Why your clients don’t care about your value proposition

Freud famously asked: "What do women want?

Professional services (and most B2B salespeople) ask themselves "what do buyers want? Unlike Freud, they often think they know the answer.

The received wisdom - very often - is that buyers want "a convincing value proposition".

As John Caddell says in"Another kind of valueproposition

The term 'value proposition' has been in vogue in B2B sales for twenty years or more. In a nutshell, it means that a product to be sold must, in essence, create more money (by increasing revenue or reducing costs) than it costs to buy. "If you buy my gadget for x euros, you'll get back 5 x dollars over the next ten years", or something like that.

...The value proposition is a very logical concept. That's its beauty and its limitation.

Caddell is absolutely right. If you look up "value proposition" in search engines, you'll find common themes: competitive differentiation, best price/value, identifying and satisfying unmet needs, tangible business results. Typical extracts:

To be successful with customers, your company must provide a particular value proposition to a definable market in order to exist... something that can be conveyed in three to five points, three to five sentences, or said in thirty seconds or less.... [the] value proposition is the sum total of the benefits a seller promises a customer in exchange for the associated payment (or other transfer of value)... In other words, the value proposition is what the customer gets for their money.

We keep saying that if you have a compelling value proposition, you 'll sell more. It's the language of homo economicus - rational, linear, deductive, data-driven.

There's just one problem, as Caddell points out: it's patently false. Or, to be more precise, it explains far less buying behaviour than the value peddlers, and most salespeople, like to believe.

What does the data tell us? Do value propositions really work? Jeffrey Gitomer, author of books on sales, put it nicely: "People buy with their hearts, then justify it with their brains.

The late Bill Brooks, with Tom Travesano (in You're Working Too Hard to Make the Sale), summed up a survey of several thousand buyers of products of average complexity in these terms: "People prefer to buy what they need from people who understand what they want. Not from those with the best value propositions."

Professor Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School suggests that 95% of our buying decisions are made subconsciously. Value propositions" ignore this 95%. Zig Ziglar, an old hand in sales, says that "people don't buy for logical reasons, they buy for emotional reasons".

The master of influence, Robert Cialdini (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion), lists six key influencing factors: none of them is data, rational argument or anything resembling a 'value proposition' as defined above.

The term 'value proposition' used daily in the business world simply ignores this data-driven fact. Caddell describes the results of his personal customer research:

"I haven't heard any customers say, 'I would recommend Company Y because we have been able to increase our stock turns and therefore reduce our working capital requirements'.

Instead, they say things like, "I really like the fact that they are easy to get hold of and work hard to solve my problems when I have them." Or, "They could have given me a helping hand when I needed to make changes during implementation, but they didn't."

In other words, what attracts customers' attention and prompts them to recommend their services are things like "reliability", "interest in my business", "saving me time", "improving my intelligence". In other words, the deepest, most emotional, fuzziest things.

And that's exactly right.

Let's face it: current B2B sales practices are largely built around a concept that is clearly not the main driver of the decision. In my own experience, this is particularly true in professional services.

Why is this? Is it ignorance? Denial? Schizophrenia? A preference for models over data, like economists? Why should intelligent people trust logic when logic has been proven to fail? How can salespeople justify this illogical behaviour?

Here's a theory. Test it in the only place it counts: in your own gut (not in your brain).

Let's take a metaphor: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. At the beginning of the book, Huck is confronted with the 'fact' (in his mind) that he is a sinner - in the Catholic sense of the word - and that he is going to hell. And why? Because he realises that he is ready to help the slave Jim escape to freedom.

In Huck's mind, a slave is another man's property - freeing him is theft pure and simple, a crime that his church and all of "good society" consider a grave sin. When Huck makes what we all consider to be the morally 'right' decision - to free Jim - the price he pays is that he sincerely believes his soul will be condemned for eternity. His moral innocence is unknown even to himself - his own social values have condemned him, even as his inner conscience triumphs.

In describing Huck Finn, Twain brilliantly exposes the moral failures of the slave 'ethic' of his day. We see that the truly moral person is Huck, not the cruel society in which he lives.

Professionals face the same dilemma in sales. What they are taught is right is actually wrong. They have bought into the theories, the models and the 'value propositions'. They've bought into theories, models and 'value propositions' so much that accepting the mere idea that an emotional connection might be at the heart of a sale is tantamount to heresy for them.

There are very few Huck Finns in consultancies, people prepared to leave the orthodoxy of value propositions behind and listen to the inner voice that tells them "just help the customer". Even if that's precisely what works.

Why is this heresy? Because professionals are content masters who are forced to sell. They are hired, trained, rewarded and promoted for their skills in mastering complex rational abstractions - law, GAAP, C++. And, if they really succeed, the ultimate reward is that they can now sell! What a hateful irony!

In the eyes of professionals, selling means selling your soul. It means manipulating. Lawyers and accountants have strict rules about advertising. It means focusing on the money rather than the good of the client. At its best, selling is seen as a "necessary evil, essential to the smooth running of the business".

For professionals, 'selling' is a dirty word. We prefer "business development". (Note the passive voice: even 'business development' is a bit too direct). It all seems so unseemly; work well done should be enough to generate more work. The fact that it might not work that way is just too unfair to deal with.

So B2B professionals and salespeople do what they've always done to succeed in this world: turn an unpleasant task into an academic pursuit, a business process, a subject for model-making. And above all, depersonalise it.

No MBA programme that I know of offers courses on sales - I know, personally, I'm a holder of one of the big European MBAs and I can guarantee you that sales was not part of the curriculum -. You'll find courses on marketing, sales management and decision models, but no courses on sales expertise. It is not academically 'respectable' to train people in such activities.

The result of all this is psychological confusion. An executive-level professional, faced with the need to develop business in order to survive and progress in his career, is faced with the moral dilemma of Huck Finn. Should I :

1. Renounce my moral principles, become skilled in the art of manipulation, swindle my clients and take money from people I've grown to like? All to save my job, feed my family and get ahead in this cruel world? or must I? :

2. Keep my principles, but give up income, career advancement and success, and become an unsuccessful person.

Most experts who sell don't even see things that clearly. They opt for a form of denial. Or they settle for half a job, then resent and envy those who have chosen a clearer path.

The correct answer is Huck Finn's, but with a nuance. Follow your heart. Build the relationship. Tell the truth. Be transparent. Think of transactions as stops on the road, not end points. Do the right thing. The advantage is that you can have Mark Twain's overview - you don't have to feel Huck's guilt.

Seen in this light, the proper role of an economic value proposition is to provide the brain with the rationalisation it needs to serve the heart. The "value proposition", if we want to keep this expression, is the value that the buyer derives from the product.

The irony is even greater than Mark Twain could have imagined. Those who choose to sell the way people actually buy end up being the most successful.

This article is a translation of this article here. I'm sharing it with my audience because the approach is totally in line with my vision of the dichotomy between the importance of knowing how to sell while positioning yourself as a trusted advisor, i.e. not selling, but helping the other person.