Selling twice
In a value-based approach you sell every offer twice: once to your own leadership, then to the customer. An offer not sold inside your company is a rumour.
A commodity is sold once. A value-based offer is sold twice, and the first sale is the one account managers skip. Before the proposition goes to the customer it goes to your own leadership, who are a decision-making unit too, with a CFO who has to fund it, an operations director who has to deliver it and a product head who did not ask for it. The 3M test is the gate: material, margin, momentum.
The chapter on selling puts the failure bluntly. Key account managers lose not because the customer says no but because they pitch the relationship rather than the opportunity, inside as much as outside. An offer that has not been sold inside your company is not an offer. It is a rumour, and the customer will find that out at the moment it matters most, which is delivery.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapters 4 and 8.
Related terms
The 3M test
Material, margin, momentum: the three questions an offer has to pass with your own leadership before it is pitched to a customer.
ABCDE
Audience, behaviour, content, delivery, evaluation: the five questions for planning any value pitch.
Value selling
Selling the proposition twice: first inside your own company, then to the customer's decision-making unit in their financial language.
Supplier value capture
The mirror image of customer value capture, and the half suppliers forget on purpose: growth, margin and strategic value back to your own business.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.