In order to sell your value, you need to discover your business fit and sell this fit to decision makers. The business fit is how your two companies, working together, drive critical business outcomes for the customer. These outcomes typically come in the form of objectives that are attained, strategies that are implemented, and issues that are addressed. It sounds simple - and it is - until you actually try to do it.

The tricky part is figuring out what impact your solution and your work with the prospect can help to create. One way to determine this is to dig deeper to find the impact. Here is an example:

Let's say that you are a market researcher, and you are competing for an opportunity to do some research with a new client. To figure out the potential impact on the customer's business, dig deeper with a few questions:
 


What work will you do? Market research.
Why? To help uncover new potential customers.
What will happen when/if you uncover a new customer demographic? The customer will target that group with a marketing effort.
Why? To convert some of these people to customers.
What will the impact be? An increase in revenue.


In this example we tied a research project to a potential increase in revenue (a critical customer business objective) by digging deeper with a few questions.

Why is this important? Let's dig deeper a little ourselves:
 


Who do you want to sell to? Decision makers.
Why? Less time wasted selling to the wrong people, and a higher probability of success.
What do they care more about - your research capabilities or their critical objectives? Their objectives.


What will be more effective when selling to real senior-level decision makers - talking endlessly about your superior research efforts or tying your research capability to the attainment of a critical objective? We all know the answer to that!