Value selling
Selling the proposition twice: first inside your own company, then to the customer's decision-making unit in their financial language.
Value selling is the second stage of the Strategic Customer Planning Cycle, and the method insists it happens twice. The first sale is internal: the offer has to pass the 3M test with your own leadership before it goes anywhere near the customer, because an offer that has not been sold inside your company is not an offer, it is a rumour. The second sale is external, to the customer’s decision-making unit, in the customer’s financial language rather than your product vocabulary.
The external sale is to a committee, not a person, so the real competitor is rarely another supplier. It is the customer’s fear of being wrong. A large share of qualified deals are lost to no decision at all, and the remedy is counter-intuitive: take risk off the table so the safe choice and the best choice are the same choice. The pitch itself is planned with ABCDE.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 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.
Decision-making unit (DMU)
The people who decide, influence, use, pay for and can veto a purchase. Mapped as roles, dispositions and relationships, not job titles.
Customer value proposition
The answer to the customer's one real question: what is this worth to me? Said in two sentences, in their financial language.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.