Demo Psychology: Stop Selling Busines Value and Start Selling Utility

In sales, especially in technical sales, we are told to focus on Business Value. Don’t talk features and functions. Don’t spend time on speeds and feeds (unless the techie guys are in the room).

Value always meant showing a gain of money and time. To close a deal, I had to show at least 1 of 3 things:

1. Save money

2. Make money

3. Save time

The first two were the most important. Bottom line: it always came down to showing a positive financial return.

To me, this made sales easy. I have a degree in mathematics. Selling was mathematical. If I could build a spreadsheet that would compare the costs and effort of their current solution to how they would do it with my solution (the ROI model!), that would serve as the proof of my solution’s Business Value. The prospect would see positive financial gain. We would close the deal.

Except, it didn’t work like that at all. There are very many occasions when showing a positive financial return, even a massive one, simply didn’t get a deal done. As you suspect, there are systems at the work in the brain that make this much more complicated.

Emotion plays a big role in how the automatic brain works. Because of emotion, it’s possible for a person to decide against what logically appears to be a great option. It just doesn’t feel right to them. As people weigh perceived risk against expected outcome, the risk threat they feel often looms larger than the positive effects of a gain. This leads us to the notion of Utility.

Utility is the total satisfaction one receives from consuming a good or service. This definition is easy to understand but not very exact. I would suggest that if consuming something — say, using a piece of software — makes me very happy, then it has a large Utility. Just how large can only be quantified by me.

Further, this explains why someone would keep their crappy old software vs. using my shiny new software, especially if they put a lot of themselves into building it. Even though I think their life would be easier AND they would save lots of time and money, the Utility they assign to what they currently have outweighs the Utility they perceive I’m offering. So, I lose.

Rather than looking at mathematical estimates of financial value and time savings, I need to determine how my prospect figures Utility. That is very different than building a convincing spreadsheet.

First and most important, Utility is based on the prospect’s valuation and not mine. That makes it much harder that straight math. I first need learn to enough about the prospect to know what brings them satisfaction.

Let me pause here. I’m not talking about what is commonly called Sales Discovery. I find that to many salespeople, Sales Discovery means learning the facts of a prospect’s situation. They then ask questions to relate those facts to money and time. This can fool you into thinking you can get a deal.

What I am talking about is getting to know someone in order to know how they measure Utility. It means understanding individual preferences and desires. Let me expound.

I’m selling analytics software. My software automatically consumes data and makes it very easy to create charts and graphs to analyze that data. Consider then two sales situations.

In Situation 1, my prospect Nancy currently uses manual downloads and a large Excel workbook to consume the data and do the analysis. She has spent many hours building clever formulas and macros, creating amazing charts and graphs. The senior directors she serves remark often on how Nancy always produces the coolest dashboards. When they ask a question, Nancy quickly gets the answer. She is proud of her spreadsheet and clearly receives a large degree of satisfaction from using it. She’s an analysis hero to the senior management team.

Selling to Nancy means showing her that she can be more of a hero using my software. I must prove to her that she can be clever and give those senior managers something that impresses them even more. That’s a potentially long and difficult sale.

SIDENOTE: Now, some clever sales rep may come along and suggest we just go to Nancy’s boss’s boss. Management is all about bottom line. Only they approve deals. Except, they also like their people. And they aren’t going to fire Nancy. Why spend more money on something that will just cause a people headache? Probably not a good option.

Let’s now look at Situation 2. Nancy still manages the same spreadsheet. But she hates the damn thing. It’s a lot of manual work. It’s difficult to change. Sometimes it breaks, and she spends hours fixing the problem. When management asks a question, she now must do extra work to get the answer. Sure, she gets praise for coming through every month with the analysis. But she would much rather be using something else.

Two very different situations. The ROI model for my analytics solution is the same in both situations. The amount of money and time we would save this prospect in both situations is exactly the same.

Clearly the Utility is not. In Situation 1, Nancy of course would care less about my ROI Model (or my solution, for that matter). And it will be a difficult go trying to get the attention of Nancy’s management if Nancy is the happy Analysis Hero.

In Situation 2, I think Nancy will gladly take my ROI model in hand, run to her management waving her hands and shouting for joy. She would message them on Slack every hour to see if the purchase had been approved. She would be my deal champion for sure.

It’s not math that makes a sale happen. It’s not an ROI model with overwhelming positive return. It’s Utility. It’s about increasing the satisfaction the prospect receives from consuming the solution. Stop talking Value and start talking Utility.