Sales Blog with Sales Tips

What can we do when a prospect or customer asks us, “What’s your price on this?” “What’s your price on that?” Ad infinitum. We know that many times we can lose this battle but there are sales skills that can  put these price questions to bed and save the order.

“When our customers start a roll-call of pricing questions it’s time to go shopping at the grocery store…”

Sales Tip 101
When customers have issues with pricing, their foremost concern is usually about the total price of all the products and services they’re buying from us, not each individual item. Normally a customer will have a vague notion of what the total price might be before they even receive any sales help from us. This is best demonstrated when customers look at formal proposals. The first thing they look at is the page with the total pricing. Customers focus on totals.

How to Sell with a Shopping Cart
When we go to the grocery store we pile a bunch of stuff in a cart and pay the total when we check out. Bar codes have allowed grocery stores to hide the pricing that used to be displayed individually on every item. They’re not stupid and they know what we know. Customers care primarily about the total price of the purchase, not the price of each individual item.

Let’s Go Shopping
When our customers start a roll-call of pricing questions it’s time to go shopping at the grocery store and put these sales tips into action. The first sales tip is to stop quoting price after price and respond with some variation of, “Rather than quoting each item’s price let me put together the complete package/order/proposal for you with a total price. Some of our pricing might be higher than you’re expecting and some will be much lower, but our overall pricing is consistently competitive and your total price will be too.”

We have to get into the mind of our customers and figure out what information they are really seeking. Most of the time when asking about pricing one item at a time they are really just wanting to know, “What is all of this going to cost me?”

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

Bad sales skills die slowly don’t they? One of my poor sales skills when I was younger was to shotgun my prospects and customers with sales and marketing brochures by snail-mail and E-mail. Want to know something I always knew but never admitted to myself? All of that activity never helped my sales one bit.

“…reminds me of the guy I know who hasn’t exercised in thirty years but wears the best looking and most expensive pair of Nikes on the planet.”

Why don’t brochures work?
They don’t work because we have two primary considerations when it comes to the most effective ways of selling: relationship and information. We need to create a partnership with our customers and accumulate as much data as possible about them in the process. How does a printed piece of marketing collateral or a beautifully crafted PDF file E-mailed to a decision maker help us in either of those two areas? We’ll get plenty of people doling out sales tips and sales advice in our careers about why we should launch an avalanche of marketing materials. They’re not providing good sales help.

Marketing Brochure Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
Snail-mailed collateral is thrown away and buyers delete E-mailed marketing propaganda if it isn’t caught by the company’s spam filter first. Consider for a moment how little marketing material actually hits the eyes of a decision maker. Virtually zero percent. Our customers treat this stuff like Anthrax. Besides, if customers want information guess where they look first? Your web site.

Why do we keep doing it?
We keep sending out a tsunami of sales brochures because it’s something we’re supposed to do and it makes us feel good. At least we’re doing something. It reminds me of the guy I know who hasn’t exercised in thirty years but wears the best looking and most expensive pair of Nikes on the planet. It somehow makes him feel like he’s doing a positive thing regarding his health.

So doctor, what is your sales advice?
Stop wasting time on ineffective sales materials and focus on what makes a difference. The difference is all the activities involved with relationship building and being a student of our prospects and customers. That’s the best sales tip I can give you when it comes to collateral material.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

Our customers and prospects don’t need our sales help and sales skills as much as they used to. They can find much of the information they need on the Internet. The first thing most customers do before purchasing anything is to research the product or service on the Internet before talking with a sales professional. We know this is true because we do the same thing when we buy a consumer product for ourselves. Since buyers know they can easily get product information on the Internet, there has been a fundamental change in what they need from us and how to sell to them.

“In the 21st century decision makers are increasingly using a vendor’s knowledge as the key differentiator…”

What are today’s buyers looking for?
They want information that goes well beyond what is available on the Internet. Furthermore, they want it coming from someone they view as an expert. Sales professionals that can only provide information easily found on the web are viewed as order-takers. Customers view order-takers as human powered e-commerce web sites that provide little sales help or value.

How do we respond?
To set ourselves apart from the competition and demonstrate our value in this changing sales environment we have to provide something the customer can’t get without us. Expert information. Expert knowledge and experience are not available on the Internet. If they’re using our expertise then the likelihood that they will buy from us increases dramatically.

What’s next?
To put ourselves ahead of 99% of our competitors and to provide the kind of expertise that our customers are thirsting for, we need to make sure we are up to speed on the products and services we sell. We must also ensure that we are knowledgeable about our industry as well. To gain and maintain expert status we can take training available from our employer, subscribe to industry publications and subscribe to an industry specific sales blog or podcast. We can read a few books specific to our industry too. Recommending these books to customers even further enhances our expert status. VIP (Very Important Point): Don’t ever stop learning; this is an ongoing process.

What’s the bottom line? In the 21st century decision makers are increasingly using a vendor’s knowledge as the key differentiator between selecting vendor A over vendor B.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer