If you have not experienced a drop in sales recently, you might choose to skip this issue. On other hand, if you miss it, you just might find yourself competing with those who learned this technique.

Two things happen in a down market that directly affect every sales professional.

1. Total spending is cut irrationally

2. Buying power moves up organization

The cure for each of these problems is found in Value Selling. Simple features and benefits selling is designed to satisfy needs when client is buying but it's tough to use them with a client who isn't.

Total spending is cut irrationally

In down markets, you will often hear clients complain about their company's 10% across-the-board budget cuts. They explain it to you as if it actually made sense and then use if as an excuse for not buying. It's safe to say that any company that cuts 10% out of every department has failed to take time to analyze their spending needs properly. After all, if you were in a boat that was 10% over weight, would you toss 10% of everything overboard? If you did, engine would stop running and hull would begin to leak!

Your job is to help your clients examine their businesses in such a way that they realize that your offering will actually add money (Value) to their bottom line. Only when we do, will they feel justified in reallocating money to buy your product or service.

There is one major caveat to Value Selling: Your offering must, in some way, actually be able to help client earn or save more than it costs.

Step 1: Develop your case

Imagine you are CEO of your client's company. Even in a downturn, you would gladly give a trip to Aruba to any employee who could show you how to significantly increase sales or cut costs. Your job is to make a case that would earn that trip. Here's how to do it:

a. Understand client's business - You must investigate your client's business as if you were going to buy it. You need to know their "critical numbers", those statistics that every manager watches every day. You need to know how your offering fits into their business and what affect it could have on critical numbers.

We are watching a very fundamental sales management problem played out in Florida elections (this is not political!). It's called BLAME and it can destroy our sales organization from within.

When we affix blame, we immediately stop progress. We can often look at our job descriptions to see problem. In an election, job of elections supervisor is to observe rules and protect rule of law. As a result, when they find tens of thousands of bad ballots, they don't see it as a problem. In fact, they see it as a success. Their job was to set aside bad ballots. It says so in their job description! As a result, finding bad ballots equals doing their job.

But what if job description was changed. What if their job was to ensure that elections accurately reflected will of voters? In that case, bad ballots would be seen as a bad situation and any system that created too many bad ballots would immediately be fixed. In that case, Palm Beach County would have replaced their voting system four years ago when 14,000 bad ballots were discovered.