If you want to get out of the rat race of thinking you need more and more leads and more and more prospects to increase your sales, you should start by focusing on your prospect rather than your product.

Most small businesses sell to their prospects based on what their product or service is; some take the next step and sell based on what their product or service does. But only a few take the final and biggest step and sell based on the outcome the customer gets by using the product or service.

It’s understandable that you’re leading by telling people about your product. After all, that’s what you’re selling, right?  It’s also understandable that you believe that if your prospect just understands what your product does, he’ll buy it.  After all, it’s evident that it’s the best product for him, right?

Well, no. Wrong on both counts. You’re really not selling a product – you’re selling a way to make things better for your prospect. You are helping him solve a problem, so you might think you are selling a solution to that problem, and in one sense you’re right. But if you think it through carefully, you’ll realize that what you are really selling is an outcome – a difference in the way he is able to run his business that increases his profits. And that’s all your prospect really cares about – your product and what it does doesn’t mean anything to him except as a vehicle for delivering the outcome he wants.

It’s the outcome that provides the value for your prospect. And it’s the value of the outcome around which you build your value proposition and competitive differentiation. Let’s look at the steps you can take to arrive at a powerful value proposition that will eliminate your competition and transform your product or service from a “nice to have” to a necessity.

First, think about the critical problems you are solving for your current customers, and why they see these problems as central to their business success. Be sure you identify the problems they actually think are important, not the ones that you believe they should think are important. Then figure out what your customers wanted to accomplish when they bought your product –that’s the outcome that you want to concentrate on as you build your value proposition.

Second, figure out who in your prospect’s company needs to accomplish that outcome. That is the person that will be interested in listening to your story.

Third, quantify the dollar impact on your prospect if this outcome is not accomplished. Your job in selling is to help your prospect figure out what that impact is and put a dollar amount on it. That is the real value of the outcome you are providing, and it’s that value that will justify the investment you are asking them to make in your product or service.

When you have accomplished those three steps, you will have become prospect-focused instead of product-focused, and will be able to sell based on the outcomes you provide rather than on the features and functions of your product.  You will have differentiated yourself from your competition.

Here’s the important point: Your new value proposition is only going to work on that small segment of the market where you can solve that critical problem. Generating leads and prospects outside of that segment won’t help a bit – in fact, it will hurt you because you’ll  waste time following them up that you could spend in the segment where your value proposition is making things easier. You will do much better by tightly focusing on the small segment where you are solving real problems and your competition is still selling products.

You’ve taken the first step in tightening your focus. You can find more detail in Chapter 1 of my book, “Small Changes.”

We’ll talk about how to implement this new sales approach in the next segment of this series.

What do you think? Leave a comment and start a conversation.