Financial Value

The financial value refers to the creation of measurable wealth, either by increasing savings or bringing additional revenues. Keep in mind that because of the loss aversion bias, helping your customers save $1 has a greater psychological value – in average about 2.3 times more – than helping them make an additional $1 [164, 165].

In a B2B context, the financial value is often labeled ROI (return on investment) or TCO (total cost of ownership) and it should be carefully quantified. For example, rather than saying “My solution will save you money,” you should say, “You will save 12% of your manufacturing cost with my solution.” Or even better, “You will save $58,000 annually with my solution.” Note how a precise quantification of the value makes it more tangible than a vague and less convincing statement like “we will save you money” [166]. Also quantifying the value with an actual dollar amount as opposed to a percentage will reduce your prospect's cognitive effort. It makes it simpler to compare the value with your cost. If your solution has a price tag of $50,000, then your prospects will instantly understand that they can recoup their investment in less than one year. The gain calculation becomes obvious, even for their primal brains!

Strategic Value

The strategic value refers to a business value your prospect would experience with the understanding that this value cannot be translated into a credible financial quantification but offers nonetheless tangible benefits. For example, imagine you are selling a new type of seat belt to Volvo that offers a higher safety rating than the ones Volvo currently uses. Because safety is central to the value proposition of Volvo (it is, in fact, their main claim!) the increase of safety provided by your solution represents a strategic value. Note that translating this into a financial value would be challenging. Although an overall increase in safety of the Volvo cars is valuable, claiming it would help Volvo sell more cars would be a stretch because it would be difficult if not impossible to make a direct link between higher safety and additional sales.

Similar to the financial value, the strategic value should be quantified with an exact number. In the Volvo example instead of saying, “Our new seat belts will make your cars safer,” say, “Your car safety index will increase from 88 to 91 thanks to our new seat belts.” Note that in this case quantifying the value makes it more tangible and therefore more appealing to the primal brain.

Other examples of strategic value include less business risk, opportunity to diversify, increased quality, better differentiation, and so forth. All these examples point to a reduction of risk and uncertainty, which are crucial factors for the primal brain.

Personal Value

The personal value refers to the psychological or physical benefits your customers would experience because of your solution. Personal value includes less stress, pride of ownership, reduced work burden, being promoted, becoming a hero, feeling more secure or more empowered in the job, getting a bonus, receiving company or external recognition, etc. Unlike the financial and strategic type of value, personal value is difficult to quantify other than by using psychological constructs. Nevertheless, if your solution allows your customers to work less, you should try to quantify how much less: is it just five minutes per week or one hour per day? Notice that if the benefit of working less implies that your customers could, in turn, decrease the cost of their solution, it would then be wise to quantify that financial component of the value. Instead of saying “Our solution will save you time,” say, “You will save five minutes on the assembly time of each of your machines, which means you will no longer have to do extra hours on Fridays (personal value) and it will result in production cost savings of $27 per machine (financial value).” Even in large B2B transactions, the personal value should not be underestimated. For example, for years when IBM was selling large computers, their motto was “Nobody ever got fired from choosing IBM.”

The objective of an effective persuader should always be to maximize the amount of value presented and not to leave it open to the imagination of the audience.

Social Proof: Customer Testimonial

In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini identifies six laws of influence [167]:

• Social proof: The more people behave one way, the more it will incent others to match that behavior.
• Consistency and commitment: Once people make a statement in one direction in the future they will be psychologically motivated to remain consistent with the original statement.
• Reciprocity: When you do something nice to people, they will want to reciprocate.
• Liking: The more you have a positive rapport with people the more chances you have to influence them.
• Authority: People perceived as expert or in charge are more influential.
• Scarcity: The rarer an item, the more valuable it becomes.

A simple example of the impact of the law of social proof – which we want to use here to strongly demonstrate your value – is “canned laugher,” which has proven to cause the audience to laugh longer and more often and to rate the comedy as funnier [168]. Cialdini states that we define as correct behavior what we see other people do. Other manifestations of this phenomenon can be seen when bartenders prime their tip jar with a few dollars, when car manufacturers claim “the number 1 selling truck in America” or when companies are eager to communicate the long list of customers who use their solution. Remember, our primal brain will make us behave like sheeps. The more we believe people behave one way, the more we will want to conform. In a business setting, how can you use this law to your advantage? The answer is by using one or more customer testimonials.

Customer testimonials or customer stories represent the best type of proof because not only do they come from a third party, as opposed to coming from the vendor, but they give an example of what the social norm could be. Furthermore, when carefully scripted and properly delivered, customer testimonials can transport viewers into a different world, a phenomenon described in detail in the section on persuasion catalysts: stories in Chapter 8. Imagine you are trying to sell seatbelts to BMW, and you have already sold your products to Volvo. You could use the following testimonial:

Notice how difficult it would be for the prospects at BMW to argue with such a proof. Knowing the similarities between their business case and Volvo, most likely the buyers at BMW will start to imagine that they too would experience the same benefits!

Cialdini insisted that the law of social proofs works even better when we are observing the behavior of people with a high degree of similarity to us [169]. In the story, the obvious similarity between BMW and Volvo would make the social proof work stronger than if the prospect was a tractor manufacturer like John Deer or an airplane manufacturer like Boeing. Here again, note the link with the primal brain and the importance of similarity!

Finally, a customer testimonial represents the past. There is nothing speculative about it. It is factual, which is why it has such impact on the primal brain!

Example of the use of a customer testimonial to support the value of a claim. Tovar is the largest snow removal company in the United States, and their clients include large institutions like banks, hospitals, and big shopping malls. The pain of their customers is all about speed: How long will it take after a major snowstorm for their parking lots to become accessible again? For a hospital, lives are at stake when the ambulances cannot reach their facilities, and for shopping malls revenue loss is immediate when shoppers cannot enter the parking lot. Guided by SalesBrain, Tovar endorsed a set of claims centered on the swiftness of their intervention: Instant Communication, Instant Action, and Instant Relaxation. They also asked SalesBrain to develop a set of slides to help sell their services. To prove the value of instant relaxation we recommended that they use customer testimonials such as the one presented in Figure 7.1. In this example, notice that the customer uses the word “relaxed” to support the wording of one of their claims.

In conclusion, the best way to prove your value is to use the right customer stories. Testimonials are social proofs that have a strong persuading effect on the primal brain of your audience. Make them into videos to augment their visual and emotional impact.

Observable Proof: Demo

A demonstration (or demo) uses a prop, a visual, or a sequence of logical steps to prove a value statement in the present. Think about Domino's Pizza slogan: “30 minutes or less or it's free.” The “or it's free” is a strong demonstration that the pizza will arrive on time.

In Figure 7.2, notice how Sony highlighted the personal value of a small projector: it is difficult to tell which one is the laptop, and which one is the projector! At the time this ad was used, nearly 20 years ago, most projectors were bulky and heavy.

Figure 7.3 shows another example of a great demo, which uses the natural curiosity of the readers to deliver their value proposition!

Although the value is not clearly stated or quantified, note that the value of privacy is communicated on three types of value (see Table 7.3):

• Financial: You could lose a significant amount of money if your confidential information was seen by the wrong eyes.
• Strategic: Losing confidential information could be detrimental to your business.
• Personal: Having to deal with identity theft or the loss of your credit card and other sensitive financial or health information could bring stress for years.

Although each of those examples speak to radically different value points, note the space the demonstration of the value occupies: for instance, in the case of 3M, the visual highlighting the value proposition (the why you should buy) is 8 to 10 times bigger than the series of five images at the bottom that explains the what the product does. Now contrast this with what most advertisers do. They give a long explanation of the what with few or no reason for the why!

An observable proof such as a demo or a demonstration is second to a customer testimonial in providing an irrefutable type of proof.

Analytical Proof: Data

“In god we trust…all other please bring data!” is the motto of the skeptics. Despite that skeptic opinion, data are abstract and provide weaker proof than a customer testimonial or a demo. However, you can still prove your value using data.

When using data as a proof, research shows that the credibility of the source of the data impacts the persuasion effect [170]. Furthermore, studies have shown that quantification of the data always brings some persuasion benefit. The exception to this rule states that quantification might put more reliance on the fact that the source of information needs to be perceived as an expert for the persuasion effect to occur [171]. Note that the diagnostic phase of NeuroMap serves to unveil the pain of your customers and provides an opportunity to establish your expertise in the domain.

Imagine you are selling manufacturing equipment. To prove your value, you could say, “Our new machines would save you $240,000 per year on your manufacturing cost.” Note that such a statement is not using data to prove the value, it's just a quantification of the value but the proof is aspirational, it's your hope that you would save them that amount.

Now imagine if you were saying, “Our machines will shorten your manufacturing time by 10%. Your plant is running 2,400 hours a year, so as a result you will save 240 hours per year. Since you mentioned that your production cost is $1,000 per hour, you will save $240,000.”

Notice that although the savings presented in the two examples above are identical, the first one requires a total act of faith in what the vendor says (the $240,000), whereas the second requires two assumptions:

1. Your prospect believes you will shorten the manufacturing time by 10%. The rest of the numbers will be easily accepted because they came from them.
2. Your prospect understands the logic of your argument. For that, he needs to comprehend how you came up with the $240,000 savings.

The current example is obvious but in most B2B situations these calculations can be very complex, and they will inevitably lead to a major cognitive load on the brain of your audience, a task that is energetically taxing and is often conducive to confusion, not persuasion.

Therefore, your objective is to arrive at quantification of the value – financial, strategic, or personal – by using the simplest possible formula compatible with your audience's level of comprehension of mathematical or abstract concepts. For example, if you sell a complex solution that will be reviewed by a CFO, it would be relevant to use a sophisticated ROI model. But if you are in a B2C situation, the use of data to build your proof should be simple to understand. Remember, even the simplest data are not appealing to the primal brain!

Figure 7.4 and Table 7.4 are great examples of data to prove the value.

Notice how the ad in Figure 7.4 uses data: the percentage of times the judges have agreed with them. However, they provided the proof but didn't translate it – most likely a difficult task – into either a financial value, how much money you would save on average by winning your lawsuit, and/or a personal value, not spending many sleepless nights under the stress of a lawsuit.

Monarch Medical Technologies has developed innovative software to better manage glucose for diabetic patients. In the first slide, shown in Figure 7.5, note how they used data to emphasize the pain of the nurse who is caring for her patients.

Then in the following slide (Figure 7.6) see how they used data to prove the value of their solution and how these numbers contrast with the numbers associated with the pain.

To further strengthen the proof, note that they could present the original data they used to come up with the numbers:

• 0.7% of deviation versus 93.3%
• 46% of reduction of checks
• 75% increase in nurse satisfaction

In conclusion, data could be used when stronger types of proof (social or observable) are not available. An effective persuader should make the data easy to process and believe.

Aspirational Proof: Vision

When no other proofs are available, there is still a way to persuade: by using the power of your vision or belief. You surely have heard this kind of proof when a seller says: “Trust me, we'll save you $1,000!” Because of the absence of actual proof, the seller needs to make the vision bold and impressive. Such an aspirational proof typically requires telling a story, an analogy or using a metaphor to get your prospects to trust the value they will receive.

The ad shown in Figure 7.7 received multiple advertising awards.

Note that it is not a customer case because most readers are not naïve enough to believe that this license plate really exists as opposed to having been created by the ad agency. It would have been a customer case if a famous divorced woman like Ivana Trump (divorced Donald Trump in 1991) or Angelina Jolie (divorced Billy Bob Thornton in 2003) was standing by the car. It is also not a demo because the ad doesn't prove that indeed the woman would be able to get the car out of a settlement. Therefore, this is using a vision: “Trust us, we'll be able to get you the car.” The value has a financial component: the worth of that vehicle, say $50,000, and it also has a personal component: revenge! The value matrix for this ad is shown in Table 7.5.

One should note that although the type of proof used is quite weak, the ad still has a great impact because the message is delivered emotionally to your primal brain!

Another splendid example of the use of a vision to close a deal, and revolutionize the world in the process, is the story of how Jim Clark started Netscape – Jim, the only entrepreneur who ever started three companies that were worth more than $1 billion, first founded SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc). I met Jim when I opened the first Branch of Silicon Graphics in Toulouse France and later when SGI offered me a job at their headquarters in Mountain View, California. Jim left SGI in 1993 and invested $3 million of his own money to start Netscape, the company that invented the first browser and spearheaded the revolution that became known as the Internet era. In 1994, and before its world‐record‐breaking IPO (initial public offering) in August 1995, Jim was desperately trying to raise money, so he pitched his ideas to the top venture capital (VC) firms in Silicon Valley. The value of a browser, which made accessing the web easy through its graphical interface, could not be proven by using any other proofs of value than the vision of Jim Clark and he couldn't use:

• A customer case by saying that Bill Gates made a fortune with Microsoft Internet Explorer. It took several years after Netscape for Microsoft to develop its first browser.
• A demo. In fact, much of the money Jim needed was to develop a first running demonstration of Navigator, the first Netscape browser.
• Data, because there was no reliable data that could predict how many people would use a browser to access the Internet. There was no consensus on what people would do with the Internet besides what the research community had done –that is, exchange scientific data over the Internet!

Between 1993 and 1995 Jim was trying to keep Netscape alive because the company was losing a lot of money. Yet, on the IPO day of August 15, 1995, many people started to buy Jim's vision; the IPO raised over $300 million on a valuation of $2 billion with revenues of only $16 million for the six months preceding the IPO, with no prospect of making a profit for at least two years. That's the value of a good vision!

However, before this incredible success, Jim had a tough time selling his vision. In fact, New Enterprise Associates, one of the tier 1 VCs in Silicon Valley, turned down Jim's offer to join as an early investor. It was not obvious then that a browser would be worth anything. And betting investment money on the vision of an entrepreneur is a risky proposition.

The moral of this story is that even if you are Jim Clark and even if you're holding a piece of software that will change the world, you should try to present a better proof of value than your vision to influence the primal brain of your audience. Yes, it's possible to persuade using a vision, but it represents the weakest type of proof!

Note that the border between the four kinds of proofs we are suggesting are not definitive. For example, if you were selling toothbrushes you could use the following statement: “Our new toothbrush is recommended by 80% of dentists.” Note that this proof is a combination of data and a social validation, so its strength should be considered greater than a proof that uses only data as in the earlier manufacturing example.

Financial Cost

Financial cost is always the most well‐defined element of cost. In B2C, the price is usually on the tag attached to the item. And in B2B, the cost typically appears prominently on the first or last page of the proposal.

Strategic Cost

Strategic cost is most relevant when selling a B2B solution. This includes the business cost of acquiring your solution such as increased risk, less flexibility, diverting critical resources to the deployment of your solution, and so forth.

Personal Cost

It covers how your solution could impact negatively the personal lives of buyers. This may include the risk of a switching to a new vendor, the pain of learning a new system such as what would happen if you went from a Google phone to an iPhone or vice versa, having to work overtime, dealing with a new and stressful process, and so forth. The cost can also be represented in the form of the following matrix.