April Dunford · 5 min read · Product Strategy
Value vs. Objection Handling
Read the original on aprildunford.substack.com →
The piece argues that teams often confuse value with objection handling in positioning. True value is the differentiated business impact your offering delivers, while capabilities like great support or easy integrations are objections that can disqualify deals if not addressed but don’t drive the purchase themselves. It also emphasizes selling value to the champion and ensuring IT and other stakeholders’ objections are resolved to win the deal.
Key Takeaways
- Differentiate differentiated value from objection-handling capabilities.
- Value is the unique business impact you deliver; it should be the primary reason a prospect chooses you.
- Objection-handling capabilities matter to avoid disqualification but rarely win the deal on their own.
- Sell value to the champion and address objections from IT, Legal, End-users, and other stakeholders.
- Use buyer personas and mental tests to ensure capabilities aren’t mistaken for true business value.
Excerpt
In my positioning work, it is not unusual for teams to confuse value for customers with what I would call “objection handling.” Subscribe now Value is what our offering can do for a customer’s business. For example, you might sell a CRM solution that delivers better visibility into the pipeline, allowing teams to predict revenue more accurately than any other CRM. You might also use AI in a novel way that dramatically reduces the resources required to analyze data, allowing teams to act on that analysis very quickly. These are both examples of differentiated value. Differentiated value is the value…