Brad Eather (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Selling is Creative podcast, a podcast exploring creativity's role in sales, leadership and business. I'm your host, Brad Eather a digital communications consultant supporting businesses and sales professionals adapt to digital. If you're in sales, you've probably heard the word value more times than you can count. But what do we really mean when we say we offer value to our customers? Is it price?
Is it quality of service? Is it the unique strengths that we bring to the table? And how do we actually quantify it? These are all valid questions, but often, no matter how hard we think on them, they still feel like riddles. Because ultimately, until we uncover what our customers actually perceive as valuable, value will remain a mystery. And that's exactly why I've invited today's guest onto the show.
Michael Wilkinson has spent over 25 years helping sales leaders and teams around the world solve this value mystery. He's the co-author of three books, including the value challenge and the seven challenges of value and the creator of the value challenge framework, a system that helps salespeople create, communicate and defend value without discounting. Michael, it's a privilege to have you on the show. Welcome.
Mike Wilkinson (01:21)
Brad, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Brad Eather (01:25)
Looking forward to this. Michael, I first came across your work when I was reading a book and you were quoted. The phrase that came out was value is a mystery. What do you mean by that? And why do you think it's such a powerful statement?
Mike Wilkinson (01:45)
Perhaps if I take a quick step back and explain how I came upon value as a mystery, because it is a bit of a bizarre definition of value if you think about it, but it actually all happened, would you believe, I'm just looking at it on the 29th of March 2006. And I was speaking at a conference of chemical sales engineers in Copenhagen and the night before
We'd all gone out for dinner and there were about a hundred of these guys and in conversation with them I was just talking about what it is they did and what they sold to their customers and Almost everybody told me that what they sell to their customers was value. I thought this is this is absolutely bizarre I think they've all been brainwashed. So the next morning instead of doing
what I was going to do, I said, look guys, I was really interested in how many of you told me that value was what you sold to your customers, but I'd like you to tell me what that is. So what I'd like you to do is to come up with an Oxford English dictionary definition of value, beginning with the words value is. And there were about 10 tables, there were about 10 people on each table. And said, all I want from you is a card, a card from each table with your value definition written on it. And the minute
I gave them the task, it was instantly obvious that they were struggling. I don't know why they thought that they self-value, because they had real difficulty coming up with what it meant. It took about 20 minutes to get all of these cards back. What we'd agreed was that I just read through the cards and then we distill all of that thinking and we come up with our definition, of distillated value definition.
And I started going through the cards and it won't surprise you that all of them were different. There were clearly some similarities. The word perception came up on a number of occasions. But halfway through this pack of cards, I turned the card over, I looked down and I thought, this is ridiculous. I can't say that. 20 minutes work and they've come up with two additional words.
from value is. Value is, in two more words, and the two words, as you've already identified, were value is a mystery. And I thought to myself, that is ridiculous. But then, the more I began to think about it, the more I began to realize just how accurate that was as an observation. Because until we understand what our customers see as being valuable, we can only guess.
And we may be able to make educated guesses, but at the end of the day, the most important part of value is that value is defined by the customer, not by us. And given that that is the case, our job as salespeople is to solve the value mystery. And that's it. So that's how I came with value as a mystery. And I've used it ever since. And
It's incredibly powerful, particularly with salespeople, to get them to recognize that sometimes we don't really understand as much about the customer as we need to do.
Brad Eather (04:46)
Cause it really got me thinking as a salesperson. the first thing that came to mind was like discovery. This is so applicable discovery. my mind just went snap. And I was like, okay, like It really makes sense that through the discovery process, this is what we're kind of trying to do. But you've gone a lot further and you've developed.
Mike Wilkinson (04:53)
Yes.
Brad Eather (05:09)
the value challenge, the seven challenges of value. Could you walk us through that? Because I think the idea of value is a mystery does tend to in first inference, it lives in discovery, but you track it all the way through from the very beginning of the sales process all the way to the end. How do you take us through the value challenge?
Mike Wilkinson (05:27)
Yeah, mean,
is a mystery and our number one job is to solve the mystery. And the part of the mystery is that value means different things to different people. So if you're in a complex sale and you're talking to multiple people, value will be different for all of them. Yeah, I mean, clearly, if you're working with the same business, that are going to be similarities. But the finance director will think of it in a different way to the ops people, to the users, to whoever else is involved in the decision.
So when I started thinking about what the challenges of value were, I spent quite a lot of time, I was talking to salespeople, talking to sales directors, sales VPs. So this is not my sole idea. This is a distillation of all the conversations that I had. So there are seven challenges of value that I think any of us as salespeople need to address from the beginning of the sales process through to delivering value at the end of it.
So the first challenge unsurprisingly is we've got to understand value. And I think there are two things there. We have to understand value as a concept because if we're going to talk about it, we need to understand from our point of view, what value is. So we need a framework around which we can think about value. And I know we're to talk about that shortly. So I mentioned it now.
So the starting point is to understand value as a concept, but then really importantly, to understand value in terms of what it means to our customers. And that for me is the most important part because that is the foundation for everything. Understanding value, if we haven't done it effectively, the rest of the seven challenges are going to be a big challenge. So the more we understand value, the less onerous the other challenges are going to be.
So challenge number one, understand value. Challenge number two is a bit irritating really, but it is that you have to recognize that people's perceptions of value are constantly changing. So just because I understand what you value today does not mean you will be valuing the same things in a week's time. You know, so as tariffs are imposed, as taxes go up, import duties go up, budgets change, people move, the perceptions of value and the requirements of value are constantly on the move.
The third bit is you do need to identify people who care about value in the first place. There are still people around who will tell you that the only thing they're interested in is price. especially now when there's so much pressure on in terms of pricing, people will tell you their only interest is price. And if we don't understand value, we've got very little defense against that. So we need to know where value comes from.
so, but understanding people who care about value is, really important. Challenge four, you've then got to differentiate what you do. when I look at the value proposition, which we may talk about later on, I have a value proposition framework and part of that is differentiation. How do you differentiate what you do and recognize that differentiation is not just about being different. Differentiation is about being different in ways that your customer values.
So just being different is not enough. That then also makes the point that if you haven't understood challenge number one, understand value, differentiating becomes more difficult Challenge five, when I do surveys myself and I ask people what some of the big challenges are, this one always comes up. Challenge five is communicating your value effectively. And
Very often, businesses and individuals say to me when push them to the catcher that communicating their value effectively is somewhere where they fall down. Again, if you haven't understood value right at the beginning, you're going to really struggle with this. You can only communicate your value effectively if you understand the value that your customer is looking for. Challenge six, again, is an interesting one. It's about sharing in that value. It's about pricing.
effectively defending your price against the downward pricing pressure and sharing in the value that you are delivering to the customer. And you talked briefly about monetizing that value. Making airy-fairy promises like we're going to save you some money or we can make you some money is not enough. You need to monetize the impact of your solution on the customer's business because that A, helps to demonstrate your value more effectively and B, makes it easier to then share in that value between you.
And then the final challenge, which is where it sometimes falls down, is you've got to deliver it. So, because if you think about it, one to six is your value promise, but then you've got to actually get off your ass and do it. And some businesses find that quite a challenge. can do one to six, but then delivering the value and actually doing it seamlessly is quite a challenge for some of them.
I was reading a report the other day that in terms of buying, 59 % of the buying decision is influenced and driven by the customer's buying experience. So the whole experience they have throughout that buying process, the conversations, everything that goes on. So it's an interesting challenge. So those are the seven challenges of value.
Brad Eather (10:32)
We're going to get the first bit, the definition of value. but I'm just interested when it comes to delivering value, what your take on this is because
Not every business is going to have every structure of this value challenge tight at all. on the flip side, you've talked about people that fall down on delivering value. There are businesses out there that skip everything else, but do an excellent job of actually delivering the value. but they might not be as strong at acquiring new business because they can't articulate what they're...
what their real value is. What do you say to a business that's maybe in that position?
Mike Wilkinson (11:08)
I think that's actually really quite sad, isn't it? If you're actually really good at what you do, but you're not good at communicating what you do. The thing is, I don't think on the whole customers don't buy what you do. They buy what you do that helps them to do what they want to do, which goes back to the fact that the most effective way of selling is starting by understanding what the customer is trying to achieve.
If I'm clear about what outcome the customer is looking for, it's much easier to then position how I feel that can help them to get there. If I don't do that bit, I end up being a solution chasing a problem rather than looking for the problem and then demonstrating how my solution can help. And there may be very fine differences between the two, but they're big in the eyes of the customer.
Brad Eather (11:58)
I like that answer because having done the value challenge myself, something that sort of came to mind as I was doing it is it really focuses on the overall experience it's often called a customer journey, a good customer journey is about making experiences along the whole way and adding value at every single stage of that process.
So with that said, let's jump back into the beginning and go to the value is a mystery part because you set it up really nicely with your value triad. So I was thinking, can we talk about the value triad and how that works in terms of how do we actually start defining what value is for our customers?
Mike Wilkinson (12:42)
Yeah, it's well it was the value triad came second after we come up with values of mystery as a definition because I went away from that meeting going yippee cracked it what a revelation values of mystery all we have to do is to solve the value of mystery but it became clear quite quickly that that's all fine but if you haven't actually got any idea what value is or any framework around thinking about value
actually that starts to become quite difficult. my colleague and I at the time, actually sat down, we spent a couple of days really thinking about it, thinking through what value meant, what the component elements of value are. And out of that, we developed this concept called the value triad, which surprisingly identifies three key component areas of value. And I think everybody will recognize these.
I mean, the strangest thing was that when we'd done it, we thought, well, that's obvious. It is obvious and we all know it, but it's just putting it together in a model, think, that makes the difference. So the three component areas, the first two are revenue gain, revenue or performance gain. And the question you should ask yourself is look at what you do for your customers now and ask yourself, how does what we do help our customers improve their revenue?
or improve their performance. Now, we tend to focus on revenue, but I mean, clearly there are some businesses where revenue is not a measure. For example, healthcare hospitals where patient outcome might be a better measure of success. But revenue gain, how does your product or service help your customer improve their revenue? The second component was cost reduction and everybody is...
recognize this straight away and says, yeah, obviously. But again, the question is exactly the same. How does what you do help your customer reduce their costs? Now, there's one overarching thought here is that if you're going to do either of those two things, that means you need to understand a where does your customer generate revenue? So where does their revenue come from? Because how can you
tell them you can help them improve it if you don't know where they are generating revenue. And similarly, if I'm going to tell you that I can help you to reduce your cost, I need to understand where you are incurring cost. And both of those things mean you have to understand your customer's business in a lot more detail than perhaps you have in the past. So you need to understand their commercial realities as well as just that sort of
overarching thought of, I wonder what they mean when they talk about value. Now, revenue gain and cost reduction are both tangible, measurable, objective components of value. And it is important that we do measure those. And I think there are two occasions when that is important. The first is during value discovery, when we're looking at the impact on their business of failing to address problems or issues or challenges.
And the question there is, what is that actually costing them? they don't address it, what is it costing them in reduced revenue or increased cost? And then the next time we're going to talk about it is when we come to demonstrate how we can help them to address the challenges that they have. And we put that monetary value on top of that. So those are two key areas. And particularly for technical salespeople, they're into those without any trouble.
The third bit, which we really struggled with in a roundabout sort of way, and it has, I changed it about six or seven months ago, I used to call it emotional contribution, but I now call it emotional connection. And it's the much softer area, the intangible, subjective area of relationships, of credibility, of trust.
All of those things, just feeling that you are the sort of business that I'd like to be working with, all of those much, much more difficult areas to measure, but which are massively important. And which goes back to that point that I made, that 59 % of buying decisions have a very large component of the buying experience within them. And the buying experience usually is about how we've connected and how we've communicated with the customer.
So those are the three component elements of value, revenue gain, cost reduction and emotional contribution. And when you add those three things together, you get that sort of total feeling of value.
Brad Eather (17:20)
when I see that value triad, what I see is a separation between the tangible stuff that you spoke about, the cost and the revenue aspect, but they are going to be tied towards your business and the products or the services. They're going to be dictated to the salesperson. And what I really see value in an understanding from a salesperson's perspective.
is how they can actually contribute value within the sales process themselves. What do they have control over? And I really like the emotional connection piece in that. But maybe let's dig a little bit deeper into the emotional connection piece and what should salespeople be leaning on to leverage that part of...
where they're really adding value to this conversation.
Mike Wilkinson (18:18)
I think there are a whole host of things. The starting point actually often I think is for salespeople to recognize just how much value personally they bring to the whole process.
One of the areas where they bring it is their ability to understand value because we're all in a competitive environment and the more we understand the customer's value, the better. So one great way in which the salespeople can add more value is by demonstrating that they understand the customer better than their competitive alternatives. And I think one of the great sales superpowers is the ability to summarize.
Because if you can summarize really effectively and demonstrate to the customer that you truly understand the challenges and issues that they're facing, then I think you're already a step ahead of everybody else. Because if they know that you know exactly what their issues are, it demonstrates you've asked good questions. It demonstrates you've listened well. And it demonstrates that you're now
demonstrating that understanding that you need to have to be able to come up with a solution that addresses their needs. So I think there are all those sorts of things. And then there are the myriad of things that go to a customer or any of our perceptions of what is a great connection, a great emotional connection, people paying attention to you, people, again, I think one of the key things, people being genuinely interested and curious about you.
both as an individual and about your role in the business. And I think sometimes this is missed. If I was recruiting salespeople, Brad, one of the key characteristics I'd be looking for is someone who's innately curious. I call it constructive nosiness. People who want to put their nose in where really you wouldn't ordinarily put it, but you're doing it because you're genuinely interested.
And I think if you are genuinely interested in things, you ask questions in a very different way to the way that you would ask them if somebody told you that that's what you should do. So if you're asking questions and somebody told you you should ask questions, that's one thing. But if you're asking questions because you're genuinely interested in finding out, I think that's very different.
Brad Eather (20:37)
I hope that that's what this podcast is really. It's an opportunity for people with that's leaning towards that curious side to step outside their comfort zone and think a little bit differently about whether it's sales or leadership or a whole lot of more holistic topics that are out there. if you, yeah, ⁓
Mike Wilkinson (20:57)
absolutely. And as a
seller, I have to tell you, as a seller, if you're not interested in your customers, what the hell are you doing? As salespeople, we should be dedicating to help our customers make the best decisions and help them to achieve the outcomes that they're looking for. And if you just do it by rote, A, it's boring, and B, it doesn't really
doesn't really demonstrate that emotional connection that I think is so important if you really want to stand out.
Brad Eather (21:31)
I've been thinking on this a while recently, but the idea that just the word sales, it's final, it's the finality, it's that's the result of what we do as sellers, but...
what people actually get wrong is that they say I'm in sales and psychologically. go straight to my job is to close. Where really maybe we should come up with a different definition of what a salesperson does because it's much more people focused rather than product focused.
Mike Wilkinson (21:55)
Well, I think a seller
should dedicate themselves to helping customers make good buying decisions and helping them to achieve the outcomes they're looking for. And I'm with you. don't think for most of the people that I don't deal with, the sale is not the end of the story at all. mean, there may be a whole raft of sales during the course of a year. But for me, the real objective of the seller is to broaden the relationship, network.
Brad Eather (22:13)
Mm.
Mike Wilkinson (22:23)
broadly across the key customers that they have, look for additional opportunities where they can help. So an individual sale is not the end. Closing the sale is not the ultimate objective. For me, the ultimate objective is developing the relationship to such a degree that they look upon you absolutely as their first port of call. my clients, I'd like to think if they have an issue.
around what I do, I would be the first person that they pick the phone up to speak to.
Brad Eather (22:51)
Yeah, definitely. And I think like, from a business perspective, those kinds of relationships are the things that get you referral business and it just, it's compounding over time, like long and short of it. Instead of popping a salesperson into the role and expecting results in the next three months, maybe give them some time to settle in and, and,
reap the rewards of compounding interest over time.
Mike Wilkinson (23:16)
Yeah, there's an interesting, yeah, and onboarding and the speed of onboarding is a real issue at the moment. People are increasingly expecting people to hit the ground running, which is, you know, tough. It can be really tough. Yeah, absolutely. Especially in complex areas. Yeah, complex sales areas. Selling, I hate to say it, but if you're selling tins of baked beans with apologies to baked bean salespeople, there's not a massive amount of product knowledge you need.
Brad Eather (23:26)
Very tough.
Mike Wilkinson (23:40)
But some of the more complex areas are mountains. Yeah, interesting.
Brad Eather (23:44)
Absolutely.
So you've essentially distilled value into a sales process. Can you walk us through the five stages Just high level, just so that we can get an understanding.
Mike Wilkinson (23:58)
Yeah,
I have a five-step process only because it's a bit disingenuous because clearly under each of the steps is a hell of a lot going on. But I just wanted something that was very simple for people to remember and relate to. So my five-step process again is hardly going to come as a blinding flash of inspiration, I don't think to anybody. But if you want to think about cells, this, this, this
literally lays over any of the sales processes that you might be using, which makes it quite helpful really. So step number one is assess your opportunities. I cannot tell you how many businesses I go into who are still working on opportunities that are going nowhere, that are either not going to be profitable, that are going to be a pain in the ass. So opportunity assessment is what we should do at the beginning.
And I know that lots of businesses have lots of very complicated and sophisticated ways of evaluating opportunities. But in essence, you're only trying to answer two questions. Question one is, do we want it? In other words, is it attractive to us? Can we make money out of it? Are these nice people to work with or are they going to be a pain in the ass? And second question is, realistically, can we win it? Because if the answer to either of those is no, then you should be forgetting about it and going and doing something more productive.
Now, opportunity assessment is not a one-off. You don't just do it at the beginning of the sale. As you go through the sale and you learn more about the customer, you may well want to revisit that decision because, you know, there's no point continuing to flog a dead horse. If you found out there is absolutely no way you can win this business because the competitor's footprint is all over it. Why would you want to continue to invest your time, money and effort in something you know you're not going to win?
primary objective is that when you've done that initial opportunity assessment, you have quality opportunities going into your sales pipeline. Again, when I look at, I take a, I love some sales pipelines. Some of the sales pipelines I see look as if they've been written by Hans Christian Andersen. You know, they're just full of hope, which is never ever going to come to fruition.
You know, these are opportunities that every time the sales manager talks to you It's going to come in over the course of the next week and it never does but it will come in the next week And it just carries on forever in a day So pipeline quality, I just think is so massively important. You shouldn't be chasing everything You should be chasing the things that you want to win and you know that potentially you can win and that takes you into value discovery
And value discovery, which is the second step of my value sales process, is the most important bit. Because that's where we understand what our customers see as being valuable. It's where we understand what their challenges are, what their problems are, the issues that they're trying to address. So this really is the voyage of discovery bit. And I talk about taking customers on a value journey.
People get hung up about this, but for me value discovery is a conversation. It's not an interrogation If we are genuinely curious and interested it can be much more like a chat You know, we want to get people feeling increasingly comfortable talking to us because they know that we are genuinely interested in them Rather than being very guarded about talking to us
because they know we're going through a process and all we want to do is to find out enough to be able to flog them something, which is a very, very different way of going about the same process. Also in value discovery, we need to make sure we're identifying all the key people that we need to talk to and understanding the decision-making process. So who's going to be involved and how is that decision going to be made?
So I think those are really key parts of value discovery. And I absolutely firmly believe that the selling is done during value discovery as the customer sells themselves through their answers to your well-crafted questions. Value demonstration is too late. Value demonstration should simply be a confirmation of the fact that you can do the things that the customer now already expects you to be able to do because you understand what their requirements are so well.
So value demonstration, sorry, value discovery. Last bit of value discovery is using your sales superpower, confirming back to your customer, summarizing back to your customer what your understanding is for your customer to say, you've absolutely got it. What do we do? Then into value demonstration. And as you very kindly said, keep it quick. This is where the value proposition resides.
There are loads of other things you may have to do. You may have to do written proposals, formal presentations, all the other things that go with demonstrating your value. And one of those may well be doing that value evaluation, having a value calculator to demonstrate to them in monetary terms the value they get as a result of doing business with you. At the end of that, with a bit of luck, they say yes. So you get the close, then you move into value delivery.
Now realistically value delivery is very much the client's area of expertise. I do get involved in it only in as much that I want to make sure that their onboarding processes are effective. They introduce people to the people they're going to be dealing with, all that kind of stuff. And then to pick up on the point that you made about the sale not being the end of the journey, my final step of the value sales process is what I call value development.
And it's all about the ongoing conversation that I'm now going to have with the customer, know, networking with them, talking to new people, just expanding the conversation. So that's it. Opportunity assessment, value discovery, value demonstration, value delivery and value development. Five steps. Simple.
Brad Eather (29:48)
Because as I was working through it, that was something that I really enjoyed about your work is the fact that at every stage you've framed it as a collaborative effort. And some of the key points and you brought up one before is it's not an end.
interrogation, it's a conversation, that's the value discovery part. And the other one is not a presentation, it's a conversation, which is the value demonstration part. And I really like that framing that throughout the entire process, it's a collaborative process with the customer to continue.
Mike Wilkinson (30:11)
Yes. Yeah.
Brad Eather (30:23)
to develop value at every stage. And I think that that's maybe the core bit that we can add that emotional connection piece to as we pull people through the whole process
Mike Wilkinson (30:34)
Yeah.
Well, if you think about it, the customer is talking to you because they have an issue, they have a problem, they have a challenge, they have an opportunity, whatever it might be. And the more we can actually work with them as a team to help them to get to the result that they're looking for, the better. I mean, if the customer sees us as...
You know not on their side as someone's trying to sell something just for the sake of selling it That's just it's simply not going to work So I'd like to think of it that we you know, I don't sell at people we sell with people
Brad Eather (31:11)
Cause in my world, something that always comes up is this idea of trust. You need to be trusted. You need to be trusted. and I really think for the salesperson, it's actually comes down. Trust is not the right word. It's reputation because reputation is built through this process that we're going through now. And the bit that the bit that sellers haven't necessarily
Mike Wilkinson (31:29)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (31:33)
put two and two together because they're not familiar with the online world is that reputation is inherent trust. It's just about translating that to the very beginning of the process. cause if you can articulate that, then you've got more opportunities coming in the door because you don't need to do what, some sort of LinkedIn person who's just pulled up on the side of the road and decided that they're going to have a crack at business online.
Mike Wilkinson (31:46)
Hmm
Brad Eather (31:59)
you've already got the reputation so people will come with you because they already respect you.
Mike Wilkinson (32:07)
And
that's it. I think about the components of trust and you're right credibility, respect, you know, just constantly doing what you promise you're going to do. All of those things are part of that overall trust equation. But without trust, we all know that the classic saying, you you need a customer to know, like and trust you if you want them to do business with you. And they are just so important. So yeah, absolutely buy into that.
Brad Eather (32:13)
Mm.
In a sales process, the trust is, it can be built beforehand, but it's really solidified in the delivery process. That's when trust is, that's its most vulnerable. If you cannot deliver on what you set out to do, then you are going to burn bridges left, right and center.
Mike Wilkinson (32:39)
Thanks.
Brad Eather (32:52)
But that is such a crucial element that, and I think that the value framework or the value sales process really guides the same thing that I'm spreading as well.
Mike Wilkinson (33:02)
I I think trust is the thread that goes through the whole process. You're right, and you can't break that thread. If you break that trust thread at any point during that process, you have a problem. as sellers, particularly in the more complex areas, we don't have a problem. We have to recognize that ultimately, the delivery of our value is not down to us. As sellers, very often, we're the people who make the value promise to the customer.
But we are deliver that value promise, the organization delivers the value promise. And that's why I firmly believe that everybody in the business needs to understand what value is broadly. And they particularly need to understand what it is to the individual customer as well, because they are going to, and they need to understand what their role is in delivering that value to the customer. And very often that's where there are potential shortcomings, where that, that trust thread might just be broken if we're not careful.
Brad Eather (33:58)
I mean, the more and more you talk about like certain things, you realize that we're got a magnifying glass on something. essentially what you've just brought in there is the idea of company culture and that piece in terms of aligning everybody to have pride in their work and valuing the customer and all that kind of stuff. it's, that's why.
AI is not going to change anything because humans are so complex and it's through the way that we collaborate that is going to continue to deliver outcomes for people. That's my sort of take on it.
Mike Wilkinson (34:33)
I think that there's been lots
of occasions when salespeople are going to be made completely redundant because we don't need them anymore. And generally speaking, exactly the reverse is what has happened. As we move into an age of complexity, customers need our help to see through all the complexity as much as anything else and to navigate the complexities of their own decision-making processes. what I do think is I salespeople need to be very careful.
Brad Eather (34:47)
Mm.
Mike Wilkinson (34:59)
and really think about what their role is today because it's changed a lot and you know the brochure carriers are endangered species there's no question about that.
Brad Eather (35:09)
There's this concept called the Gutenberg parentheses. And it's the idea that once upon a time We used to tell stories through spoken word and pass down stories. And that's how we transmitted information. All of a sudden we get the printing press and now we can write down stuff and then broadcast that message out. then now it becomes...
one single source of information dispersed out and everybody gets the same source of information. Now we're at the other side of that. And we have been for a while where we've got the ability to talk two ways now through social media and there's a two-way conversation happening. But we're getting to a point, and this is sort of where the theory comes in, that's...
Mike Wilkinson (35:36)
Yep.
Brad Eather (35:54)
Essentially what's happened now is that there's so much information overload and there's so many different messages pinging around that we're going back to that tribalism, which I, which is why I believe that sellers are more important now than ever because within localized communities, we're going to fall back on people that has trusted information because there's too much information. We need to fall back and rely on people that
Mike Wilkinson (36:00)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (36:21)
know what they're talking about. That's the long-winded story of that.
Mike Wilkinson (36:25)
I don't think it's a long-winded story at all because if you actually think about it, if we go out onto the internet today, it is getting increasingly difficult to know what to believe.
Brad Eather (36:36)
Mm.
Mike Wilkinson (36:37)
You know, how, you know, you see so many so much stuff out there and you think, well, is that actually real? So you're right. I think having somebody like a salesperson that you can trust, that you can believe in is actually going to be increasingly important. I could totally agree with that.
Brad Eather (36:54)
going off on one of my classic tangents, but one last thing that I wanted to touch on is questioning. Cause you go so in depth with your power questions. And they're so powerful in terms of setting up the value discovery piece. Out of...
Mike Wilkinson (36:57)
Ha!
Brad Eather (37:13)
Out of those five questions, and I'll just run through them briefly, situation questions, problem questions, impact questions, gain questions, and commitment questions, what are the ones that you think sellers go wrong with the most? What are they missing?
Mike Wilkinson (37:29)
I think in the broadest sense, think an awful lot of salespeople are in too much of a rush. ⁓ They want to get through this to get to the sexy bit, which is talking about how wonderful their products and services are. So the biggest mistake they make is not taking time and investing time in asking questions. Going back to our original bit of the conversation, they don't spend enough time investing being curious. They should really let their curiosity run riot.
Brad Eather (37:35)
Mm.
Mike Wilkinson (37:55)
during this stage and all I've tried to do with Power Questions and those of you who are listening who recognize that that is a remarkable similarity to spin would not be inaccurate. Of course it's built out of spin, but what I like to say to people is that it's a conversational map. This is the journey. This is the value journey you want to take your customers on.
So you start, I I won't go into them in great detail, but the situation questions are all about just getting the context right, demonstrating that you've done a bit of background research, establishing your credibility, demonstrating you know what you're talking about before you then move into the questions around the problems, issues, the challenges, the opportunity the customer is facing. Now, quite often, once I've understood the problem,
Salespeople will think, well, that's it. I've got the problem. Now all I do is to put my solution on top of that and Bob's your uncle. And in a way that was sort of solution, consultive sales process. You understood the problem so that you could actually demonstrate that your solution could address the problem. And I think within the value sales process, it misses out then the impact because I want to monetize the cost of the problem.
on the customer. And that's why impact questions are so incredibly powerful. So, you know, so what's the impact on your business of failing to address that problem? How does it affect your business if you don't take advantage of that opportunity? What does it cost you? So the impact questions for me are really important because that is where we start to monetize our value. Similarly, with the gain question, the power of the gain question is
If I say to you, if our journey so far is going really well, we're establishing all of those points, if you like, and I get to the game question, say, well, look, tell me, Brad, if we could actually solve that problem really effectively, what would that be worth to you? How would you feel about that? And you tell me that answer. That is something that's going to be really, really useful to me when I come into value demonstration. When I say to you, Brad, you may remember that
when we were talking earlier on, you said that that would be really helpful to allow you to do so and so. Can you see how our solution allows you to do that? So I'm using your words to demonstrate the value you told me that you were looking for. And that just becomes a lot more persuasive. But, you know, often people say to me, what's the one piece of advice you give to sellers generally? it is slow down. Slow down. Don't be ins...
Brad Eather (40:30)
Mmm.
Mike Wilkinson (40:32)
The more time you invest in good quality value discovery, the faster the sale cycle will move. Which sounds slightly counterintuitive, but is absolutely right. The better you understand the customer, the quicker you'll get to the sale.
Brad Eather (40:49)
Yeah.
Mike Wilkinson (40:50)
in my view.
Brad Eather (40:51)
And I think it all comes back to that curiosity piece that you've pointed out. And I don't know if there's anyone out there listening to has gone all the way back to one of my earlier episodes, but I interviewed a gentleman called James Michael, who has some data that he's collected over 20,000 salespeople. He's a, he's a recruiter that really pointed to that curiosity piece as being
Mike Wilkinson (40:55)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Eather (41:19)
a trait, a human trait of the top performing ⁓ B2B solution sellers. The top quartile B2B solution sellers had a higher score on the curiosity measure than the people that weren't essentially, which is, it validates that point.
Mike Wilkinson (41:40)
It is, but the interesting thing is, because I've been thinking about curiosity as well, but you can't, I can't just say be curious. You can't tell people to be curious. I thought to myself, why is it that people are curious? What makes people curious? And I think what makes people curious is interest. If you're interested in something, then you are much more likely to be curious and want to find out more about it.
Brad Eather (41:49)
No.
Mike Wilkinson (42:08)
which suggests that if you're not interested in your customers, why are you in sales in the first place? Because you're never going to be particularly curious, are you? So, you know, I think interest and curiosity are, you know, bedfellows to a degree.
Brad Eather (42:17)
Mm.
That's a really nice way to set up the final question. Curiosity. So leading from curiosity into what is your definition of creativity?
Mike Wilkinson (42:24)
which is, think I know.
Well, think you'll gather, obviously, that think curiosity is a huge part of creativity. And I did think about it. And I think for me, really, creativity is that coming together of imagination and practicality. And it's just that desire to find out more, look at things from a slightly different perspective. Value is a mystery was...
you know, a supposed degree of creativity in a roundabout sort of a way. I'd never thought of it that way before. So yeah, for me, it's that connecting of new ideas and new ways of thinking in innovative ways.
it's looking for different patterns, looking at the way things work and just rearranging them a little bit, if you like.
Brad Eather (43:18)
Hmm. Cause that statement going all the way back to the beginning of the episode, value is a mystery. It's so open-ended that it invites critical thinking. mean, you've gone really deep on a single question and written three books, but that
Mike Wilkinson (43:29)
Hmm.
Thanks.
Brad Eather (43:38)
That's the seed in this case of something that you've developed out of a single question and a thought that you've taken a long way.
Mike Wilkinson (43:49)
Yeah, that's true. That is true. Yeah. I didn't think of it quite that way, to be honest. It is interesting, isn't it? Because I thought about it in a sort of practical way, because I could see where the issues were. And like you, you introduced this.
by making the point that I make whenever I go to conferences, for some bizarre reason I speak at a lot of pricing conferences, and I always start by saying to people, I guarantee that in this conference during the next few hours, the word value will be used more often than any other place on earth. Because they're all talking about it. And I said that equally, I guarantee that most of you won't have the remotest idea what you're talking about. we all define value differently.
Brad Eather (44:28)
And I think for me, one of the key pieces that after participating in your course that I'm going to invest some time in is really thinking about that emotional connection piece and where I can improve on that. That's that's, that was my key takeaway. Definitely.
Mike Wilkinson (44:39)
Yeah.
That's really interesting. it's not about that old fashioned sales approach who says it's all about the relationship. It's all about the relationship. The relationship is hugely important, but it's much more than just the relationship. Once upon a time, people would do business with you because you were a nice bloke. Today, they won't do that. You have to be a nice bloke and you have to deliver everything else that they need as well. So that emotional connection is one component.
of their overall perception of value. And it will be important. for some people, if you think about those three component elements of value triad will be of varying importance to different people. And our job is to understand what is the most important element of the value triad in the conversation I'm having with this customer.
Brad Eather (45:32)
Where can people get in touch with you, mate?
Mike Wilkinson (45:35)
Well, the easiest answer is to drop me an email, but you can find my website at www.axiavalue.com. You can find me on LinkedIn and I certainly encourage people who are interested in value to connect with me on LinkedIn. And it's Michael Wilkinson is my name on LinkedIn. And my email is MW, Mike Whiskey at axiavalue.com. That's it.
Brad Eather (46:01)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Mike. And to everybody out there, thanks for listening to the Selling's Creative Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to like and subscribe. But in the meantime, happy selling.
Mike Wilkinson (46:16)
Thank you very much indeed. It's been a pleasure.
