ï»ż00:00 â Value-Based Selling: Introduction to Value in Sales
Brad Eather: Hello and welcome to the Selling is Creative podcast, a show exploring creativity's role in sales, leadership, and business. I'm your host, Brad Eather, a digital communications consultant supporting businesses and sales professionals as they 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 no matter how hard we think on them, they often still feel like riddles. Because ultimately, until we uncover what our customers actually perceive as valuable, value will remain a mystery.
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 frameworkâa 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: Brad, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
01:45 â How to Define Value for Your Customer: Value as a Mystery
Brad Eather: I first came across your work when I was reading a book where you were quoted. The phrase that stood 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: 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 if you think about it. It actually all happened back on the 29th of March 2006. I was speaking at a conference of chemical sales engineers in Copenhagen. The night before, we'd all gone out for dinner. There were about a hundred of these guys, and in conversation, I was just asking them about what it is they did and what they sold to their customers. Almost everybody told me that what they sell to their customers was value. I thought this was absolutely bizarreâI thought they've all been brainwashed.
So the next morning, instead of doing what I originally planned, I said, "Look guys, I was really interested in how many of you told me that value was what you sold. But I'd like you to tell me what that actually is. I want you to come up with an Oxford English Dictionary definition of value, beginning with the words: 'Value is...'"
There were about ten tables with ten people on each table. I told them I just wanted one card from each table with their value definition written down. The minute I gave them the task, it was instantly obvious that they were struggling. I don't know why they thought they sold value, because they had real difficulty coming up with what it meant. It took about 20 minutes just to get those cards back.
Our agreement was that I would read through the cards, distill all of their thinking, and we would come up with a distilled value definition. I started going through them, and it won't surprise you that all of them were completely different. There were clearly some similaritiesâthe word "perception" came up on a number of occasions. But halfway through the pack, I turned a card over, looked down, and thought, This is ridiculous. I can't say that. After 20 minutes of work, they had come up with just two additional words following "Value is...". Those two words were: "a mystery."
The more I began to think about it, the more I began to realize just how accurate that observation was. Because until we understand what our customers see as being valuable, we can only guess. We may be able to make educated guesses, but at the end of the day, the most important rule of value is that it is defined by the customer, not by us. Given that that is the case, our entire job as salespeople is to solve the value mystery. That's it. It's incredibly powerful to get salespeople to recognize that sometimes we don't understand as much about the customer as we need to.
04:49 â B2B Sales Process: The Seven Challenges of Value Framework
Brad Eather: That really gets me thinking as a salesperson. The first thing that comes to mind is discovery. This is so perfectly applicable to the discovery process. It makes complete sense that this is what we are trying to do during discovery. But you've gone a lot further and developed The Value Challenge and The Seven Challenges of Value. Could you walk us through that framework? The idea of value being a mystery naturally implies discovery, but you track it all the way from the very beginning of the sales process to the very end. How does that look?
Mike Wilkinson: Yes, value is a mystery, and our number one job is to solve it. Part of the mystery is that value means different things to different people. If you're in a complex B2B sale and you're talking to multiple stakeholders, value will be different for all of them. Clearly, if they work for the same business, there will be similarities. But the finance director will think of value in a completely different way than the operations people, the end-users, or whoever else is involved in the decision.
When I started mapping out what the challenges of value were, I spent a lot of time talking to salespeople, sales directors, and sales VPs. This framework is a distillation of all those global conversations. There are seven distinct challenges that salespeople need to address from the beginning of the sales cycle through to delivering value at the end:
* Challenge 1: Understand Value. We have to understand value as a concept because if we're going to talk about it, we need a framework around how we think about it. But crucially, we must understand value in terms of what it means to our specific customers. This is the foundation for everything. If we haven't done this effectively, the rest of the challenges are going to be a big challenge.
* Challenge 2: Perceptions are Constantly Changing. This one can be a bit irritating, but you have to recognize that a customer's perception of value is constantly changing. Just because I understand what you value today does not mean you will value the exact same things in a week's time. As tariffs are imposed, taxes go up, import duties change, budgets shift, or people move, the requirements of value change.
* Challenge 3: Identify People Who Care About Value. You need to find the stakeholders 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 is so much pressure on in terms of pricing, people will tell you their only interest is price. If we don't deeply understand value, we have very little defense against that.
* Challenge 4: Differentiate What You Do. This lives inside the value proposition. You must differentiate your offering, but recognize that differentiation is not just about being different. Differentiation is about being different in ways that your customer values. If you failed Challenge 1, true differentiation becomes more difficult.
* Challenge 5: Communicating Your Value Effectively. When I run surveys asking sales professionals what their biggest challenges are, this one always comes up. Businesses frequently fall down here. Again, you can only communicate value effectively if you understand the value your customer is looking for.
* Challenge 6: Sharing in Value (Pricing & Defending). This is about pricing effectively, defending your price against downward pressure, and sharing in the value you deliver. Making airy-fairy promises like "we can save you money" or "we can make you money" isn't enough. You need to monetize the specific impact of your solution on the customer's business. This demonstrates your value clearly and makes it much easier to defend your margins.
* Challenge 7: Delivering the Value. This is where the wheels often fall off. Steps one through six represent your value promise, but then you actually have to get off your ass and do it. Delivering value seamlessly is quite a challenge for some businesses. I was reading a report stating that 59% of a buying decision is driven purely by the customer's buying experienceâthe conversations, the interactions, the entire process.
10:32 â How to Prevent Discounting & Deliver Value Effectively
Brad Eather: I want to unpack the first partâthe definition of value. But I'm interested in your take on value delivery. Not every business is going to have every piece of this framework perfectly aligned. On the flip side of businesses falling down on delivery, there are companies out there that skip everything else but do an excellent job of actually executing the delivery. However, they might struggle to acquire new business because they can't articulate what their real value is. What do you say to a business in that position?
Mike Wilkinson: I think that's actually really quite sad, isn't it? To be exceptionally good at what you do, but unable to communicate it. The thing is, on the whole, customers don't buy what you do. They buy what you do that helps them 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 am clear about the outcome the customer is looking for, it's much easier to position how my solution helps them get there. If I don't do that bit, I end up being a solution chasing a problem, rather than looking for the problem first and then demonstrating the solution. There may be fine differences between the two, but they are massive in the eyes of the customer.
12:42 â The Value Triad Explained: Revenue, Cost, & Emotion
Brad Eather: I like that answer. Having looked through the Value Challenge, it really forces you to focus on the overall customer journey. A great customer journey is about creating experiences and adding value at every single stage of the process. With that said, let's jump back to the beginning and look at how we start defining value using your "Value Triad". How does that work?
Mike Wilkinson: The Value Triad came right after we established that value is a mystery. I initially walked away from that meeting thinking, Yippee, cracked it! Value is a mystery, all we have to do is solve it. But it became clear quickly that if you don't have a conceptual framework around what value actually consists of, solving it is incredibly difficult. My colleague and I sat down for a couple of days to map out the component elements of value, and we developed the Value Triad. It breaks value down into three core component areas that everybody will recognize:
* 1. Revenue or Performance Gain: Look at what you do for your customers and ask: How does what we do help our customers improve their revenue or performance? We tend to focus heavily on revenue, but for some organizationsâlike healthcare or public hospitalsâpatient outcomes are a better measure of success than top-line revenue.
* 2. Cost Reduction: How does your product or service help your customer reduce their costs?
There is an overarching requirement here: to do either of these two things effectively, you have to understand exactly where your customer generates revenue and where they are incurring costs. You can't tell them you can improve their business if you don't understand their commercial realities in deep detail.
Revenue gain and cost reduction are both tangible, measurable, and objective components of value. It is critical that we measure them at two key points in the sales cycle : first, during value discovery, where we calculate the financial cost to their business if they fail to address their problems ; and second, during value demonstration, where we place a clear monetary value on how our solution solves those challenges. Technical salespeople usually love these two areas.
* 3. Emotional Connection: This is the third piece we initially wrestled with. I used to call it "emotional contribution," but I recently changed it to "emotional connection." This is the softer, intangible, and subjective area of relationships, credibility, and trust. It's the feeling that you are the sort of business I want to be working with. It is incredibly difficult to measure, but massively important. This ties right back to the fact that 59% of the buying decision comes down to the buying experience, which is heavily dictated by how we connect and communicate.
18:18 â Emotional Connection in Sales: The Ultimate Superpower
Brad Eather: When I look at the Value Triad, I see a clear separation between the tangible stuffâcost and revenueâwhich are often dictated to the salesperson by the product or service itself. But what I see real value in is understanding how a salesperson can personally contribute value within the sales process itself. What do they actually have control over? I really love the emotional connection piece for that reason. What should salespeople be leaning on to leverage that part of the conversation?
Mike Wilkinson: The starting point is for salespeople to recognize just how much value they personally bring to the table. One major area is their unique ability to understand the customer better than their competitive alternatives.
I believe one of the absolute greatest sales superpowers is the ability to summarize. If you can summarize effectively and demonstrate to the customer that you truly understand the exact nuances of the challenges they face, you are already a step ahead of everybody else. It proves you asked excellent questions, listened intently, and possess the depth of understanding required to build a tailored solution.
An emotional connection is built when people feel you are paying absolute attention to them, and that you are genuinely interested and curious about themâboth as an individual and about their specific role in the business. If I were recruiting salespeople, Brad, the number one characteristic I would look for is innate curiosity. I call it "constructive nosiness." It's the desire to put your nose in places you ordinarily wouldn't, simply because you are genuinely interested in finding out how things work. When you are driven by genuine curiosity, you ask questions in a completely different way than someone who is just reading from a mandated script.
23:47 â The Five Stages of the Value Sales Process
Brad Eather: I hope that curiosity is what this podcast representsâan opportunity for people to step outside their comfort zone and think differently about sales, leadership, and holistic business topics.
Mike Wilkinson: Absolutely. As a seller, if you aren't deeply interested in your customers, what the hell are you doing in the profession? We should be entirely dedicated to helping our customers make the best possible decisions and achieve their desired outcomes. If you just do it by rote, it's boring, and it completely fails to establish that emotional connection.
Brad Eather: I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The word "sales" implies finalityâit's the end result of what we do. Where people get it wrong psychologically is thinking their entire job is just to close. Maybe we need a definition that is much more people-focused rather than product-focused.
Mike Wilkinson: I completely agree. For the vast majority of markets I deal with, the individual sale is not the end of the story at all. The real objective of a professional seller is to broaden the relationship, network across key client accounts, and look for additional opportunities to add value over the long term. Closing the sale is not the ultimate objective. The ultimate objective is developing the relationship to such a degree that you become their absolute first port of call whenever an issue arises.
Brad Eather: Exactly. From a business perspective, those relationships compound over time and drive massive referral business. Instead of dropping a salesperson into a role and demanding instant closing results in three months, organizations need to give them time to settle in and let that compounding interest work.
Mike Wilkinson: Yes, speed of onboarding is a massive corporate issue right now. People increasingly expect new hires to hit the ground running, which can be incredibly tough, especially in complex B2B sales environments. If you're selling tins of baked beansâwith all due respect to baked bean salespeopleâthere isn't a mountain of product and market knowledge required. But complex sales require deep expertise.
To help navigate this, I distilled the value sales approach into a straightforward, high-level, five-step process that can overlay virtually any existing sales methodology a business is currently running:
* 1. Assess Your Opportunities: I visit countless businesses that waste massive amounts of time working on deals that are going absolutely nowhere, won't be profitable, or are going to be a total pain to manage. Opportunity assessment must happen right at the beginning by answering two simple questions: Do we want it? (Is it attractive, profitable, and are these good people to work with?) and Realistically, can we win it? If the answer to either is no, disqualify it and move to something productive. This is not a one-off event; you must constantly reassess as you learn more. Some pipelines look like they've been written by Hans Christian Andersenâjust full of fiction and hope that will never ever come to fruition.
* 2. Value Discovery: This is the second step and the most important bit. This is where we uncover what the customer actually sees as valuable, mapping out their challenges, problems, and strategic goals. Value discovery must be a fluid, open conversationânot an interrogation. If we are genuinely curious, it feels like a structured chat where the customer feels comfortable opening up, rather than being guarded because they feel a rigid sales process forcing them down a path. Here, you identify all key stakeholders and map out the exact decision-making process. I firmly believe that the true selling is entirely done during value discovery, as the customer sells themselves through their answers to your well-crafted questions.
* 3. Value Demonstration: Value demonstration is actually too late to start selling. This phase should simply be a confirmation of what the customer already expects you to be able to do because you mapped their requirements so perfectly during discovery. This is where your written proposals, presentations, value propositions, and financial calculators live to show the clear monetary return on investment they get.
* 4. Value Delivery: Once they say yes and the deal closes, you move into delivery. While execution is heavily reliant on the operational fulfillment side of the business, as sellers, we must stay involved to ensure the onboarding process is seamless.
* 5. Value Development: Because the sale is not the end of the journey, this final step focuses on the ongoing post-sale conversationânetworking deeper into the client organization, identifying new problems to solve, and continuously expanding account value.
29:48 â Collaboration & Value Discovery in Sales
Brad Eather: What I really enjoy about your work is that at every single stage, you frame the sales cycle as a highly collaborative effort. You emphasize that discovery isn't an interrogation, it's a conversation; and demonstration isn't a rigid presentation, it's a conversation. That cooperative framework allows the emotional connection piece to naturally pull people through the pipeline.
Mike Wilkinson: Exactly. The customer is talking to you because they have a burning problem, a challenge, or a major opportunity they want to capture. The more we can work alongside them as a unified team to help them achieve that outcome, the better the result. If the customer perceives that you aren't on their side and that you're just trying to push a product for the sake of hit quotas, the relationship simply won't work. We shouldn't sell at people; we sell with people.
30:23 â Building Trust & Sales Pipeline Quality
Brad Eather: In my consulting world, the word "trust" comes up constantlyâeveryone says you need to be trusted. But for a professional salesperson, I actually think trust is the wrong word to focus on initially. It really comes down to reputation, because reputation is actively built through the structured process we've been discussing.
31:33 â The Role of Reputation in Sales vs. Trust
Brad Eather: The piece that many traditional sellers miss because they aren't fully familiar with the digital world is that an established reputation creates inherent trust before you even speak. If you can clearly articulate your value and build a strong professional reputation online, you attract high-quality opportunities inbound. You don't need to act like a random LinkedIn pitch-bot who just decided to have a crack at online business. Because you have an established reputation, people respect you before the first call.
Mike Wilkinson: Spot on. When you look at the component parts of trustâcredibility, respect, and consistently executing on what you promisedâthey all form that overall trust equation. Without trust, you cannot do business. The old adage is entirely true: customers must know, like, and trust you before they buy.
32:52 â Trust and Delivery in Sales: Protecting the Relationship
Brad Eather: In the sales process, trust can be initiated beforehand, but it is truly solidified during the delivery process. That is when trust is at its most vulnerable. If you fail to deliver on what you promised during the sales cycle, you will burn bridges left, right, and center.
33:58 â Company Culture and Value Delivery Expectations
Mike Wilkinson: Trust is the thread that runs completely through the entire sales and delivery process. If you snap that trust thread at any single point, you have a massive problem. As sellers, particularly in complex B2B environments, we have to recognize a harsh reality: the ultimate delivery of value is usually not down to us personally. We are the people out there making the value promise to the customer. But it is the wider organization that has to deliver on that promise.
This is why I firmly believe that every single person in the business needs to understand what value means broadly, what it means to that specific customer, and exactly what their individual role is in executing that value. Very often, organizational shortcomings occur because the delivery teams don't understand the promise made by sales, breaking that critical trust thread.
Brad Eather: When you look closely at that dynamic, you realize you're putting a magnifying glass on company culture. It's about aligning every department to take pride in their work, value the customer, and ensure seamless handoffs. That's exactly why AI isn't going to replace high-level professional sellingâhumans are incredibly complex, and it is through human collaboration that cross-functional outcomes are delivered.
34:59 â The Importance of Salespeople in Complex Markets
Mike Wilkinson: For decades, pundits have predicted that salespeople were going to be made completely redundant by technology. Generally speaking, the exact reverse has happened. As we move deeper into an age of intense technological complexity, customers need professional human sellers more than ever to help them see through the information noise and navigate the internal complexities of their own corporate decision-making processes. However, salespeople do need to be very careful and critically evaluate their modern role, because the traditional "brochure carrier" is undoubtedly an endangered species.
35:30 â Navigating Information Overload in B2B Buying Cycles
Brad Eather: There's a media theory called the "Gutenberg Parentheses." The core idea is that once upon a time, human culture transmitted information via oral storytelling and spoken word within communities. Then the printing press arrived, allowing us to write text down, mass broadcast a standardized message from a single source, and ensure everyone consumed the exact same information.
Now, we've moved to the other side of that parenthesis. Through digital media and social networks, communication is a non-stop, two-way street. But we've reached a point of extreme information overload. There are so many conflicting messages pinging around that buyers are retreating back into digital tribalism. This is why consultative sellers are more critical than ever: amidst overwhelming information overload, buyers fall back on trusted individuals within localized communities who possess proven domain expertise.
Mike Wilkinson: I don't think that's a long-winded tangent at allâit is entirely accurate. If you go onto the internet today to research a solution, it is getting increasingly difficult to know what to believe or what is actually real. Having a consultative salesperson you can explicitly trust and believe in is becoming a massive competitive advantage for buyers.
37:29 â Power Questions in Value Discovery
Brad Eather: Let's look closer at the discovery process, because you go incredibly deep into what you call "Power Questions." You break them down into five distinct types: Situation questions, Problem questions, Impact questions, Gain questions, and Commitment questions. Out of those five, where do sellers make the biggest mistakes, and what are they missing?
Mike Wilkinson: In the broadest sense, the biggest mistake is that salespeople are in way too much of a rush. They want to sprint through discovery to get to the "sexy" partâwhich, in their minds, is talking about how wonderful their products, features, and services are. They fail to slow down and invest the necessary time into asking deep questions and letting their curiosity run wild during the diagnostic phase. This structural flow works as a conversational map for a structured value journey.
* Situation Questions are strictly about setting the context, demonstrating you've done background research, and establishing your foundational credibility.
* Problem Questions uncover the specific issues, bottlenecks, and corporate challenges the customer faces.
Where traditional consultative selling often fails is stopping right after identifying the problem. A lot of sellers think, Aha! I found the problem, now I can pitch my solution on top of it and Bob's your uncle. Within a true value sales process, that misses the most critical lever: Impact Questions. You must monetize the operational cost of the problem on the customer's business. You have to ask: What is the impact on your business of failing to address that problem? What does it cost you if you don't take advantage of that opportunity? Impact questions are where we actively begin to monetize our value.
Similarly, the power of a Gain Question is getting the customer to articulate the financial upside in their own words. If the conversation is going well and I ask: "Brad, if we could solve that specific problem for you, what would that be worth to your department?"âand you give me the exact number , that answer becomes lethal ammunition for me during value demonstration. I can look back at the proposal and say: "Brad, you may remember mentioning earlier that resolving this bottleneck would allow you to do so-and-so. Can you see how our solution directly allows you to capture that value?" You are using their exact words to demonstrate the value they explicitly told you they were looking for, making your position hyper-persuasive.
If I could give just one single piece of advice to B2B sellers globally, it is this: Slow down. The more time you invest in high-quality value discovery, the faster the actual sales cycle moves overall. It sounds counterintuitive, but the better you understand the customer, the faster you get to the close.
40:50 â Constructive Curiosity as a Core Sales Trait
Brad Eather: That completely validates the curiosity piece. I previously interviewed a sales recruitment expert, James Michael, who collected data across more than 20,000 sales professionals. His research explicitly proved that innate curiosity was the defining psychological trait separating the top quartile of high-performing B2B solution sellers from the rest of the pack.
Mike Wilkinson: It makes total sense, but the interesting thing about curiosity is that you cannot just order someone to "be curious." I've thought deeply about what actually triggers curiosity, and the root driver is interest. If you are deeply, genuinely interested in something, you are naturally driven to ask questions and find out more.
Which brings us right back to first principles: if you aren't genuinely interested in your customers' businesses, why are you in sales in the first place? You'll never be curious enough to uncover the real metrics. Interest and curiosity are inseparable bedfellows.
42:21 â Creativity and Value Understanding in Modern Business
Brad Eather: That is a beautiful segue into our final signature question: what is your personal definition of creativity?
Mike Wilkinson: As you can gather, I believe deep curiosity is a massive component of creativity. For me, creativity is the precise coming together of imagination and practicality. It's that burning desire to look at a standard problem from a slightly different perspective.
Formulating the statement "Value is a mystery" required a degree of lateral creativity out of a practical problem. To me, creativity is connecting new ideas and new ways of thinking in highly innovative, practical waysâlooking for different patterns in the way things work and rearranging them to create better outcomes.
Brad Eather: Going all the way back to the beginning of the episode, the phrase "value is a mystery" is so beautifully open-ended that it naturally forces critical thinking. You took the seed of a single question and built a framework, three books, and a global methodology out of it.
Mike Wilkinson: It's interesting looking at it that way. I approached it purely from a practical standpoint because I saw where sales teams were consistently failing. Whenever I speak at international corporate pricing conferences, I always start by telling the audience: "I guarantee that during this conference over the next few hours, the word 'value' will be used more frequently than in any other place on earth. But I equally guarantee that most of you don't have the remotest idea what you're actually talking about, because we all define it completely differently."
Brad Eather: Participating in your training program, my single biggest takeaway that I am going to invest significant creative time into is improving how I build the emotional connection piece throughout my digital consulting cycles.
Mike Wilkinson: That's fantastic. It's vital to note that this is not about the old-fashioned, superficial sales cliché of "it's all about the relationship." Relationship equity is highly important, but modern commercial connection is much deeper. Once upon a time, corporate buyers would do business with you simply because you were a nice bloke. Today, they won't. You have to be a great person to deal with, and you have to flawlessly deliver quantifiable business value.
The emotional connection is just one critical component of their overall calculation of value. Depending on the stakeholder, the three elements of the Value Triad will hold varying degrees of importance to different people. Our core job as professionals is to solve the mystery and uncover exactly which element of the triad matters most to the person sitting across from us.
Brad Eather: Where can people get in touch with you, Mike?
Mike Wilkinson: You can find our main website and resources at www.axiavalue.com. I highly encourage anyone interested in mastering value-based selling to connect with me directly on LinkedIn under Michael Wilkinson. Alternatively, feel free to drop me a direct email at [email protected].
Brad Eather: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Mike. And to our global audience, thank you for tuning into the Selling is Creative podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to like and subscribe. In the meantime, happy value selling.
Mike Wilkinson: Thank you very much indeed, Brad. It's been an absolute pleasure.
