Posted by
Maddie Saunders
If sales are slow, it’s tempting to put all your focus into trying a slew of new tactics. But what if the answer lies in something more fundamental—how well you define and communicate your value.
We spoke to Chris O’Riordan, Founder and Business Leader of sales consultancy Firestarter and friend-of-Articulate. During Chris’s episode we talked about the power of well-articulated value for sales, the success factors for product-market fit and Firestarter’s ‘five yellow boxes’ approach to improving sales. We’ve summarised those insights in this article for your next quick read.
How defining your business value can accelerate sales
We asked Chris what business owners can do in today’s tough market to accelerate their sales performance. ‘Look hard at the things your current clients really value in what you do,’ he said. This approach does two things:
- It moves you away from navel-gazing or scattergun efforts to focus on what matters—delivering measurable or meaningful value to customers.
- It highlights the strategic opportunity right in front of you, selling more to your current clients and ‘creating a foundation under your business development activities,’ according to Chris.
Doing this helps to avoid the ‘solution-first, problem-second’ or ‘build it and they will come’ traps that many businesses fall into. ‘There’s a pathway through questioning to get your buyers to a place where they have an epiphany about something they need to solve in their business,’ Chris says (and from experience, we agree.)
How companies nail product-market fit
In Chris’s experience, businesses that struggle to find their market, ‘commonly sit in dark rooms and talk to themselves.’ In contrast, those that have found their audience have done so because they ‘go and talk to their customers… they really understand the motivators for the people buying.’
A common myth in B2B marketing is that emotion doesn’t factor into the buyer journey. But unless your customers have already been replaced by artificial intelligence agents, they’re still human and driven by core emotions such as fear (of failure), desire (for success) and frustration (at barriers).
Chris summed up the mindset as, ‘I want the thing you’re selling me to be better than what I use at the moment… more cost-effective, saves me time, or makes the grief from higher-ups go away.’ This is often an untapped space that good salespeople can succeed in.
Firestarter’s five yellow boxes for sales success
Despite the name, you won’t need to rummage around in the attic to use Firestarter’s core framework. It’s a simple (but challenging) exercise and output that helps businesses articulate their value in a way that makes their target audience sit up and take notice.
You might be more familiar with the terms value proposition or elevator pitch, but the purpose is the same: to ensure ‘the entry point to conversations is the right entry point,’ says Chris.
The five yellow boxes are the ‘blanks’ you need to fill in to complete the following statements:
- Fundamentally, as a business, we do…
- The type of people we work with are…
- They typically have issues like…
- We solve these issues using…
- Typically, working with us looks like…
It’s a simple framework, but Chris acknowledges that it’s nuanced, and the answers aren’t always easy to pin down: ‘The hardest one is describing what [you] do… [think about] explaining it at a wedding table or describing it to your five-year-old child.’
Chris recommends starting with Box 1 and Box 3 as they’re more objective and easier to articulate, then returning to Box 1. If you’re still struggling, he suggests trying the 12 common problems exercise. He did it at the inception of Firestarter with his fellow founder, and they still use the output, unchanged, in their sales process today.
To complete it, grab some paper or a digital note and start listing all the common problems your customers have that you can solve. It’s a bittersweet feeling, Chris muses, but ‘by the time you get to number seven or eight you’re usually repeating yourself… [then] look at it through your customers’ perspective and crystallise what you’re actually doing.’
The secret to sales success (spoiler: it’s great marketing)
When you understand what your clients care about and what problems you solve, you’ve laid the foundation for accelerating your sales. To reach top speed, you need a full Difference Engine, which is what we build at Articulate Marketing. If you want to explore what that blueprint would look like for your business, we’d love to chat. Fill in our short contact form and we’ll get back to you.
