Do you have a piece of company collateral nearby—maybe an infographic or a pitch deck?
Take a look at it. I’m willing to bet that it leads with impressive stats about increased ROI or productivity. Maybe it talks about being calculated to bring the buyer up to some industry standard. If so, your company is right on par with everyone else in how they communicate value to buyers.
In fact, according to CEB surveys, most sales pitches—and the content to support it—focus on the value created by a product or service at the company level (e.g., ROI) or at the performance level (e.g., productivity). But most fail to harness the most powerful, the most motivating type of value.
In Shelley Cernel’s recent KnowledgeTree post, “Using Psyhographics to Understand Why Buyers Buy,” this nugget stood out:
“By understanding the psychographics of your target market, you can also understand what risk factors could potentially play a role in their buying decision. These fears include reduction in job security, damage to professional credibility, inability of the software to technically perform as promised, and loss of monetary investments…If vendors can minimize this fear and reduce the risk, they will be able to build a more trusting relationship and are more likely to make a sale.”
In fact, according to the aforementioned surveys, these fears usually make or break a sale. Termed “Identity Value” by CEB, value built around promotion, popularity, and feelings of belonging and helping others are five times more potent than value built around company objectives or work performance. I repeat: 5x more powerful.
More than anything, the buyer is thinking about how this purchase makes them look, how it will move their career, and how it will affect their social standing.
So what can sales teams do to take advantage of the power of Identity Value in their pitches and in their collateral? What Cernel recommends—acknowledging these identity-based values—is a good place to start. Perhaps the most precise way to put it to work, however, is to work with your mobilizer to dig into the specific identity values that motivate each buying group member.
