When there is little perceived value in your products and services price becomes the lowest common denominator. Customers will beat you up on price. They focus on getting the lowest price tag and will almost always be asking for all sorts of discounts and contingencies. Why? Because with such little perceived value, the customer has justified in their mind that your product is not worth what you are selling it for.
Your customer believes that the benefits that they would receive by investing in your product are minimal in return for their hard-earned cash. As a result, “your price is too high” is often heard. This objection can be eliminated, if not greatly minimized, if we increased our overall value.
If you are struggling with “your price is too high” across many of your opportunities, you are probably missing the mark with providing the necessary amount of overall value to your customer. You may think you are selling value, but you have to step it up. As a professional salesperson you must always be providing (and adding) value at all times. Long before the sale, during the entire sales cycle, and after the sale. Everything you do should be intended to be done to provide value to your customer.
To keep you on track with doing this, always be asking yourself, “what does my customer really want and how can I best meet their needs and serve them?” When we do this correctly, customers will pay the price that you are asking because they see the value. Now from experience I can tell you that on occasion you will run into buyers who are cheap and just want the lowest price tag no matter what you do. These buyers complain about everything, they are difficult to work with, and they don’t appreciate anything that you try to do for them. They walk all over you and they don’t care about value.
However, keep in mind that these customers are the minority of buyers. Most customers will be happy to pay the price when they see the value in your products and how they can specifically solve their problems, or make them more money. They have learned from experience that it may not be prudent to go with the lowest price tag. They are open for paying more as long as you can provide a matching level of overall value.
You can accomplish this by deeply understanding what your customer really wants and by delivering a solution that specifically meets those needs (and more). Your job as a professional salesperson is to peel back the onion. For example, your customer may tell you that they want a new solution that would provide their management team with better reporting. This statement is only scratching the surface with what they truly want. If you ask more questions and keep peeling back the onion, you may just find out that their costs are out of control and they don’t know why. As a result, it is killing their profits. Ultimately they want to increase their profit margins. This is what they really want. If you can show your customer how you can specifically solve their problem and deliver exactly what they want, they will pay the price (even if it’s higher than the competition).
In sum, understanding how you can best serve your customer and delivering a product or service to accommodate a customer’s exact needs is just one area of providing value. You must also be delivering value on a consistent daily basis. You can do this by building more trust with your customer. Get to know them better than anyone else. Learn about their company and their goals for the next few years. Take a sincere and genuine interest. Introduce them to other customers that had similar wants and how they became successful. Offer up additional discussions/meetings and give your customer the time they need. Invite them to upcoming webinars on topics that might be right up your customer’s alley.
In short, put down the sales wand for a bit and focus on being a trusted advisor, always adding and building value. When we increase the amount of value being provided the price tag is usually not a problem. Sure, customers may still ask for discounts or extras but you will notice that the requests are reasonable (you don’t have to give away the farm for the business).
If pricing objections are happening in many of your opportunities, take the time to reflect on how much value you provided to each of those customers. Is there anything that you could have done differently? Did you go above and beyond in every interaction with them? Did you bend over backward and get them the help and information that they were really looking for? Did they understand exactly why your offering would provide them with the best possible value? Chances are that you may have missed the mark with delivering all the value that you could have provided.
Provide more value and price won’t be an issue.
Happy Selling!
-Patrick