materials, messages and processes against the latest
industry best practice, and then we’ll present you with a concise set of
prioritised recommendations and use your current data to predict the
range of performance improvement you can realistically expect to
achieve after implementing your value selling system®.
customise
We’ll work with you to co-develop a customised version of your value
selling system® that aligns your sales processes and tools with your
customer’s typical buying journey and reflects your particular
organisation’s situation, circumstances and priorities.
adopt
We’ll introduce your version of the value selling system® to your sales,
marketing and other customer-facing staff in one or a series of highly
interactive training sessions that will harness the the participants’
knowledge and experience to further refine the materials.
improve
From that point on, we’ll be available whenever you need us as a
flexible resource to help you continue your value selling journey, and
to work with you to regularly measure, monitor and refine your
organisation’s value selling programme.
coaching and mentoring
In addition to helping you continuously refine your value selling
approach, we’ll also be available to deliver further training, as well as to
provide coaching and mentoring resources that can help to support
the continual growth of both your team and key individuals.
inflexion-point on-demand
You can continue to work with us on an ad-hoc basis or like many of our
clients you may prefer to subscribe to inflexion-point on-demand,
which provides guaranteed access and a structured programme of on-
going support.
“Sales leaders report
that their biggest
challenge lies in the
inability of their sales
people to connect
their offerings to the
business issues of
buyers”
SIRIUS DECISIONS

8
harnessing the power of analytics
There’s a good reason why sales analytics, according to a number of
recent analyst reports, is one of the fastest-growing areas of technology
investment for B2B sales organisations.
The complexities of today’s B2B buying and selling processes mean
that spreadsheets can no longer provide the rich insights that today’s
sales leaders need if they are to identify where their forecasts and
opportunities may be at risk, or where the most significant opportunities
for sales performance improvement can be found.
Fortunately, analytics are no longer the exclusive preserve of the IT
department - in fact the latest generation of specialised sales analytics
require no IT involvement at all, and can be generating powerful
insights into both historical and future performance in a matter of
hours.
Even better, they come with a rich set of ready-to-run dashboards and
highly visual reports that represent the cumulative learning and best
practice of hundreds of sales leaders who have been asking exactly the
same questions you have of their sales pipelines and processes.
That’s why we’ve chosen to establish a close partnership
with InsightSquared.com, the leading provider of ready-
to-run sales analytics solutions for the salesforce.com
user community.
If you’re a salesforce.com user, we can offer you the
opportunity to trial InsightSquared as part of our initial
benchmarking process. We think you’ll be amazed and
impressed with the amount of information this exercise
will generate about the strengths and weaknesses of your
current sales process and pipeline.
Then, as we work with you to develop, enable and refine your own
customised version of the value selling system®, we’ll help you to turn
analytics into a core element of both the day-to-day management of
your sales processes and your longer-term continuous performance
improvement efforts.
You can learn more about our partnership with InsightSquared here:
www.inflexion-point.com/sales-analytics.

9
embedding value selling in CRM
One of the reasons why so many investments in CRM solutions end up
being regarded - at best - as only a partial success is that traditional
CRM systems are designed to operate more like sales accounting
systems.
Many sales people see these old-fashioned CRM systems as an
unhelpful diversion of their valuable selling time - providing
management with ever-increasing detail about their activities, but
contributing very little to their personal sales effectiveness.
Fortunately, a new generation of sales-process-focused
CRM applications has recently emerged that not only
provide a much better user interface than traditional CRMs
but also guide the sales person in what best practice
suggests they need to know and do at each stage of the
process in order to maximise their changes of winning.
Until recently, this was an either-or choice: implement an
industry-leading but not very process-centric CRM platform
or go with one of the new generation CRM providers but
lose the benefit of the established vendor’s well-developed
ecosystems.
We’re delighted to report that this uncomfortable compromise is no
longer necessary. We’ve partnered with Membrain, widely recognised
as the the #1 sales effectiveness platform for complex B2B sales, to
offer a pre-configured version of our value selling system®.
With the introduction of The Value Selling System® Powered by
Membrain, our clients now have the the choice of implementing value
selling as a complete stand-alone CRM solution, or as a directly
integrated opportunity management module within their existing
salesforce.com instance.
Whichever option you choose, your sales organisation will benefit from
a guided value selling approach that makes it easy for sales people to
make smart choices and implement best practices at every stage in
every sales campaign.
To learn more about The Value Selling System® Powered by
Membrain, visit www.inflexion-point/membrain.

10
I'm Bob Apollo, founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners
and creator of the value selling system®. I've had the good fortune to
work for and with many of the world's leading B2B technology brands
and most successful entrepreneurial tech-based businesses. I'm
grateful for the opportunity this has given me to keep up to date with the
latest B2B sales and marketing strategies and techniques from some of
the smartest brains in the industry.
I'm now spending my time as a consultant to a new generation of
forward-thinking B2B-focused organisations, helping them to implement
value selling principles that are enabling them to outperform their less
progressive competitors and win the battle to engage, acquire and
retain the most attractive customers.
Over the years, I've progressively developed what is now known as the
value selling system®. It's a structured yet flexible approach to
systematically improving sales performance that - as you might expect -
has been continuously evolved to incorporate the latest industry best
practices and research into B2B buying behaviour.
Our clients are typically B2B-focused tech-based businesses in “scale-
up” mode with fast-growing sales organisations, but we’ve also
successfully applied the principles in well-funded high-growth start-ups
as well as in the entrepreneurial business units of more mature
organisations. The common pattern is that our client’s solutions are
almost always carefully-considered strategic purchases with a lengthy
and complex buying journey that involves multiple stakeholders.
If you match any of these profiles and are keen to implement value
selling as a way of taking your organisation to the next level of sales
effectiveness and beyond, we should find the time to talk.
I look forward to learning more about what you are seeking to
accomplish in 2018 and beyond - and helping you to achieve it.
Web: www.inflexion-point.com
Email: bob@inflexion-point.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bobapollo/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bobapollo
Phone: +44 7802 313300
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Inflexion Point: Introducing the Value Selling System®

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