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World Renown Sales Person Zig Ziglar once said. “People love to buy”, but he went on to say that the reason why someone doesn’t buy from you is that you haven’t given enough value for the payment you are taking.

We business owners need to creatively and continuously add more value for our customers. To elevate ourselves above the rest, we need to come up with unique value propositions. In this post it is my objective to give you some examples of added value to help you come up with your own ideas on how you can add value to your products and services for your customers.

Many times, I hear small business owners say “If only I had the advertising money to get the word out about my product or service, after all, some percentage of them will buy and we’ll grow the business, similar conceptually to Geico or Jordan’s Furniture”.

My fellow Business Owners I had an advertising budget in one of my businesses of $500,000 per year and believe me it doesn’t work that way. We need to have a message of value when we advertise and that includes networking. Geico and Jordan’s furniture have unique value propositions like save 15% in 15 minutes on car insurance or “Underpricing”, or interest free financing for 6 months with no interest and no payments. If you don’t offer more value when you advertise, then your customer acquisition cost will exceed the value of a customer and that is a losing metric over time.

Look at it this way, if our number one priority is the customer and it should be, we need to be obsessed, with constantly adding more value to our products and services. And if you do, the word will get out and if you then want to supercharge your growth from there you can then advertise and now you have a powerful message. And believe me if you offer more value than the payment you are taking your customer acquisition cost will be far below the value of a customer and that is an outstanding growth metric!

When I was 9 years old, I had a lawn mowing business and in addition to mowing and raking the lawn. I also weeded and watered the lawn. It was amazing to me when I was weeding and watering is when the most prospects would stop their cars on the side of the road and ask me if I can do their lawn. That is when I first saw the value in adding value.

When I was in the Ski business I did a performance guarantee. Ski the skis 3 times and if you don’t like them for any reason return them for either a 100% refund or get a brand-new pair of skis.  People in the industry thought I was nuts. With this program we had double digit increases every year in ski sales. And an average of 4 pair of skis came back. Where did I gather up the moxie to do this? Because I knew my customer so well. I knew that all my customer wanted was a great ski experience and if they got that they would pay anything and that is still the case today.

Package up products. It was traditional to package up skis but I also used to package a Parka, Sweater Bib and hat. No one was doing that. Packaging products adds value

I have a client in the construction business and a client in the landscaping business that offer 5 year guarantees on their work. These guarantees add value! They transfer the risk from the customer to them. Sounds brutal right? To me it sounds like making money. The key is my clients know how to manage the costs of these warranties and that is why they work.

If you are trying to sell to Millennials, these are people born between 1981 and 1997 they are attracted to a concept called “Cause marketing” where you can add value to them by contributing to a cause from the proceeds of every sale.

Daymond John The People’s Shark on Shark Tank. added value to his business course by adding a copy of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. By the way, anyone can do it, that book is in the public domain.

Information products. You can give them away or sell them to add value. Everyone has an area of expertise that people want to know about. Did you know there is someone out there doing high 6 figures a year selling an information product on how to give your horse ballet lessons?

I could go on and on.

I’ve chosen to right this post in the hope that I added value to my clients, potential clients and referral partners who may be reading this. Because I too must constantly give more value than the payment I am taking and elevate myself above the rest.

And Please if you don’t remember a single word I said today, and you want to add more customers or keep existing customers, I am pleading with you to let the following 3 words burn in your memory. “Add – more – value”!

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