Last week we discussed how salespeople can overcome objections related to price. Now we want to address how marketing can support sales’ efforts.
For marketers, problems with price typically show up in the following ways:
- You’re hearing too many requests from the sales team for discounts or price exceptions.
- Your average selling price is falling below your target price.
Here are three things marketing can do to keep pricing from becoming a systemic challenge.
1) Help sales secure budget approval.
Salespeople often run into trouble near the end of the buying cycle, when they’re trying to secure budget approval from a finance team. Without a solid business case to justify the cost of investing in your offering, the deal can fall apart.
Many marketers miss the opportunity to help the sales team at this stage, because they’re more focused on metrics related to the early stages of the buying cycle. But what good are your efforts to generate leads if prospects don’t ultimately covert to customers? If you want to help sales succeed at the end stages of the buying cycle, equip the team with an ROI tool. These tools allow the sales team to build a business case that will convince financial decision-makers to buy your offering.
Could salespeople build a business case on their own? Technically, yes. But it would take a lot of time and, without help from an automated tool, they’re likely to make mistakes that would reflect poorly on your company.
2) Redirect price shoppers.
When prospects come to your website, sometimes they’re just searching for how much your offering costs. Should you provide an easy answer? On one hand, you don’t want to make potential buyers jump through a lot of hoops or frustrate them by withholding information. On the other hand, you don’t want to spook them or risk losing their interest based on price alone.
The best thing to do is leverage their curiosity about price to your advantage. When they visit your website, you should make a value calculator available to them. This type of tool offers an easy and intuitive way for prospects to understand the size and urgency of their business problems.
Any prospect that uses a value calculator comes away with a better understanding of how you are going to solve their problems. This shifts the focus away from how much your offering is going to cost and toward how much they are going to save and/or grow sales. You have now converted the site visitor from a price shopper to someone who’s invested in what your solution can do for them. This is an organic way to help your sales team center the conversation on value and avoid getting bogged down by price objections.
3) Imagine new worlds.
Most buyers think they know what they want and need. The truth is, they’re not always right. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Customers don’t always know what you’re capable of producing or how it might help them solve existing problems. Other times, they’re not even aware of problems that are costing them money or preventing them from reaching their revenue potential. This is when an online assessment tool becomes an excellent resource to help buyers identify gaps in their performance.
When buyers begin to understand that there’s a better way, price becomes less of a concern. Since the prospect didn’t know he had a problem in the first place, sales can establish the value of your solution without having to face buyers’ preconceived ideas of the required investment.
Using these three approaches, marketing paves the way for sales to focus the conversation on business value. Once the value of solving a problem is established, buyers are less likely to push back on price.
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