There are many challenges facing sales and account management teams today. Here are just a few of them:

• Uncertain economic conditions
• Geopolitical strife
• Aggressive, sometimes desperate competition
• Disruptive competition that changes the game
• Increasing costs
• Customers’ increased focus on controlling costs
• The commoditization of almost everything.

When backed into a defensive position, what can we do? 

We can fight back; we can re-double our efforts to sell our company’s value. 

Here are a few strategies to leverage as you fight back:

• Understand your customer’s key business drivers. By this, we mean the customer’s critical business objectives, strategies, and issues. You must do this so you can identify their “pain” and “gain”. These are the things they most want to accomplish. 
• Determine the Business Fit between you and the customer. These are the critical outcomes you can help the customer realize as a result of your work together. Talking about these outcomes is usually much more compelling than talking about your solutions. When you do this well, you are saying that you believe, working together, you can support their efforts to increase revenues, drive profitability, enhance cash flow position, etc. 
• Sell your value to people who can buy it. There are different types of buyers out there. Many are transactional buyers who are happy to look at us as commodities. They are not your target for selling your value. In this context, you are looking for people who have the interest, ability, and budget to buy your value – true senior-level decision makers. They are the ones who are focused on these key business outcomes and are less concerned with price. 

Sales and relationship management professionals really are in a “Fight for Value”, and our best response is to roll up our sleeves and get to work. After all, when we successfully sell our value, our customers benefit by getting superior business results!