3 Responses

1. i have some scenarios involving upselling?
   it depends a bit on your industry and what the value is. If you’re interested i have some sales scenarios around upselling more quantity = lower individual item price. If you work with value added benefits like after sales care, follow up visits, guarantees, free delivery etc then I would also suggest working in pairs to practice what types of sales they normally get to which they can add the added value benefits to help make the sale and more business etc. E-mail me at alison@darringtontraining.co.uk if you’d like to see the scenarios.

2. VFM process
   Here’s something that I’ve found very powerful. The bad news is that it’s less of an exercise and more like a process.
   The aim of the process is to assign measurable value – where possible £s – to the benefits of your product or service. At the end you have a matrix that links needs to benefits and value.
   To make it work well you need to bring together sales, marketing, product development and (ideally) members of the management team.
   To complete the process you need to go through several phases. Here they are in v. brief outline:
   1. A brainstorming session to generate a large list of possible benefits – why people buy.
   2. The group then link these benefits to the customer’s problems, pain and opportunities. If a “benefit” doesn’t solve a problem it is rejected.
   3. Looking at the problems, the group identifies the primary business impacts of these problems. What does this problem cost in terms of time, people, money etc? This part takes a bit of thought and it’s where marketing and product development earn their corn.
   4. You then look at secondary business impacts of these problems. At this stage I normally have some short input on opportunity costing and intangible benefits, such as market perception, competitive advantage, etc.
   5. The next step is to review the features of your products and services that lead to these benefits
   6. You can then create a matrix showing the business benefit – value of each feature. And if the session has gone well you have measurable ROI for each benefit.
   Whenever I run this session I find that we usually lead into a discussion around the questions we need to ask to identify customer’s pain and its business impact.
   This is a really brief outline. You can email at mark@marklaneconsulting and I’ll be glad to explain further.
   Good luck

3. VFM in public sector
   Thanks for these ideas – actually, I forget to mention the added complication that I talking about value for money/ best value exercises in the public sector – so any examples that would work for Local Government would be particularly appreciated!