Value - it's not what you think!

If I had a dollar for every time I see the phrase “added value” used in our industry alone, I would be very rich!

But adding value is not about being better than your competitors; it’s actually convincing your clients and potential clients that you can give them what they really want.

Therein lies the golden question – what do your clients and potential clients really want from you?

Here are two fine examples of what the term “value” really means.

1. Why should I pay?

My husband and I were looking to buy an investment property and we met with two agents to help us find the “perfect” property. Both seemed very professional and listened to what we wanted. At the end of the meeting with Agent #2, he told us he would charge a fee to proceed. We were both quite shocked as we believed his remuneration would come via a commission from the vendor, but the agent said he reduced the commission from the vendor and made up the difference from the purchaser. When we heard that the fee would be over $600 we quickly ended the meeting.

Any way we looked at it, we couldn’t comprehend why we had to pay for someone to help us find a property. After all, the first agent was being paid 100% by the successful vendor.

Agent #2 called the next morning and took great pains to justify the fee by saying it took time, knowledge and skills to do this work on our behalf and a “value” had to be placed on that. Still, from my perspective, I couldn’t understand what I would save or get in return.

In other words, “what value was I getting for my money?”

EPIPHANY! Suddenly I was sitting on the other side of the fence and it became so clear! You can’t TELL another person what is valuable to them. That individual must FEEL the value. To do that you have to use emotion to make the buyer feel something – usually pain.

2. John Grisham explains it well

A few days later I was relaxing on a rainy Sunday afternoon (work furthest from my mind) reading a John Grisham novel titled “The Appeal”. And there it was again... the question of value.

Short story... a multi-billionaire is at risk of losing everything. He is offered a service that will help him keep his international conglomerate AND his billions. When he is quoted $8 million for this service his hackles rise so he requests a business plan to show what he’s getting for his multi-million-dollar investment. The response is priceless (and valuable!). He is smugly told that it’s not important how the money is spent; it’s what he will get in return – he will keep his billions in return for “just” $8 million. He suddenly gets it. He could probably try to do it himself, but he knows he doesn’t have the time, skills or contacts – and there’s a helluva lot at stake here. It’s VERY valuable to him – far more than $8 million, so really, the “price” is very low in comparison .

So applying this to my experience...
I didn’t understand why I should pay anything when the service was free elsewhere – which is the value I had placed on it and nobody could tell me otherwise. The “value proposition” that was put to me didn’t focus on my pain. It didn’t make me say “Yes, I really need this service from this person because...”

The value is in the pain
The pain for me in this scenario is that my time is precious to me and I hate wasting it. Therefore a good value proposition outlining what might happen if I didn’t use this service, perhaps how many hours I would save by not travelling long distances and traipsing through houses that didn’t suit us at all (but would have earned the agent commission on their sale), would have made me feel some pain and help me understand the real value.

However, no two clients will be the same – they have different pains – and it’s your job to find out what specific pain needs healing for each potential client. Sure, you’re a qualified expert but so is everyone else so that doesn’t add value.

You can use this in your business
I hope my epiphany has helped you as much as it has already helped our business. We automatically thought that we “added value” because we have qualified, talented professionals who can write great financial articles.That’s great – for some people – but a lot of advisers are also good writers, so they won’t feel the value in that offer. Their problem could be that they don’t have the time to do it themselves, and their pain is watching clients go elsewhere because they rarely hear from their adviser.

That’s the pain – losing clients and revenue. And when we show them they can rely on us to cure that pain, they FEEL the value! We don’t need to convince them.

That’s why we can charge $8,000,000 for our newsletter service! (I dream!)