How to Add Value to Every Sales Call

A salesperson’s skill can add as much as 50 percent to the perceived value of any product or service. In many cases, particularly in service based industries, it can add much more. A high quality and professional approach is a powerful way to add value and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Many top consulting firms carefully groom and train their senior consultants, knowing that how clients perceive them is as important as the work they carry out.

Everything you do is either increasing your perceived value or detracting from it. Intangible and imperceptible details may have the biggest potential to influence your customer’s perception of quality.

Ten Ways To Increase Your “Perceived Value” Rating:

1. Be Well Dressed – Most business people respect conservative attire more than fashion dressing. Make sure your clothes are well fitting and neatly pressed.

2. Invest in expensive or good quality accessories – These include your pen, watch, briefcase, etc.

3. Have a tidy, neat, well-groomed appearance – Customers will appreciate your attention to details.

4. Practice impeccable manners, politeness and courtesy – Put your best self forward, all the time and to everyone.

5. Never knock the competition – If you do, you decrease your own value.

6. Be on time and deliver everything you promise – You are building your own reputation.

7. Never argue with customers – They may not always be right, but they are always the customers.

8. Look for opportunities to do something extra – Little things mean a lot.

9. Plan and prepare each appointment in advance – Don’t leave things to chance or try to “wing it.”

10. Write “Thank you” notes to each new customer or prospect – “It doesn’t cost anything to say thank you!”

Bottom-Line Benefits

One of the surest ways to add real value in the mind of the customer is to focus your sales presentation around “bottom-line” benefits. Everybody, whether buying for personal or business reasons, can relate to these high value criteria:

• Saving money

• Saving time (which is money)

• Improving satisfaction and quality levels

Build a simple model into every sales presentation to help prospects cost-justify your product or service, showing specific, quantifiable savings in time or money over alternative solutions.

Always make sure that your sales approach adds value by developing the most important bottom-line benefits – features your customers can measure in terms of improving quality above what they now have, or how your products and/or services can help save or make them time or money.