The concept of including additional “Value Adds” in a proposal has come up frequently lately. In the interest of keeping this posting short (as readers have recommended!), I’ll address only one issue around Value Adds at this point: it is important to make sure that your client actually understands the value of what you are including.
This sounds like pretty basic advice; after all the word value is included in the phrase Value Add. But the key is to make sure that you can show what the specific Value Add means to that specific account, and then, to the extent possible, quantify it. I’ve seen many situations where a salesperson fails to do that.
Here’s a recent example: A salesperson for a technology company wanted to improve the overall value of their solution by adding some additional training for the operators. This was to be included in the proposal, as a bullet point under a heading of “Additional Value Adds”. The customer contact with final approval on the proposal, a fairly senior executive at the organisation, would have had very little idea what that meant, let alone the value of it to the organisation.
It turns out that this Value Add was about building new skills in the operators, beyond the skills required to operate the equipment (which were covered under "Training" elsewhere in the proposal). This would be of tremendous interest to the operator community, who view it as an opportunity to advance their skills, and to get involved in more interesting work within the company. If they had those skills, they could be more proactive about working with other parts of the organisation, and improve the workflow within the business. This could result in reduced administration effort, compressed development timelines, less rework, fewer errors, less frustration, etc. So clearly, this Value Add really could add value, but it was in danger of being sidelined.
To make sure that your Value Adds aren’t under-valued make sure you focus on three areas:
1. 1. Identify what the Value Add means. In the example above, there was the very real possibility that the Value Add would be confused with the training required to operate the equipment, thereby eliminating the additional value. Keep your explanations clear, concise and relevant, but if additional description is needed, make sure to include it.
2. 2. Specify what it means to the specific individual(s) reviewing the offer. It is important to understand what your audience cares about. If the audience is the operators, discussing the opportunity to learn new skills and advance their career would have been extremely relevant. In this case, though, the audience is senior executives, and operators' career paths may be less compelling. We’ll need to translate the Value Add into business metrics that matter to management: improved efficiency, lowered costs, shortened development timelines, etc. Get the impact right for the right audience.
3. 3. Quantify the impact of the Value Add. It can be hard, but the better we are at quantifying the impact, the more compelling the Value Add will be. We could work with operators, and other departments, to possibly identify the savings from improved productivity, or reduction in waste. We might even model the impact of a decrease in employee turnover in the operator community. In this specific case, the salesperson was leveraging privileged relationships to get access to training that would cost thousands of dollars on the open market: another opportunity to quantify the impact!
Following these three steps can significantly improve the perceived value of your Value Adds, and improve your chances of success! Over time, you may even find that you require fewer Value Adds as you ability to show their impact improves...
