Customers Don't Want to be Sold, They Want You to Help Them Buy: Salespeople's Role in Value Co-Creation with Duane Dufault

Duane Dufault is currently a Fractional CRO at Forward and is a Strategic Advisor at Abaqus Inc. Before this, he was Fractional VP of Sales at The RockED Company Inc. Duane is a dad of four lovely daughters.

In this episode, Duane shares the power behind having all departments in a company understand value in order to help the customer see and understand value as well in accordance with their reasons for buying a product.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Discover why it's important for you to teach your sales reps to unpack value and not create it
• Find out why it's a must for you to help people understand what it is that they're actually paying for upon purchasing your product
• Understand the reason behind having clients voice out their problem and a salesperson being able to connect the product as a solution to what a client needs to be solved

"Just make it easy, seriously. The easier you can make it for people to figure out the pricing on your product, the easier it is for them to buy. Simple."

– Duane Dufault

Topics Covered:

01:15 – The connection between Duane's role and pricing

02:14 – That time when Duane realized the immense need for product management to focus on pricing

05:26 – Talking about the similarities and differences of product marketing and sales roles

09:50 – Should salespeople have the authority when it comes to pricing?

14:36 – Why salespeople need to unpack value, not create it

17:12 – Reminiscing Mark's first few years as a salesperson

18:42 – Making a difference in the market in relation to value and what the customer's needs are

23:08 – The difference between a CRO and a VP of Sales in Duane's perspective

25:27 – Duane's piece of pricing advice for today's listeners

Key Takeaways:

"One of the growth levers that I was looking at is like how was pricing structured for whatever product it is because that's a really big indicator on how people are going to buy from your company. If you've got hard to understand pricing, that's a problem. And that's friction in the buying process that you need to remove." – Duane Dufault

"Product marketing and a good sales process are like two sides of the same point. It's like sales and marketing, but like, a good sales process and product marketing is so closely tied, because the questions that a good product marketer asks are a lot of the same ones you get from a sales conversation, a discovery process, and they take them down the same path.

"Product marketing is fascinating from my perspective because you need to have a certain perspective on customer engagement and usage to understand how to shape and evolve both the product, the customer journey, and what they pay for the product." – Duane Dufault

"If you've got a sales rep that's very, very focused and narrow-minded on one specific area, they can't pull from other experiences." – Duane Dufault

"Teach your reps how to unpack value, not add value." – Duane Dufault

"If you come into your discovery process with a deck that just has a whole bunch of bullets of stuff that came from the marketing page, that's not a value to them. They only find it valuable when they find it valuable, and it's only valuable when it solves a problem. And you can't solve a problem until you ask him what those problems are." – Duane Dufault

"If you have a good discovery process that's focused on the needs of the buyer, you're going to help them figure out what those differences are, because people buy on an emotional trigger, and then cancellation happens when they find those little things that don't meet up with what they really want to do. In the sales process and marketing, marketing is there to take feedback from products, to then communicate what everyone gets from it, so that way, when the prospect gets the salesperson, it's the salespersons job to unpack those little things, because those little things are going to be the reason why they don't cancel in a year." – Duane Dufault

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Metric Manager Playbook:https://themetricmanager.com

Connect with Duane Dufault:

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/duanedufault/
• Email: duane@sellingsaas.io

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com
• Website:https://www.duanedufault.com/