Fix your offer
We’ve already focused on the Ideal Client Profile (ICP) and connecting with the best aligned prospects and clients. Now we need to hone the commercial offer.
Note: This is not a not a pitch-slap. Not a marketing message…once we have their attention, and have qualified them as an in target prospect, and are nearing scope and proposal stages of the sales process, we have the option of making a commercial offer (scope and price). That’s the purpose of this article.
Being ICP focused is not the offer platform. That would be the equivalent of a soccer fan walking into any soccer stadium on any day of the week trying to buy a ticket, cheering for their team only to have the stadium be empty because there was no game that day. Knowing what and who to focus on does not translate to being able to connect, appropriately and timely.
See my article Down to One for more on connecting with your ICP. To stretch the concept to what your ICP wants, we need to connect their problem, with our solution and tie it tightly to a value that they want…an outcome.
Remember: you can also have the right ICP, right solution, packaged or valued wrong which translates to a wrong offer. Now, what does success look like in the form of fixing your offer?
Start with Value (not yours, theirs)
Working with a business that had a well defined ICP, they came to me because they struggled to maintain year-over-year growth and met stiff price objections in nearly every deal.. Simply, the market didn’t like their offer. Result: 0 sales growth and high customer turnover.
The offer was a front-end discount with a steep increase in a short amount of months after an initial period. Often this approach is a trial offer or a low ticket “try me” offer where the expectation is for the client to see the immense value and ramp up quickly to a high premium price to sustain access to the solution.
Some products and solutions can sustain this type of price-to-value offering because the product is inherently exceptional. Most are not, and are quickly relegated to freemium models or low monthly premiums to grow awareness and adoption.
In this case, the founders did a great job of solving a problem they saw and attaching their price offering to the value they perceived their customers would experience.
I applaud the effort of focusing on the target prospect and what would have additionally served them well would have been to quantify the actual benefit to the client and attach the emotional outcome of tat benefit to the ICP and buyer roles.
Like the soccer fan who attended a stadium on a day without a match, this client had a solution that the market did not attach to a value offering or problem it solved.
All is not lost
A slight pivot allowed large upside growth and long term stability. The pivot, walking back all of the marketing and public facing content that focused on features, and ROI calculators. We had to unwind some of our positioning language in the sales process and case studies.
We learned, quickly, that the problem still existed but the value placed on that problem was rooted in other areas was not as high impact as initially imagined. The market needs to tell you what they value and as salespeople, we need to be good at asking the questions that get the market to tell us that information.
“That moment where you learn how they value a solution to their problem is the watershed moment where you’re reformat your selling hard drive and begin talking to prospects and buyers from a new perspective and point of view. ”
By being focused on the market, we were able to pivot fast and retest. This is how and where marketing and sales should be tightly aligned. When the market tells us that it wants a faster solution, not a cheaper one, receipt of that insight is an economic data point for positioning the offer.
What Happened, specifically?
The market placed a lower value on our solution. First, we honed the key components that made our solution valuable to solve the commercial problem. That meant feature limitation and implementation streamlining to reduce the cost per solution sold.
Next, we reformatted all of the commercial content, outreach, capabilities presentations, collateral, and trade show images to reflect the customer’s challenge and executive impacts of not solving the problem. This built an audience of prospects who self-identified as having the problem they wanted to solve.
We then worked intensely on qualification and documenting the impact as a part of our sales discovery. We had to understand if their problem was big enough to solve and if it was worth it to solve the problem orto focus on other initiatives in their business tat returned a higher internal ROI.
By focusing on the client issue, size of the issue and the impact on the business when that issue was solved, we were able to increase close rates on deals, shorten sales cycles, improve customer satisfaction and reduce customer turnover.
Recap
Will this work for everyone? Absolutely not. Is it worth your time to investigate your market’s valuation of your solution? Absolutely. The idea that your product is not viable because it is not selling should be the leading indicator that you are not aligned or do not have product market fit (PMF).
The knock-on or next thought should be for a leader to consider the offer, structure, incentive and motive for buyers and the value they might receive in their terms when buying your solution. Note the underlined part, '“their terms”, because it refers to how they measure success in their business.
If you are stuck in a price discount discussion with a client regularly, you likely have not pointed to or delivered on enough value in their eyes to be a high-value vendor for the long term. Fix your offer and improve your business (revenue, profit, customer lifetime value).
Happy Selling!