Positioning, Value, and Objection Handling

0:01 welcome to the positioning show where we discuss topics related to the practical application of positioning for Marketing sales and product teams I'm April Dunford a consultant author and the world's leading expert on positioning for B2B technology companies hey everybody welcome to another edition of the positioning show with me April Dunford I got a topic I want to cover this week it's a thing that comes up with a lot of clients when I work with them on their positioning

0:28 and it has to do with the difference between value and objection handling so let's let's recap a little bit on what value means and then we'll talk about what objection handling means so in my positioning process when we're going to position something we start with um competitive Alternatives so competitive Alternatives uh that's the answer to the question what would a customer do if you didn't exist so there are two types of competitive Alternatives there's the

0:58 status quo or whatever the customer is using today so that could be an Excel spreadsheet it could be I'm going to do it manually with people it could be an old Legacy thing that they've had for a long time or it could be a product that just didn't work out for them for some reason um so there's first of all that's the status quo that's the thing you're replacing and then the second thing you need to beat in order to win a deal is

1:22 you need to beat anything that ends up on a short list against you so normally when we think about competitive Alternatives they fall into those two bu ETS status quo um short list competitors so we look at that and then we look at well what makes us different so what are the things that we have that the Alternatives don't have and usually when I do this with a cross functional team we'll fill up whiteboards full of stuff

1:48 that we can do that the competitors can't do and some of that is features like so some of it will be ah we've got this need AI thing and the other guys don't have it or we have um you know particular feature or capability that the other folks don't have we start with capabilities so that we can handle value later now when we're going down that list of capabilities not everything is a feature of the product some of those

2:12 things are capabilities of the company so maybe you do pricing in a different way than the competitor does maybe you have a Professional Services team and the competitor doesn't do that maybe you adhere to a particular standard like sock 2 or Hippa or one of these standards that are out there and the other guys aren't necessarily uh adhering to that standard or they don't necessarily you know they haven't passed that standard it could be a big range of

2:39 things so we have U capabilities of the product as well as capabilities of the companies we have this big long list of things now we'll usually start this exercise by going down the list of features and translating it to value and how we do that is we ask the question so what so we'll start with the big crunchy things that we know are really differentiating so we'll say okay we have this key feature in our product that no one has

3:10 so what why does a customer care what is the value that that feature enables for a customer's business and then we'll go down the list and we'll see if there are value themes that pop out because we may have a long list of different iated capabilities but we don't necessarily want to end up with a really really long list of value points because a customer is not going to be able to remember all that stuff so

3:38 what we really want is we want to get to one two maybe three value themes or value buckets so we'll start with the big big capabilities we'll translate that to value and then often what we see is a lot of the smaller differentiated capabilities just map to one of the buckets that we've already established now when we do this exercise sometimes we'll have some things that don't neatly fit into a bucket uh but

4:09 they're important and they're important for a lot of reasons they're important because customers bring them up in sales calls they're important in that we wouldn't be able to win a deal without them um but they're not necessarily mapping to our real value theme so let me give you some examples of that so it would be things like almost every company I've worked with they'll say we we do a great job on support we've got fantastic support when

4:37 we survey our customers they're really happy with support it gets really great rating we you know we we've got support our support is way better than everyone else now obviously customer support is really important um it's particularly really important once the customer has bought from you and I would say it's one of the main things that gets you a renewal and we'll talk about that in a second but it may not be what I would call Pure value

5:08 for a customer that is looking to buy you so here's what I mean by that ask yourself this question would the customer care about this if they hadn't already decided to buy you for other reasons so all things being equal if the only only thing you had was great customer support would they buy you not necessarily the other thing is that with something like customer support it's a little bit hard to measure it's a little

5:40 bit hard to definitively say our support is better than the other guys now you may have something that does make your support better than the other guys like maybe you have 247 support and the other folks don't then I would say maybe the value there the value theme might be we could support a company that's International better than anybody else but we really need to look at is this thing value on its own another thing that comes out on this

6:07 is um some companies will have spent a lot of time uh making it really easy for a customer to adopt their software so let's say we have some kind of enterprise software it's not you know a super easy thing to deploy so we have a Professional Services team that's going to help you do that deployment we may have invested in some money and doing a bunch of pre-built Integrations so that you don't have to code from scratch the

6:34 integration to all the stuff that you the company has across the Enterprise and then we might do some things like maybe we've got some special training so that users can get on boarded really quickly these are often what I would say fall into a bucket of objection handling rather than pure value so the reason we invested all that money into that is the objection is hey that thing you got it sounds really good but it sounds kind of

7:03 hard to deploy and then you handle that objection by saying don't worry we got a Professional Services team we have training we have pre-built Integrations that's why we do that so would I if if it's purely handling an objection meaning a customer says hey I like what you do but you don't adhere to this standard so I can't buy you oh I like what you do but it looks like it might be really hard I like what you do do but

7:30 we really can't afford it and we don't like that pricing model I like what you do but um I I I wish you did a better job of you know how are you going to actually support all my people in all different time zones in different languages these things in my mind are not actually value it's not the reason that the customer buys you but that doesn't mean they aren't important of course they're important they're super

7:55 important it's important because you know in some cases customer can't buy you without that um in other cases it might actually be differentiated meaning you're the only one that does it and no one else does it but that differentiation on its own is not enough to convince a customer to buy you like the fact that you have pre-built Integrations with everything else well who cares if I don't already want to have your product these are the kind of

8:20 things I don't worry about unless I've already decided oh hey it'd be great to have this thing but sounds like a lot of work things that are specifically objection handling in my mind um live in a different way in your marketing and sales let's use an example of you've got CRM software and you're selling this to the head of sales now your real big differentiated value might be that you have a set of capabilities that

8:51 allow your product to do this really great job of predicting what the actual closed revenue is going going to be in a quarter so you do this really great predictive stuff and so the value for AE of sales is you know you'll know exactly when you're doing reporting up to your management you'll know exactly where the revenue is going to come in in the quarter and you'll be able to do that much more accurately that you could with

9:18 any other CRM so let's say that's the value that's the main value so I've got a u a buyer in the sales department they're really excited about that that's great you know because they got in trouble a couple quarters ago because they thought this was it was going to close this way and it closed a different way and then you know the head of sales looks dumb because they didn't predict that accurately now I'm going to have

9:37 this software and it does that um so but I've also got you know all this objection handling stuff which is you know for sales team that head of sales might worry uh maybe this is going to be really hard to get my salespeople to actually use this thing and if they don't use it then I don't get the benefit of having this better prediction everybody's got to use it so the objection is U you know this is going to

10:04 be hard for my sales team to use and so maybe you have a bunch of cool stuff like you have um special training that's been developed for that you've got special things inside the product to make it really easy for folks to learn uh maybe you've done some things some specific training to get folks off the big incumbent that they're probably using and make it easier for them to make the switch over to this thing and

10:29 you've got some specific things around that so if I think about where does this stuff live in my marketing and sales if I think about the homepage is the homepage going to say hey we've got all this special training to make it really easy for your guys to get on this thing well not necessarily in fact it kind of makes you sound like it begs the question like is this stuff really hard to use why do you have that the thing

10:55 about objection handling is you don't tend to bring it up unless the objection has been raised but you absolutely would have your core value front and center on the website which is we're going to give you this way more accurate Revenue predictability in the quarter now somewhere deeper in the website when you're getting at all the Gory features that you have you might mention oh by the way we've got this stuff because the customer may have that objection as

11:21 they're reading through the thing but we're not going to lead with that because it's not value it's objection handling the same way if we look at our sales pitch in the sales pitch we're trying to orient the whole sales pitch around our differentiated value what's the value that we could deliver that no one else can so we're not going to orient the whole sales pitch around hey we've spent a lot of time making it really easy for end users to adopt this

11:46 thing we're going to make that whole sales pitch Orient around this differentiated value we've got like Hey we're going to give you better visibility into the pipeline more accurate pipeline prediction but then there'll be this objection handling step if you look at at my sales pitch structure we focus on value the bulk of the time we have is focused on value but there is a step to handle unspoken objections which is right near the end of the pitch and that's where something

12:14 like this would live you don't want the customer to leave without without handling that objection because potentially they might leave and say wow you know I really loved what they did and I looked at it but man we're never going to get our people to be able to use that if they say it in the sales pitch you want to handle it then but if nobody says it in the sales pitch and you've got a really good response to it

12:35 it doesn't hurt you to include it in an unspoken objection handling section which is typically near the end of the sales pitch where you would say hey and just in case you're worried about this because some folks are um some folks are worried that their sales team isn't going to adopt this but don't worry we got you here's all the things we've done specifically to make sure that your sales reps are going to adopt it and

13:01 it's going to be great now there's an important aspect to think about when we're thinking about um value versus objection handling and that's related to the Persona that we're thinking about in the deal so let's think about this in a B2B purchase process when we're selling particularly enterprise software to a customer we typically aren't just selling to one person there's like a deal team of sorts and so we will have

13:33 different personas in the deal so let's say I'm selling something to a line of business like I'm selling something to the sales team and my I may have a champion in that deal that is the head of sales or the head of sales operations and that person is responsible for making a short list and figuring out what we should look at and ultimately making a recommendation to the economic buyer who might be the Vice President of Sales or it might even be

14:02 an executive above that but uh the champion is going to make a recommendation to the uh to the economic buyer of what what we're actually going to buy now there's all these other people involved though like they can't just make a decision uh without making sure that it is okay with it and they'll have to make sure the end users are actually going to use it and like it and purchasing might get involved and legal might get involved the stats on this are

14:31 terrifying that a typical B2B um purchase team is like five to nine people so it's some people like to think of it as this giant Committee of people but my experience is it's not really a committee like it's not like a group that sat down and they have a regular meeting and they're doing stuff together in my experience there's a champion and that Champion's job is to run around and make sure that everybody else is okay

14:59 and then make the recommendation to the economic buyer if they're not the economic buyer themselves so if you think about it that way the only Persona that can get a deal done is the champion like if your positioning doesn't resonate for the champion you don't even get on the short list you don't even get to worry about everybody else um and then everybody else is kind of like the department of no like the champion is saying hey we want to do

15:28 this thing but then they got to take it to legal and legal say not unless they have this that and the other thing or you take it to it and they go it's got to be this and it's got to be that and it's got to be really easy to manage and it's got to integrate with the things that we already have or you take it to the end users and the end users say no no we're not going to use this thing we

15:46 don't like it no we don't like it none of these other personas are going to make a deal happen but they can kill the deal so that makes them really important um now let's go back to Value versus objection handling when we're thinking about that the value has to really really resonate for the champion if it doesn't resonate for the champion we don't get on a short list we don't get anywhere near this deal so the champion cares a lot about

16:14 value the economic buyer probably cares a lot about value as well the rest of these people they're just people with objections so the way we handle this in our marketing and sales and in our positioning spe specifically is we're keeping our differentiated value for the champion and the economic buyer we're keeping that at the center and then it's our job to arm the champion to handle the potential objections of everybody

16:44 else so it might say well you know this is no good unless it unless it's sock too compliant and so we tell the champion hey look your it people are going to be worried about whether or not this thing is Su to comp don't worry we got you right or we might say hey legal they're going to worry about this stuff so here's what you say when legal says that or sometimes we actually try to get

17:09 ourselves invited to that meeting where we say Hey you know we're gonna you're going to have a bunch of questions from it they're going to be hard to handle we'd be happy to come in and do that meeting with it so we can help handle those objections I've worked at companies where we've actually built specific um content that's aimed at these other folks in the buying committee but that content is really not focused on value it's really focused on

17:34 the objections from the perspective of that person in the deal committee so again when we think about value versus objection handling you can think about well what's the value for the economic buyer what's the value for the champion and then we can look at all of the other personas in the deal team and say what are their potential objections and are there are things that are on our list of differentiated capabilities that are literally capabilities that nobody cares about

18:04 this except this one particular person on the deal team and they care about it because they have a potential objection well then that's objection handling that's not value the thing to really keep in mind here is differentiated value is what gets you the deal but this other stuff that ends up look like objection handling these are these are ways that you lose the deal or reasons that the company May disqualify you you from getting a deal now whenever I have this discussion

18:34 with companies um it's like everything else on the planet there are exceptions to this rule so I would say in general these things don't end up being our core value but sometimes they do and so I want to talk about that too this is the hard thing about a lot of things when it comes to positioning the in the details of this stuff and whenever you say oh there's a rule and it's always like this there's always an exception anybody

19:06 smart will tell you there's always an exception so this is like that there's an exception sometimes what you've got is a big incumbent vendor that is in the space and that vendor has done a particularly terrible job on something and for some reason everybody in this in the in the space like the customers have decided they've had it with this particular thing and they're going to switch off and find a new vendor now

19:37 it's usually not just one thing sometimes it's a combination of things but I've seen this a couple of times so here's one example once I was in a space and um we were selling uh Erp to midsize manufacturing companies and there was a slice of the market that had been using an incumbent vendor but they had been around since you know the year of the flood these guys and they had stopped investing in the platform they had

20:07 stopped investing in customer support and so what they had was this platform that was getting buggier by the minute it had all kinds of problems and then if you were a customer and you called to get some support on that problem good luck you know nobody would call you back for two days customers were getting extremely frustrated with this and it finally got to the point where a good proportion of these customers were like that's it we're not we're not sticking

20:33 on this thing anymore we're looking for something else now because they had such a bad experience with bugginess and lousy customer support this particular set set of customers were looking for a company that could do everything that the other thing did but their main thing was support like we we really want this Rock Solid support So in that case we did have a spefic pafic value bucket that we did put right in the middle of the

21:02 homepage and right in the center of the sales pitch we bragged about how amazing our customer support was now we had a bunch of very specific things we weren't just saying hey the support's good trust us man because people had been burned so badly by that they wanted to know the specifics so one of the things we did was we had a dedicated support person for each customer account so you didn't just get you know a support email or a

21:30 support phone number to call you had an actual person that was your dedicated person and then we had a service level agreement and support that we guaranteed that you were going to get a response to your support request within two hours so there were very specific metrics put around on this thing um to handle this thing with support and then we had um some outside testing agency look at our code quality and produce a report to

21:59 talk about how few bugs we had this code and the code was super high quality According to some third party standards body that looked at that and then we had invested some time in looking at customer satisfaction and we could talk about customer satisfaction and then we had super happy customers and not just super happy customers saying they were happy about everything which they were but we had super happy customers saying you know what's so great about these

22:25 guys it's that rock solid code and that amazing support so that we were running right at the thing that this customer had looked at so there are exceptions to this and usually it's because there is a competitor and generally the incumbent or the number one in the market has done a particularly bad job at a specific thing and so that's leaving themselves open to you know a competitor to come in focus on the part of the market where

22:56 that thing is really important in the and the incumbent is falling down on that then we can come in and we can actually use that as value instead of objection handling this stuff is hard man like if it was easy uh you wouldn't be sitting here listening to my podcast or watching me on YouTube you'd be on a beach drinking out of a coconut because you'd have this all figured out um but this stuff isn't easy and so whenever you're

23:22 doing this kind of work you need to lean back a little bit and think about this I think this issue of what actually value versus what is there and it's important and we want to talk about it but what we're really doing is just handling objection I think it's a really important thing to think about if you're working with a group of people and you're working through this stuff so you may get to the point where you've got to

23:45 really sit down and sort through what's value what's objection handling and make the decision on the two things anyways that's it for this week uh thanks for joining me as always a couple of things uh the podcast was on a little bit of a Hiatus for a while but now we're back in Action so you can expect one of these every couple of weeks I've got some interesting guests coming up too that I'm really excited about but you'll see

24:06 those when they come and hey if you like this podcast I would love it if you you know give it a rating or give it a review uh this is how people actually find out whether or not a podcast is good so I would appreciate that um anyways uh until next time thanks so much for joining me bye [Music] oh [Music]