We Overlook Emotional Value Despite Its Importance To Our Clients

Though we often focus immediately on revenue gain and cost reduction, we tend to overlook emotional value despite its importance to our clients. It’s a little-used lever that can help them improve their standing with their bosses and that can help us close deals.

FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.

Nuance of value

• Value seems like a simple concept, but there’s some nuance to it as well. Formulaically, it’s value divided by cost. When a customer is looking at your offering, he looks at the benefit and cost of your offering compared to others.
• The basic underlying concept is meeting needs. Sometimes those needs are wants and sometimes they are demands, but the customer is always seeking value as they look to solve those needs and wants.
• In marketing terms, value could also be called customer perceived value. Marketers should look at what consumers need, what they want, and even what they demand.
• Value can further be broken into four segments: functional, monetary, social, and psychological.
• Adam Smith, in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nature, offers this interesting paradox: “ . . . [T]he things that have the greatest value in use frequently have little or no value in exchange. On the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange frequently have little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water, but it can be purchased for scarcely anything. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarcely any use-value, but a great, very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” (This was obviously written before we could buy $5 bottles of water.)
• The value triad states that there are three ways we can offer value to a customer: revenue gain, cost reduction, and emotional contribution.

Emotional Value

• Revenue gain and cost reduction are more tangible because they translate easily to money, where emotional contribution is a subjective idea.
• Emotional contribution, or emotional value, could translate to the customer’s past experience, perception of your brand, social power, product packaging, and countless other options.
• We tend to market and sell on revenue gain and cost reduction, making emotional value the greatest lever you have to offer.
• If, for example, we could help purchasers get visible wins that help them move up in their bosses’ esteem, and to move up in value in their companies, that’s an incredible emotional contribution.
• If you’re late in a deal and the prospect asks you to give more, don’t do it by reducing the price. Instead, consider reducing the risk for the buyer.

Episode resources

• Find FitzMartin at our website, or connect with Sean Doyle on LinkedIn.
• To learn more about the paradox of value, grab Adam Smith’s book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nature.

You can find the Aligned podcast on our website, and on Spotify and Apple Podcast.