Value vs. Objection Handling
In my positioning work, it is not unusual for teams to confuse value for customers with what I would call “objection handling.”
Value is what our offering can do for a customer’s business. For example, you might sell a CRM solution that delivers better visibility into the pipeline, allowing teams to predict revenue more accurately than any other CRM. You might also use AI in a novel way that dramatically reduces the resources required to analyze data, allowing teams to act on that analysis very quickly. These are both examples of differentiated value. Differentiated value is the value you can deliver for a customer that no other vendor can—it is the reason a prospect should select your offering over the alternatives.
Just Because a Customer Cares Doesn’t Make it “Value”
Not everything customers care about is “value.” Sometimes, customers want or need capabilities for reasons other than business value. Here are some examples of capabilities that might be classified as “value” for a customer but often I would classify as “objection handling:”
Great support
A modular architecture that allows customers to start small and add functionality when they are ready
A professional services team that can help companies do deployment and integration
Training to help new users onboard rapidly
Support for industry standards like SOC2 or HIPAA
Pre-built integrations with other systems
Customers may care a lot about these capabilities. Prospects might ask about it in sales calls. There are certainly deals you would lose if you didn’t have them – often, you wouldn’t even make a shortlist.
But typically, capabilities like these aren’t the main reason you won. Try this as a mental exercise – would a customer care about these capabilities in the absence of any other value? For example, would a customer choose you ONLY for your great support? Or your professional services? Or the pre-built integrations? The answer to this question is often no if we are really being honest with ourselves.
What Gets You the Deal vs. What Forces a Prospect to Disqualify You
Here is what I see a lot in B2B software deals. Suppose the prospect is a sales leader looking for a new CRM solution. They are excited by how you make pipeline predictions and recognize that other solutions can’t deliver on that. However, they are worried that the reps will have difficulty using the new software. This last part is an objection. You might handle that objection by talking about the great training you offer, your excellent support, or your onboarding services. The prospect isn’t going to choose you for your great onboarding, but they might disqualify you if you don’t have it.
Here's another example - the same prospect might need IT’s buy-in to approve the deal. IT worries that the system won’t integrate easily with existing systems and will be too much work for them. You might highlight your well-documented API and pre-built integrations to handle that objection. Again – the prospect won’t choose you for your great integrations, but they might disqualify you if you can’t handle the objections of the IT department.
Sell Value to Your Champion. Handle the Objections of Everyone Else
Another way to think about this is from a persona perspective. The champion of the deal and the economic buyer (if they are not the same persona) care a lot about the business impact of the solution. But often, we need to get agreement from IT, Purchasing, Legal, End-users, Security, and others to make the deal happen. Those other personas can’t (and don’t!) make a deal happen, but they sure as heck can kill it if they have an objection that you, as the vendor, can’t address.
Bad Prior Experiences Often drive the Exceptions
Like everything in life, there are exceptions to this general rule. For example, I worked with a company selling against a very entrenched incumbent legacy vendor that had dramatically cut support over the years. The main reason prospects were looking for a new solution was that the product had become increasingly unstable, and when there was a problem, there was nobody to talk to. In this case, the challenger vendor leaned heavily on a value theme of “A solution that will never slow your team down” as a key point of differentiated value. They did this by:
Proving the product was rock-solid stable (which they did with uptime statistics)
Proving they had incredible customer support (including a dedicated support person who was guaranteed to respond within an hour)
Providing a team of experts that could be applied in any situation where the customer needed it
This worked because stability and support were key purchase criteria, and the challenger vendor had a highly differentiated approach. Notice that the vendor backed up the claims with numbers and quantified commitments rather than saying – “The service is better - trust us!” It’s important to note that this wasn’t their only value theme. We could argue whether or not they could have sold customers by focusing exclusively on the stability and support theme. Still, in this context, it did seem to be a serious pillar of the customer’s purchase criteria.
In my experience, this situation happens when a customer has had such a poor experience with another vendor that they become unusually highly weighted purchase criteria.
Acquisition Value vs. Retention Value
Lastly – sometimes, the value derived from capabilities like the ones listed above is more clearly linked to retention rather than acquisition. Prospects may not consider support, for example, very important in a purchase process because prospects often do not experience your support until they become a paying customer. However, support might be why a paying customer sticks with you (or decides to dump you) when renewal time comes around. If this is the case, the team needs to understand that just because we aren’t talking a lot about a particular capability in our marketing and sales materials doesn’t mean it isn’t crucial to the longer-term health of the business.
Conceptually, this kind of thing took me a minute to get my head around when I started doing positioning work. Do you have a different take? Have you seen value and objects get muddled up in your company? Sound off in the comments.
The Positioning Podcast is back! Last week, I decided to give the full podcast treatment to the topic - What do we do when a competitor lies? Next week, Georgiana Laudi from Forget the Funnel will join me, and we will chat about messaging vs. positioning - stay tuned for that.
I’ve got three workshop slots available in May/June, and that’s it until September. If you think your company could use some help, hit reply or email me directly april@aprildunford.com
As always - I appreciate you folks coming along for the ride over here!
April
Great write up April. This reminded me of the seat belt. No car buyer would ever imagine to compare seat belts, but if a car didn’t have one…well it’s the show stopper.
So many companies I advise don’t invest in their “seat belts” anymore as it doesent support their differentiated value (and we gotta put all our money there).
My first sales trainer called them go-fosters. They don’t close the deal but they do make the deal go faster.
Sometimes those go-fasters can turn into differentiated value, post sale, like professional services. In enterprise B2B PS is expected, usually in terms of initial time to value. It’s a year or two down the road that where PS can shine, after the customer has implemented and used it. They’ll have gotten used to it functioning a certain way and PS can show them the blind spots or areas of vast improvement. Hard to sell that up front but certainly something for account managers to push prior to renewal.