What are your Business Outcomes? Regardless of whether you are engineering / IT professional or a sales professional, we tend to become focused on output. Output involves our deliverables: transacting business based on our products, services and platforms.
Consider how your output creates business outcomes for your customers.
Your customers are buying your business outcomes, not your output. Your products, services and platforms create opportunities for your customers to grow their own businesses.
Is that how you are positioning yourself competitively?
Value propositions focus on the tangible benefits that your customers receive as a result of doing business with you. Value propositions focus on the tangible business outcomes that your customers can anticipate receiving as a result of choosing to do business with you.
Business outcomes are not laundry lists of features and benefits, then asking your customer to pick one or two and order. Business outcomes are how your deliverables are transferred into your customers’ organizations and translated into their own competitive advantage.
Business outcomes result from collaboration between you and your customers. These outcomes result from your understanding how your customers’ organizations work. These outcomes are created by taking the time to research your customers’ companies and establish the history and context of your relationship.
Think about the types of business outcomes you currently provide for your customers.
- Does your shorter turnaround time get your product into your customers’ hands faster…. Allowing them to serve their own customers more quickly and competitively?
- Does your service or maintenance agreement allow your customers’ systems to remain fluid and current in terms of upgrades and updates so they don’t miss a beat when serving their own customers?
- Does your extra layer of oversight during preconstruction meetings uncover errors that otherwise don’t show up until the project has commenced?
- Does your horizontal business model allow for everyone in your organization to contribute to the business development and sales process?
- Does your team-based account entry strategy allow the non-traditional sellers in your organization to become part of revenue generation for your organization?
When you consider the value you provide your customers in terms of Business Outcomes instead of output, you see the same thing, differently. Outcomes-based selling expands the roles of everyone in your organization as contributing members to your company’s bottom line…. and your customers’ bottom lines as well.
- This week, make a short list of you’re A-List customers, those customers you do your best work for and with whom you enjoy working the most.
- Create outcomes-based value propositions for each customer, based on your history, context and experience.
- Compare your outcomes-based value propositions with the value props you’ve used in the past.
Focusing on business outcomes instead of output creates business opportunities for you, as well as your customers.
Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, catalyzes revenue-producing business transition, startup growth and professional development. She works with manufacturing and engineering firms and small business entrepreneurships. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.
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