Cindy Barnes - Selling Your Value Proposition: How to Transform Your Business into a Selling Organization

Praise for Selling Your Value Proposition

We are living in the Age of the Customer. Selling Your Value Proposition provides leaders with fresh, insightful advice on how to drive the customer-centric business transformation our new world requires. The time has come for every employee to join the sales team, and Barnes, Blake and Howard provide a blueprint with powerful case studies to arm leaders with what they need to get started. A must-read for the transformational leader of the future. Cate Gutowski, VP, Commercial Digital Thread, GE Digital

In Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition the Futurecurve team helped companies tackle the central, most critical, question they need to address in order to be successful in the market: what is it that makes us unique? Put differently, why should your customers buy from you instead of your competitors? Now, in this terrific follow-up book, they help companies translate their unique value proposition into a set of messages that the salesforce can use to drive growth. In so doing, the authors tackle a question that is just as difficult and vexing for managers: what would have to be true in the customers world for them to want to PAY us for our unique differentiators? Together, these two books packed with practical advice, tools and case examples are must-read material for B2B CEOs, sales leaders and marketers intent on driving growth in markets increasingly crowded with seemingly commoditized offerings. Matthew Dixon, Group Leader, CEB, and co-author, The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer

Packed with tried and tested tactics and dozens of examples from real organizations, this is an essential read for executives in large corporates or anyone who wants to be customer-centric (internal or external), innovate and stay ahead of the game. Simon Gale, Procurement Director, Sony Europe

If we keep looking at our customers through the same lens, having the same conversations with them, telling them the same things, not properly hearing the answers, we wake up one day and we dont understand each other any more and worse, we have been replaced. This book wakes us up and gives us a new way to look at and think about our customers, and then transform the relationships that we have with them. Andy Head, Business Development Director, NATS

Deconstructing all the key elements of what a genuine customer-centric organization looks like, Barnes, Blake and Howard guide us through the most engaging examination of value, and its relationship with customers and organizations. With an emphasis on how to use the tools and implement them effectively, the authors deliver a must-read for all executives seeking to gain, or further, their organizations advantage through deep and resilient relationships with customers. Christopher Taylor, Executive Vice President Strategic Development, Survitec

This book is essentially the most helpful business mentor youve ever met. It thoughtfully reminds us that its our customers lives and ambitions that govern their appetite for our products and services, not our predetermined sales plan. As a leader from local government, where customers and sales are not familiar concepts, I found its clear, concise and creative insights and methods empowering. First to understand where our products and services sit with helping our customers have a better day, on their terms not ours. Then with that humility and integrity to execute a sales process that unlocks our customers own fulfilment. I think we all want to buy from businesses who can do that with grace and style. Andrew Grant, Chief Executive, Aylesbury Vale District Council

Selling Your Value Proposition provides insight, acumen and a clear understanding of how to effect organizational change without turning the organization and its processes upside down. The case-study approach is most helpful, not only to provide exemplars but to show that the challenges in business today are not simply based on the size of the business, but on system-level and individual-level factors that are driving both internal staff behaviour and also customer behaviour. Being able to respond to these sometimes competing forces in a strategic and tactical way is critical for growth and acceleration. Dr Femida Gwadry-Sridhar, founder and CEO, Pulse Infoframe Inc

A critically important survival manual for a digital, disruptive age, in which your value proposition must continually evolve to keep up with connected customers. Dave Gray, founder, XPLANE, and author, The Connected Company

Selling Your Value Proposition isnt only about your value proposition. Its about aligning everything your company does to put the customer at the centre of everything you do. The book focuses on learning what value experiences your customers and markets expect, then on mobilizing your delivery of those experiences through sharp sales and marketing execution. Selling Your Value Proposition helps you align everything you do to create value experiences that are meaningful to your customers. Dave Brock, CEO, Partners In EXCELLENCE

This book shows senior executives how to develop authentic and systemic value propositions in a world where both technology and societal awareness are changing how and why people choose to buy. The authors provide clear guidance on how to implement genuine change through their proven methodology and 10 laws of value proposition selling. I recommend this book to both established businesses and the new generation of entrepreneurs who wish to create genuinely engaging companies in which the whole organization is totally focused on understanding and meeting customer needs. Simon Robinson, co-author, Customer Experiences with Soul: A new era in design and Holonomics

Your value proposition is at the heart of everything you need to do to sell and grow effectively. Yet my experience is that the vast majority of companies fail to invest enough time and energy into this key area. In this superb book, Cindy Barnes, Helen Blake and Tamara Howard bring their expertise and experience alive with a clear road map to enable you to put together a powerful value proposition, translate it into a selling proposition and ultimately transform your business into an authentic, trusted selling organization. If you are ambitious to win more business and grow your sales faster, this book is a must-read. Gordon McAlpine, entrepreneur, mentor, and bestselling author, Scale Up Millionaire

Selling Your Value Proposition

How to transform your business into a selling organization

Cindy Barnes

Helen Blake

Tamara Howard

Publishers note

Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publisher and authors cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. No responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the editor, the publisher or any of the authors.

First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2017 by Kogan Page Limited

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