Freightwaves Interview: How to Sell Value

When I was HubTran’s Vice President of 3PL and Broker, I made an appearance on the excellent FreightWaves podcast “Put That Coffee Down” . This podcast isn’t focused on logistics – it’s focused on sales and selling.

The hosts, Kevin Hill and Tim Dooner, chose the topic of Selling Value vs. Price.

I happen to know a thing or two about selling value. I focused the sales and customer success processes at HubTran on communicating and reinforcing the value our customers would receive when they used HubTran to make their back offices and operations groups more efficient.

Some pertinent quotes from the podcast are below, but it’s best to take an hour and watch the whole episode. I am on at the 26:43 mark if you want to skip ahead. There are some great nuggets in there that will help any sales represenative improve their skills.

“It’s really easy for a sales rep to talk about features. That makes the conversation about me. It’s more difficult to get into the problem that the customer actually has and what problem they’re trying to solve. Ultimately, if a sales rep can really dig in and understand the customer’s problem, they’re going to do a better job.”

“At HubTran, our whole value proposition is around selling value. We have to understand what matters to the customer.”

“Sales reps need to do a root cause analysis. Keep asking why. Do it 5 times, and you’re going to find out what the problem is that the customer is actually trying to solve.”

“You’re never going to win on price alone. It will be a race to the bottom. You’re never going to win. Reps need to communicate the long term value like crazy to a customer.”

“At HubTran, we have a thing called the Value Builder. We ask customers a ton of questions so we understand their business and can help them see the value they will get from using HubTran. Once they agree to it, we turn that into what we call the Customer Success Contract. We do check-ins with customers to make sure they are getting the value we promised them. Teach a sales rep to focus on the long term vs. the short term win so they’re focused on selling value as opposed to features and price. It gets customers ginned up and engaged with what they’re buying. In turn, they see that you, as a vendor, are doing what you say you were going to do for them.”

“Sales reps need to do a root cause analysis. Keep asking why. Do it 5 times, and you’re going to find out what the problem is that the customer is actually trying to solve.”