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The reason our customers buy from our company is because of us. This truth tells us that sales professionals need to focus on their personal value – versus corporate value – when interacting with customers.

Corporate Value
During our initial sales training, we are drilled on our company’s corporate value propositions. These are all the things our company does that are presumably better and theoretically different from our competitors.

However, in the eyes of the customer, our competitors look more like our brothers or sisters. Our customers don’t fully appreciate all the effort our marketing department is expending in an attempt to differentiate between our company and our competitors. Companies are very limited in the number of believable value propositions they can actually come up with.

But, there is one clear differentiator we have complete control over. Our competitors can’t replicate it.  It’s one that makes all the difference. One with an endless number of possibilities.

You.

Personal Value
Faithfully towing the company line and exclusively promoting corporate value propositions causes us to miss many opportunities to stand out from the crowd. It is also much easier to differentiate ourselves through personal value instead of corporate value.

We are not restricted in the number of ways for us to personally be prominent and distinct in our industry. The principle of personal value is right under our nose and we’re not using it to our advantage.

A Simple Example Of Personal Value We Can Add Right Now
As sales professionals, we tend to fixate on all the problems our customers’ voicemail systems cause us.

How about our own voicemail and the problems it causes our customers? We can differentiate ourselves from 99% of our competitors by merely updating our voicemail on a daily basis and returning calls according to what we’ve promised in our voicemail greeting.

If we’re going to be out of the office, we must say so and let callers know when they can expect us to return their call. Most importantly, we must ensure that we return their call precisely as we’ve indicated – never make them wait more than two hours for a return call.

By updating our voicemail every morning, we look up to date, relevant and like a sales professional who is on top of things.

Sales Blog Epilogue
The example above is but one of many easy and straightforward personal differentiators that make us look proactive and professional. We are only limited by our imagination and the industry we serve when it comes to creating our own personal value propositions.

Further sales blog reading:
Our Professionalism May Be Killing Us
Value Propositions, Corporate and Personal
Quirky Sales Professionals
Your Personality is What the Customer Wants to See

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>©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer

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Related posts:

1. A Company President Who Takes All Sales Calls
2. Value Propositions, Corporate and Personal
3. Being a Name Brand Salesperson for a Really-Big-Company
4. Why It Pays To Make Life Easy For Your Customers
5. Customers in 2008 vs. Customers in 1993. Are they really different?

Tags: personality, sales-training, salespeople

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