What $1,000,000.00 Taught Me

Years ago I was part of a team pitching a Fortune 500 company. 

This was a huge HUGE deal for us & we worked as hard as we could to make it amazing!

So we had crafted a solution proposal that would save this company $1,000,000 a year! 

No brainer - right? Who doesn't want to save a million dollars? 

Well, we were lucky because we ran the proposal by an internal champion before the meeting....and this champion said "So what?

We spend more than a million dollars a year in non-dairy creamer in our cafeterias."  OOOPS.  There's a lot of talk about "value" in the #B2B #sales community. 

Most of the time the #VALUE means $$$$. And that's a problem.  Because VALUE can mean many things to different customers. 

This customer put NO VALUE on one million dollars of savings.  So we asked our champion - what do you guys care about?  

Answer? "Sustainability." They had a national program, a corporate drive to be GREEN! Well whaddaya know...it just so happened our solution got rid of a lot of...paper.

We ran the numbers...one tree made 16 reams of paper.  

When we presented, the "value" wasn't $$$$ It was trees -  36 trees a month. 432 trees a year.

They'd save...a forest! The result?  Sale!

What does "value" mean to YOUR #customers?

It may not be what you think.  So ask.