Focusing on delivering core values can eliminate a lot of messaging confusion that features and benefits sales and engineering spiel create. Every day we spend our time trying to justify to our customers and prospects the value of doing business with us. What do we, and no one else, bring to the table? That single differentiator may be our core values.
Focusing on delivering core values can eliminate a lot of inconsistency we experience between customers and colleagues. We develop “account entry strategies” or “value propositions” to get our foot in the door via phone, email, personal or internet customer touch points. These strategies tell prospective and current customers about your companies’ core competencies, but not your own core values.
This is a people business. Unless you feel that you sell a commodity. Do you consider yourself a commodity? That question changes things, doesn’t it?
Focusing on delivering core values when selling, engineering, accounting, you name it, establishes your own structural business foundation for
generating revenue for yourself and your company. Ultimately, you can’t be switching gears constantly, moving from sales spiel to engineering spiel to personal spiel. I don’t know about you, but unless you manage split personalities, how can you keep all these “spiels” straight? In fact, why should you compartmentalize?
Focus on essentially, in fact fundamentally, engaging individuals in dialogue that tells the same thing to everyone. You won’t struggle to remember what you have to say next. There’s consistency, because there is no sales spiel script to follow.
The only script you have is hard-wired into your own DNA. Delivering core values is YOU script.
Between every facet of who we are as professionals and as people are your core values. What do you bring to the table, time and time again, effortlessly, because of who you are as a person of worth?
Otherwise you sound like a brochure on legs, a talking head, a babbling techie, you get it. You’ve heard it. You’ve found yourself in that situation.
A number of years ago, I determined how delivering core values impacted me personally. Delivering on my core values impacted my deliverables and outcomes, professionally. I encourage you to think about yours.
Let developing and delivering core values become your fulcrum for leveraging professional outcomes.
I have four Core Values: TRUSTWORTHINESS, INTEGRITY, ETHICAL BEHAVIOR, RESPECT. No matter what I do, or with whom I speak, or whatever hassles I am dealing with, I return to my Core Values.
Trustworthiness – I am true to my word. I will always be truthful with myself, my family, my friends, my clients and my prospects. Painfully so. It’s better to put the cards on the table and work out solutions from a position of truthfulness than dancing around an issue. Always. Which means people can trust me and entrust me. Which means I must be honest and direct with myself. I accept that responsibility – to myself and to others. I will not betray the trust that I have earned.
Integrity – My actions consistently reinforce the high value I place in my relationships with others. I will honor my commitments to others, because I honor the commitments I’ve made with myself to my Core Value system.
Ethical Behavior – I will make commitments to and with others which are consistent with my Core Value system. I will not enter into behavior which I feel compromises my Core Values.
Respect – I respect myself. I respect my Core Values. I respect my family, friends, customers and prospects. I respect their points of view.
So there you have it. At the end of the day, delivering core values are truly my personal and professional brand. Core values are not a veneer that exists in an internet blog or an email / voicemail / personal account entry strategy.
It’s what my life is all about and what matters most to me. How do you work on delivering your core values?
Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo and business- and revenue-producing collaboration and communication tools to small and mid-sized Seller-Doer businesses, corporate divisions, and startups. Her book, Do YOU Mean Business, is now available in eReader format!
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