Geared For Profit

I see value not as a personal thing “how valuable am I” , but more about opportunity, margin, and possibility.

Traditional small business services selling  puts flexibility and being vendor agnostic at the forefront. This helps show you as flexible and credible. You stand behind your consulting skills and ethics, and say we are good craftsman. This indeed wins deals.

The flip side to this is you are underselling yourself.

Review your most recent good sale, and ask yourself  “did we get maximum value”.

There is something to be said for being flexible, and getting the maximum squeak out of the pig. Which is probably where your last good sale was. And its a real credit to your team, to beat out stiff competition. Its quite likely that there was no more value to be had in this project, no matter how well organised you were.

You need to evaluate the ‘art of the possible’.  You need to learn, model, adapt, and be stronger/smarter/swifter for the next series of deals.

We want to sell value, which is a stack of value with different layers, I see it as ‘wallet share’.  How much of the budget can we command ?  If the client is holding a fist full of fifties, lets grab most of them, and not let too many fall to the floor, and don’t let them spend too many on pokies. We want most of the money to be in our pockets. This is similar to value chain analysis, or vertical integration. Can you take on some of the value of your suppliers, or can you do more of the project that your client commonly does. Basically you are trying to make your slice of the pie bigger and bigger.  “greed is good” (Gordon Gecko).

We might well win the deal, but at lesser value. So I am trying to find a lesson in value, how can we command more value next client ?

If we only do consulting gigs, with using are brightest people, in an initial project, we win the deal, but loose value now, and throughout the life of the project. Its likely if you stay with this revenue model, the company will never sky rocket. We need to break the mould, find more value, price differently, be aggressive, be relentless in delivering more value.

I think you are onto a winner with:
– a brand/niche/focus , this is our ‘why us’
– get products out that sell on value, are repeatable, and can be sold by sales folk – so this is our scalability via a business system
– get the new value product also (see vertical integration above), this is our value accelerator to capture more value on every deal

I challenge you, how could you deliver more value for our clients ? Bigger pie, more of the fifties in our pockets instead of spread around the place.