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Jeffrey Scott
SVice President & Chief Accounting Officer, SITE CENTERS CORP

Growing Your Business with Jeffrey Scott: Selling on Value

🎥 Mar 13, 2015 📺 Jeffrey Scott ⏱ 3m 👁 380 views
The “old saw” of price, service and quality is what used to define value. It used to be said that customers could control two out of ...
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About Jeffrey Scott

In a 2015 episode of his program "Growing Your Business," Jeffrey Scott discussed strategies for selling on value. He argued that Amazon has redefined customer expectations for quality, price, and service, making it impossible to compete on price alone. Scott advised that businesses must instead focus on understanding a client's priorities, goals, and emotional drivers, as well as identifying any "pain" the client is experiencing. Scott emphasized that trust is essential to this process, and that it is built by listening, asking questions, and acting in the client's best interest rather than overselling. He stated that when clients feel their interests are prioritized, they lower their defenses and share more information, which in turn increases their perception of the value provided by the firm.

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Transcript (1 segments)
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Jeffrey Scott0:05
Hi, I'm Jeffrey Scott and welcome to Growing Your Business, our very first episode. Today you're going to learn how to sell on value, how to grow value and your client's perception of value, and therefore grow the margin and grow the sale. Value used to be controlled, it was thought, by the old saw of price, quality, and service. It used to be said that a client could control two of the three and you would control the third, and that having the right combination of those three you would optimize the value for your client. But that's no longer the case. It's no longer the case because of Amazon. Amazon has taken us to a whole new place when it comes to quality, price, and service, because they give very good quality, average quality sometimes, but sometimes very good quality. They give excellent service at a low price. You can't compete on price; that's a race to the bottom. You can't compete with Amazon. You have to compete on these three items. You've got to develop value by focusing on these three items: know what your client's priorities are and what their goals are. For example, you don't want to create a proposal that covers the entire property when they're only interested in part of the property. That's where they place value. You need to understand where they place value and what their larger goals are through questioning. You also want to understand pain. Are they in some kind of pain? A commercial client, when they call you in, you want them to be in some kind of pain; otherwise they're just looking for price. Your residential homeowner may be in pain from a previous contractor they hired that really messed things up, or there's something going on on the property that's causing them a lot of pain. You want to find out what that pain is and what's the ego, what's the emotion that they're trying to achieve for themselves or personal goals that's driving them. People make decisions with logic, but they take action because of emotion. You want to get to that emotional state with your client and develop the value based on their goals and their priorities. You have to build trust to do this. Trust is paramount. You build trust by doing what you're going to say, by listening, by asking questions, by paying attention, by not trying to oversell them, but rather trying to do what's in their best interest. If you focus on what's in your client's best interest, you will grow trust. If you grow trust, they'll let down their defenses and share with you what's really going on for them. And when they share based on that trust, you'll grow their perception of value working with your firm. When you grow that perception, you'll grow the margin.