Recently I was speaking with a CEO of a healthcare company. We were discussing the sales at his company and the state of his forecast. He was clearly frustrated and finally made the statement: “This just doesn’t make sense, why don’t these hospitals, our prospects, want to save money?”

His frustration was real. They had a great product and solution to real problems. While their product represented initial cost, it had tremendous financial pay off. The ROI could be measured in productivity gains and real cost savings over time. They had even announced a pending price increase – in the effort to incent the prospects to act sooner rather than later. Yet the pipeline was full of stalled opportunities.

What was going on?

A fundamental principle in the ValueSelling Framework™ is the following: People Make Emotional Decisions for Logical Reasons. So I asked my CEO friend, are you only focusing on the logical reasons that your prospects will buy from you or have you connected to an emotional reason? What followed was a long pause in the conversation.

In any kind of sales situation, a sales professional typically has to guide the prospect to understand the value their products, services, or solutions can bring to the table. At ValueSelling Associates, we call that Business Value. Business Value is the logical justification that a client must understand to answer their own question: Is this worth it?

Business Value is not enough! Successful sales people know that they must also understand the Personal Value that will be gained from your solution by the individuals impacted by that purchase decision. Personal Value is defined as the emotional driving force which motivates someone to act.

So have you uncovered what your prospect’s personal value is? If not, there is no better time than the present to gain an understanding of that critical component.

Personal Value is often articulated in one of two ways. First, there is the value associated with a negative outcome. Research has proven that people will expend more effort to avoid pain or a negative consequence. What are the negative consequences of not adopting your product or service? Here are a couple of ideas:

•    Could your prospect miss the opportunity to be seen as a leader or innovator?
•    Could your prospect lose a bonus, promotion, or objective set by management?
•    Could your prospect fail with a competitive alternative? Is there real risk in a competitive solution?

The second type of personal value has to do with achieving a goal or moving toward a positive outcome. This personal value is associated with positive outcomes rather focused on avoiding the negative consequence.

•    Will you be recognized as a leader?
•    Will you enable your organization to reach new levels of performance?
•    Will you achieve the status you seek?

Understanding your prospect’s definition of personal value is critical if you are going to motivate them to act. People are motivated for their own reasons, not ours – so the savvy sales professional is deliberate in understanding personal value and how each person they interact with during the sales process is motivated to either buy or not buy.

Your call to action is to determine, right now, for each opportunity you have forecasted in December – do you know the personal value that your prospect will realize from buying from you. If not, pick up the phone and make an appointment to find out! Some questions to get the conversation started include:

How will this impact you personally?

How will you define success, for your company and for you?

What is this worth to you?

I challenge you to put yourself in the uncomfortable position to ask…and listen to the answers. You will learn a tremendous amount that will enable to you to understand the prospect’s motivation, and connect to that motivation resulting in a closed sale! 

So back to my CEO friend, the personal value his prospects will get from his products and services has to do with confidence and the concept of covering your backside. The healthcare industry is highly regulated and the healthcare professional is often accused of making preventable errors. The personal value of this solution has to do with providing audit trails, to prove that a mistake was not made! With that information in mind, sales people re-engaged, personal value questions were asked, and conversations took place.

I am told that two sales immediately resulted!