Most of us know by now that features are not benefits. The buttons and lights and nifty tools of the trade with which we are familiar and have built our careers on do not often appear to be beneficial or useful to our customers. In answer to this we have been taught to list benefits.

Unfortunately when selling to a business we are held to an even higher standard. While it may be easy to attract an engineer or mid level manager with a fancy interface and promises of benefits he will be shot down by his boss if he doesn’t have a solid cost justification. The benefits need to be translated to dollars to close the deal.

Value Merchants is the best book I’ve read on defining, creating, measuring, and marketing and selling business to business environment using hard dollar value statements in place of empty value claims or lists of unquantified benefits. A primary premise is that value (when selling to businesses) must be measured in money and in the customer’s terms.

Value is measured by identifying value elements which may come from benefits lists, brainstorming, customer visits, and other sources then quantifying the value to the customer.

Value is typically benchmarked against one or two primary competitors. In many cases the competition may be your customer’s in house capability. 

The fundamental equation is Value(f)-price(f) > Value(a)-Price(a) where (f) is our firms offering and (a) is the next best alternative. The difference between Value and Price is the customer’s incentive to purchase. We assume of course that the incentive to buy our offering is greater than the incentive to choose the competition.

Value Merchants covers a range of marketing and product management issues including defining high value offerings, pruning low value options, training sales people, and most importantly selling on value instead of price.

Anyone selling to a business can benefit from the principles and examples in this book. A value proposition which documents a strong incentive to purchase is extremely compelling.