They say hindsight is 20/20 and while it may be helpful to look back at 2019, it’s more productive to plan ahead. Now is a great time to create a marketing program for 2020 that will improve the quality of your leads, increase conversions and grow sales revenue.
I’ve heard it all when it comes to pricing strategies. Clients say they use a premium pricing strategy, or penetration pricing, or (pick your own) pricing strategy. But really... what is the one and only goal of pricing when you want to make a profit?
To effectively sell based on value, you need to first grasp the value your offering creates. That is where Grassroots Strategy comes in. Jeff Bennett and I recently published Grassroots Strategy: Cultivating B2B Growth from the Ground Up to share what we’ve learned about building marketing strategies around customer needs and proper pricing strategies.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) often incur significant energy costs, but lag behind their larger counterparts in adopting energy efficiency (EE) measures. According to the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA), there are two primary barriers to adoption that solution providers must address.
If you are like the vast majority of businesses, you strive to shorten your sales-cycle and accelerate closing the deal. On the other hand, some businesses are blessed with such a smooth sales process that they need to slow things down.
Imagine being a tennis coach and one day, you tell your team you want them to start playing golf. You hand out brand new, top-of-the-line golf clubs, and send them back out to the tennis court to play golf. What do you think will happen?
Although we have many industrial clients, the adoption of value-based selling still lags far behind other industries such as software, supply chain, telecommunications, and computer and networking hardware. I recently pondered why this might be the case.
During initial conversations, prospective customers often tell me they’re looking for a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculator or tool. My typical response is to ask what they’re trying to accomplish so we can explore which tool (or tools) will best serve their needs. More often than not, a TCO tool can be helpful, but it may not the best solution.
For years I've been telling people that value calculators are used for marketing and lead generation and ROI tools are used by sales to close deals.
Until now, that is.
I was recently interviewed by my longtime friend and colleague, Bruce Scheer, CEO of SalesConversation.com. It was great fun being part of Bruce’s podcast series, which covers a broad range of topics that can help sellers be more successful. Before I summarize what we discussed, consider subscribing to The Sales Conversation Podcast on iTunes and listening to the entire podcast on Bruce’s website.
