Sales
Value-Based Selling Planner
Quantify the value you create for one customer, adjust it for risk, and see ROI, payback and how much of the value your price captures.
- Time: 20 to 45 min per deal
- With: Sales, account managers, consultants, founders
- You get: A customer business case you can build with the buyer, plus a one-sentence value story
How to use this worksheet
- Write down what you know about the customer's situation and what the problem costs them. If you do not know, those are your discovery questions.
- List the value drivers: money saved, revenue gained, risk avoided. Enter a yearly amount for each and how confident you are (0 to 100%).
- Enter your price, any yearly cost to the customer, and the time horizon. The tool shows value, ROI, payback and your share of the value.
- Check the result with the customer, driver by driver. Numbers the buyer owns defend your price better than your own claims.
- Write the value story in one sentence and prepare answers to the likely price objections.
What is going on, who is affected, and what does it cost today?
Prompts and example
Ask yourself
- What is the problem in the customer's own words?
- What does it cost per month or year (time, money, lost deals, risk)?
- What happens if they do nothing?
- Who feels the pain, and who decides?
- Which questions do you still need to ask?
Example
Dispatchers re-enter orders by hand: 3 people, about 10 hours a week each. Errors cause about 4 reshipments a month.
Value drivers
One row per driver. Amount per year, and how sure you are it will happen.
Prompts
Ask yourself
- Which drivers did the customer name, and which are your assumptions?
- Where could the amount be measured before the sale?
- Which driver would the finance person trust most?
Price and horizon
What the customer pays and for how long you calculate the value.
One sentence you can say out loud, and answers to price pushback.
Prompts and example
Ask yourself
- For [customer], we [outcome] so that [impact in money or risk], compared with [status quo].
- Objection "It is too expensive": what is the cost of the problem per month?
- Objection "We can build it ourselves": what does that cost in time and delay?
- Objection "We need to think about it": what is the cost of waiting a quarter?
Example
For Acme, we remove manual order entry so that they save about EUR 40,000 a year, and the system pays for itself in under a year.
Customer business case
Before you finish
- Every value driver comes from something the customer told you or confirmed.
- The confidence of each driver is honest: unproven claims are below 50%.
- All costs to the customer are included: implementation, training, subscriptions.
- The time horizon matches how the customer evaluates investments.
Why sell on value
When you sell on features, buyers compare prices. When you sell on value, they compare outcomes: what they gain against what they pay. A price that looks high in isolation looks small next to ten times the value.
The risk adjustment is the honest part. A claimed saving of 40,000 with 75% confidence counts as 30,000. Buyers discount your claims anyway; doing it first builds trust and makes the case harder to dismiss.
The share of value you charge is a pricing signal. Below 15%, you probably leave money on the table. Above 50%, the customer keeps less than half the value and will push back. Somewhere around a quarter to a third is common when the value is well proven.
Recommended reading
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- Value-Added SellingTom Reilly
How to sell more profitably, confidently and professionally by competing on value, not price.
- SPIN SellingNeil Rackham
Question-based discovery that surfaces needs and builds the implied cost of the problem.
- The Challenger SaleMatthew Dixon & Brent Adamson
Teach customers something new about their business and lead the conversation about value.