Value Selling Blog

It’s happened to the best of us: you tell a prospect how much your product or service costs and silence ensues on the other end of the line. This is known as “sticker shock.” If you’ve done your job as a salesperson though, your customer should never experience this. Why? You’ll have set up the value and discussed price early on and, therefore, eliminated any price sensitivity. However, there will be times when, despite your transparency with price, the prospect may not have been paying attention or started to think about pricing.

Setting the price for your offering is critical. Price dictates whether or not your offering will succeed or fail in the marketplace. A price that’s too low can cause you to operate in the red or leave profits on the table. However, a price that’s too high could create drag on the sales cycle or make it tough for your salespeople to close deals. 

Why Common Pricing Strategies Fail 

When setting price, you’re looking for the optimal price to maximize profitability. That number is not the highest price possible nor is it based solely on what your competition charges, yet I hear many marketers talk about pricing in exactly those terms. Here are the two most common approaches to pricing I see.

Using a value-based sales approach helps sales teams succeed consistently and more frequently. These four tips from the world of value selling can help move deals through the buying cycle faster and increase close rates.

The other day I got a call from a client asking for my help with a sales problem. His company sells document management solutions to property and casualty insurers, and he said reps were having trouble with a specific set of sales objections. Here's what he said:

It's the middle of the month and I'm enjoying my early morning caffeination while reviewing the preliminary monthly sales forecasts from the sales team. I see one thing that concerns me. Many of the opportunities forecasted to close again this month at 90% probability are deals that have been previously forecasted to close at similar rates of probability.

Customers and prospects often lean on price as an objection for why they don’t want to do business with you. Some common things you hear from customers might be: 

• We can’t afford it right now.
• Our budget just got cut.
• Your competitor is offering a discount.
• I need my director to sign off on a purchase this size.

Overcoming objections like these is a lot easier when you understand how to approach the issue of price. Here are three tips that can help.

Quite often, the procurement department (also called purchasing or supply management) is seen as an obstacle, if not an outright enemy, to the selling process. After all, these are the people hired to say “no” and make the selling effort (and the internal client’s buying decision) more difficult, rigorous, and objective.

From the salesperson’s perspective, it usually seems as if procurement’s job is to shut down or redirect the customer’s buying effort into some other supplier or process different from the product or service you are trying to sell. Therefore, in sales, procurement is more often the problem rather than the solution. 

However, value selling can change that relationship and streamline your sales process.

People in positions of power often ask tough questions. In our experience, this is certainly true of anyone on the financial team who has the ultimate say over purchasing decisions.

Unfortunately, salespeople are rarely invited to the internal budget meeting to discuss a potential purchase. Typically, you work with your stakeholder to prepare a business case, and the stakeholder attends the meeting. That’s why it’s crucial that you prepare your stakeholder to anticipate the kinds of tough questions that decision makers usually ask about benefit dimensions in a standard business case.

One thing I’ve observed about successful salespeople is that they have a knack for creating confident stakeholders.

Why is this an important skill? The stakeholder is already sold on buying your offering. However, often this person does not have final say over purchasing decisions. He or she also needs to convince the finance team to invest in your solution.

Here’s what you need to understand about people who work on finance teams. They’re not swayed by emotion. If you want to persuade them, lead with numbers and calculations. This is why we advocate attaching a business case to your proposal. A standard business case works extremely well for deals that require you to clearly show the customer the value of benefits they can expect to see. 

Presentation is everything, especially when it comes to sales proposals and quotes. Getting it right can mean the difference between landing the sale or failing to get the contract—it's that important. If your sales proposals read like whitepapers, your client may leave scratching their head. Worse, they may be completely bored. One of the best sales strategies to have in your arsenal is the ability to create and implement winning proposals. Need some tips? Keep reading to find out how to make your sales proposal pop.

Why is Layout and Presentation So Important?

Executives and decision makers in all industries expect professionalism, and when it comes to proposals, appearance is just as important as the contents of the proposal. If your proposal is disorganized, boring or unattractive, it gets tossed aside with all the other proposals that look exactly the same. In order to get your proposals to stand out, yours must be clean, easy to read, and engaging.