The Problem With Selling Services
In the cleaning and facility management industry, we are in the business of selling services. Services underpin the economic growth of our nation. A World Bank study showed that in high-income countries, services represent 66 percent of GDP compared with only 35 percent in low-income countries. In Australia, services employ more than 8.6 million people, representing 76 percent of all employment.
As the people who deliver these services, we understand how essential they are. Yet services can be hard to understand and define, making them difficult for us to sell.
Complicating this is the issue that the people who buy our services often don’t understand them as well as we do. The ‘product’ of a service is often the result of specialised experience and training. As a result, clients who lack this knowledge often have difficulty evaluating the value of service products.
This lack of understanding leads to commoditization and unfair pressure to force our prices down.
Consider the impact of competitive tendering. Since the 1980s, this system of buying has grown quickly, and now most contracts of any size and value are transacted through bids and tenders. In 2014 to 15, one of Australia’s largest buyers — the Federal government — spent $59.447 billion buying goods and services through Austender, and issued 69,236 supplier contracts.
In a competitive tender, you will be pitted against many competitors — sometimes a handful, sometimes hundreds. This is particularly challenging for people who sell services. Many services, including cleaning services, are complex and time-consuming to execute. Unfortunately, this also makes them complex and time-consuming to explain.
In competitive tenders, we are pressured with word limits, page limits and character limits. This means we’re under constant pressure to get straight into unpacking our methodologies and implementation plans (what and how). This often comes at the expense of explaining the problem we are solving (why), which is the main reason why a customer actually needs us in the first place.
It follows, then, that learning to communicate value to our customers is essential if we want to stand out in this crowded, competitive environment.
Value is like a snowflake — no two commercial value propositions are ever exactly the same. This is because every customer has different hopes, dreams, goals and problems to solve. Yet like a snowflake, commercial value has a six-sided structure, and it is quite beautiful when you see it up close.
Each of us buys with our gut, head and heart. Within each of these drivers, there is a left-brained (quantifiable) and right-brained (qualitative) attribute for value.
When cleaning businesses can explain the value of our offering according to these attributes, it helps us to talk about what we do in a way that speaks directly to the gut, head and hearts of our prospective buyers.
Firstly, visceral (or gut) value attributes include cost and risk. Author and neuroendocrinologist Dr. Deepak Chopra says that gut feelings are “every cell in our body making a decision.” Buying decisions are often triggered by fear, and we can help our customers to understand and protect against their fears.
Secondly, buyers value logical attributes like productivity and reduced complexity. The head drives logic, and most of us have way too much going on in there to be logical about all of it. This phenomenon is known as cognitive load, and we can play a role in reducing this burden for our customers.
Finally, buyers value aspirational attributes like quality and connectivity. Buyers want to make an impact and create a legacy. Understanding this, we can set our customers on a different — smarter and better — path than they would be able to choose on their own.
When you are pitching for new business, thinking about the commercial value you generate — and not just the work you do — helps you to move your attention from inwards on yourself, to outwards on the customer and their needs. This, in turn helps to break down the intangibility barrier we face when selling services, and protects us against commoditization.
Robyn Haydon is the author of three books on business development: her winning business series includes Winning Again (customer retention), The Shredder Test (winning proposals) and the recently-released Value: How to Talk About What You do so People Want to Buy It. Visit www.robynhaydon.com