Don’t Just Get Better at Selling What You Have

Sustainable growth requires strengthening both what customers buy from you and your ability to sell it. When growth slows, the response is predictable. There is a push to sell harder, generate more leads, increase marketing activity, add salespeople, pursue new markets, and the list goes on. Sound familiar?

Sometimes those are exactly the right actions. But they all start with the same assumption, that what we offer is compelling enough. We just need to get better at selling and marketing it.

That assumption deserves to be challenged. The strongest and most enduring companies work both sides of the growth equation. They improve their commercial engine while continuously strengthening the underlying value they create for customers.

Don’t just get better at selling what you have. Build something increasingly worth buying.

Value Proposition Is More Than Messaging

In manufacturing, a value proposition is much more than positioning or a sales message. Customer value can come from product performance, technology, service, technical expertise, availability and lead times, quality, manufacturing capabilities, customer economics, or the overall business model. ‍

The most important question isn't simply, "How do we sell more of what we make?" It's, "What will our most important customers increasingly value, and what can we become uniquely good at delivering?"

These patterns show up in very different ways. Consider one industrial manufacturing business whose filtration division spent several years trying to displace a dominant competitor by positioning itself as a second source. The company quoted, trialed, and sold aggressively, with limited success. It competed as a commodity, and its results showed it.

The company made a strategic shift. It dug deeper into the market and identified customer needs that were fundamentally technical. Instead of selling harder, it redirected product development and technical resources toward solving those problems and shifted who it targeted within customer organizations — from buyers to technical decision-makers. The opportunity wasn't to sell the existing value proposition better. It was to build a stronger one. (For a closer look at how this played out, see Where Do You Have the Right to Win?.)

In a second example, at an erosion control business, the answer was completely different. The product itself was relatively commoditized, but customer conversations made clear that availability, reliability, and service were the critical sources of value. The company changed the operating model — building inventory programs, enhancing S&OP processes, targeting two-day lead times, aligning functions around service metrics, and developing customer programs that rewarded greater share of business. The product didn't fundamentally change. The value proposition did, based on a deeper understanding of customer needs. (For the full story, see Your Value Proposition Is More Than a Marketing Message.)

Finally, in a global materials business serving the signage market, the challenge was different again. The company started from a position of strength, with an existing product that was already industry-leading for outdoor durability, quality, and performance. But a new technology was emerging — digitally printed signage — that gave customers greater design flexibility, and customers wanted it.

A major customer rebranding opportunity required combining that new capability with substantially longer outdoor durability. That need accelerated the company's product development and helped create a solution that became increasingly relevant as the broader market shifted toward digital printing. It let the company maintain a differentiated value proposition and an industry-leading position as customer needs and the market evolved. (For the full story, see What Will Your Customers Value Five Years From Now?.)

Three very different situations. Three very different answers. That's the point.

Work Both Sides of Growth

Companies still need a strong commercial engine. They need to choose the right markets and customers, align sales and marketing, improve pricing, establish priorities, execute effectively, and build the infrastructure required for repeatable growth.

But they should simultaneously ask how to strengthen the value proposition — which requires continuously working through four questions: What will customers increasingly value? Where does the company have a right to win? How do we build differentiated value through product, technology, service, operations, business model, or capabilities? And how do we evolve as customers and markets change?

The two efforts reinforce one another. A stronger commercial engine helps the company capture value today and generates greater customer and market insight. A stronger value proposition gives the commercial organization something increasingly compelling to take to market tomorrow.

A Question Worth Asking

When growth isn't where you want it to be, don't only ask, "How do we sell more?" Also ask, "If we became dramatically better at sales and marketing tomorrow, would customers have a compelling enough reason to choose us?" If you're not confident in the answer, the growth challenge may run deeper.

The objective isn't simply to get better at selling what you have. It's to build something increasingly worth buying.