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Create a Strong Selling Story to Reach the Right Customers
Many companies spend a lot of time and money selling a story to an industry without spending enough time evaluating what that industry needs from them. How can you develop the right selling story if you don’t understand your customer’s needs?
At Bizmanualz, we see a lot of business owners who confuse their own perception of their value with that of their customers. Frankly, it doesn’t matter what you think of your product or service if your customers’ don’t see it that way.
Creating a Value Strategy for a New MarketAdvanced Tooling Solutions, a Boeing spin-out, had already fabricated and tested a prototype tool that would save automobile manufacturers time and money. But the team was unsure about how to sell into the automobile industry.
Dan, now VP of sales and marketing for Bizmanualz, met with ATS to work on the company’s value proposition—the selling story that describes what value the company is providing its customer. Dan documented the team’s assumptions about the economic challenges of automotive suppliers, thus gauging their presumptions about the problems the new technology would address.
Dan and the team then took the draft value proposition to the automotive manufacturers and suppliers to test the value story’s validity. The team learned that issues varied depending on the position of who they talked to—manufacturers, suppliers, engineers, or marketing executives.
After speaking with the manufacturers, the ATS team realized they needed to aim their story-selling efforts at the suppliers instead. Generally, the automobile manufacturers buy parts, not tools that fabricate parts. The new tool would have to be proven in suppliers’ production lines.
Tell Your Value Story with Specific Customers in Mind
Having gained concrete market intelligence through the process of value proposition testing, Dan and the team could justify shifting the focus of the value story from manufacturers to parts suppliers.
Dan and the ATS team worked with suppliers and were able to test the new technology on actual supplier lines. Discussing the selling story with suppliers, they learned that by saving them time and money, they could differentiate their product in the highly competitive automotive component business. So the team adjusted their selling strategy to stress those cost and flexibility advantages in their selling story.
“We got into this as a technical team,” ATS team leader William Smith said. “Not having made lots of sales calls, we did not understand the selling process. We did not understand what we needed at each step in the sale.”
But as Dan and the team jointly engaged parts makers and automotive executives in discussions around their particular economic situation, the team gained the insight to tailor its sales approach. The focus shifted to be most relevant depending on the perspective of the particular customer.
“Our early pitches had too much information, too many details. And it was confusing for our audience. [Dan] helped us be clear, simplifying on key messages for the audience at hand,” Smith said. “It’s not just about feeling good about a meeting and agreeing to meet again. It’s about actually getting something out of the meeting.”
New Selling Story, New Strategic Growth BusinessNow focused on providing cost and time advantages for leading automotive component suppliers, Advanced Tooling Solutions offered suppliers an opportunity to invest plant time and expertise in a test of the new tooling. Two accepted. The tests helped the tools become qualified for production-rate manufacturing.
The team gained valuable experience on live parts manufacturing lines that will validate the method for rate production and further refine the team’s sales and marketing focus.
If your company is having difficulty entering into a new market, or if you are unsure about the perspective of your customer, creating and testing a value proposition is essential.
For more information about how Bizmanualz can help you create and test a relevant and customer-focused value story, contact us or visit our Value Proposition web page.
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This and more articles like this can be found at www.bizmanualz.com. This article may be reprinted freely as long as this resource box is left intact.
