Nothing grabs the attention of prospective customers quicker than showing them how much money, time and effort they can save by doing business with you. But, it’s up to you to quantify those savings.
Make a list of your actions/products/services that make your customers’ job easier and more profitable. Perhaps you provide free employee training. Or maybe your products are more reliable and have fewer defects. Maybe you deliver more often, or at more convenient hours. Perhaps your packaging allows for easier handling and reduces damage. Perhaps you reduce your customers’ warehousing costs by offering frequent deliveries in “as needed” quantities.
Make estimates of how much money your customers and prospects save by using your product or service versus the competition. If you can’t pinpoint those costs, ask the customers themselves to come up with their own numbers. When the customer crunches the numbers personally, they are a lot easier to convince. For example, if your customer can release his warehouse space because you offer just in-time delivery, ask him/her to calculate space rental savings.
If you can’t get numbers from the customer, report how much money you saved similar clients. The more specific you can be the better.
Talk to your customers and prospects about their business problems. It’s important to understand your customers’ businesses, perhaps even better than they do themselves. If you learn that on-time delivery has high significance to your customers, then it should be your mission to create measurements and a culture that will support it.
DON’T ASSUME your existing customers know all the benefits you are providing them. What are you doing for them that they take for granted? What would it cost them to do it themselves? Remember, it is far more expensive to gain a new customer than to retain a valued one. Frequently re-state your value proposition to existing customers.