Archive for category SALES BEST PRACTICES
Eight Traits of Great Salespeople
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on February 11, 2014
When you look at the qualities of the great sales representatives for non-transactional sales–those sales that are larger and more complex in nature–they tend to share the following traits:
They assume parity with their customers–There is an imaginary hierarchy that average and poor-performing sales people place between themselves and their prospects. It includes head-trash like, “The customer is always right,” and “You’re the customer so you’re the boss.” The data says that the top sales representatives see themselves as problem-solvers worthy of equal respect with their customers. Respect always, deference rarely.
They are comfortable talking about money–This quality often starts back in the home in which they were raised and the beliefs that were held there about money. If there was a belief that money was a rare and precious thing to be horded or feared, then it shows up with a fundamental discomfort in discussing large numbers. Individuals that look at money as a measure of value, not as a number outside of personal grasp, typically do better in sales.
They challenge the decision-maker–The best sales representatives have a strong confidence in their understanding of the customer’s market and their own solution–enough so that they are comfortable challenging inaccurate statements made by the customer.
They are comfortable with silence–Confidence is demonstrated as much in silence as in what you say. Top sales people can allow for measurable periods of silence in conversations with prospects. This creates an opportunity for the prospect to give consideration to what has been said rather than having to process the next piece of data given to them by the sales rep.
They show up prepared–This seems so common sense and yet when I administer these types of assessments the statistical fact is that most sales people–greater than 70 percent–are not well prepared for sales calls and meetings. They lack research, pre-call planning, a complete agenda agreed upon by the contact, and a tailored presentation to the prospect. The best have all of these things.
They don’t rush–A study was done about physical demonstrations of confidence and power some time ago. The external view of two people moving was observed by a cross-section of people and questions were asked about which one had greater confidence, was paid more, and had a position of greater authority. They both wore similar attire, and were of the same body shape and age. The only distinguishing characteristic was the speed in which they performed their actions. The one who looked rushed always scored lower. An appearance of confidence in part comes from an appearance of control.
They ask great questions–This has been written about by me and many others. The data confirms that the higher-performing sales representatives ask more questions–often more than twice as many–and their questions are more focused on implications than on data. Put another way, they ask questions about what something means rather than just what it is.
They are impeccable in following up–Just like preparedness; this quality seems so simple but is often overlooked by poor performers. The best cover the details.
One more note: Great sales people score over the 50 percent mark on every one of these traits. That means that they are not super-high in one area and failures in the other areas. They are above the halfway mark on everything. That’s their foundation. Then they knock the ball out of the park in their areas of personal strength.
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This article was originally posted in the Inc. Blog by Tom Searcy on January 14, 2014.
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Think You’re Losing a Sale? Ask Yourself These Five Questions:
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on January 30, 2014
It happens to every sales person at least once. You feel like you’re right on the verge of making the big sale when suddenly the customer starts reacting in a certain way and you know you’re losing the sale. When this happens to you, you need to sit back and take a good long look at the whole process. Identify where things might have gone wrong and why you found yourself losing a sale. Here are five questions you need to ask yourself.
1. Were you totally prepared? Sometimes it’s hard to know at exactly what point you’re losing a sale. You need to go back to the very beginning and determine whether you were adequately prepared. Ask yourself if you were completely sure of the client’s needs. Did you find out exactly what the client was looking for? Did you have the necessary information to develop a presentation or proposal which demonstrated to the client you completely understood their needs? Was your product knowledge sufficient to begin with? Losing a sale can happen at the very beginning of the process and you need to look back to your very first encounter to determine where things may have gone wrong.
2. How did your initial contact go? You can find yourself losing a sale from the very first contact. Try to think what was said at your very first meeting. Did you miss some important information? Losing a sale at the initial contact is more likely due to something you said or did the customer didn’t like. You may still be asked to make a presentation, and even submit a proposal. But it’s hard to get past a bad first impression. Think about everything from your original greeting to how the client reacted to you. When losing a sale, think about whether something felt wrong from the very beginning.
3. Was your proposal right? If you did learn the needs of the client, did you present your proposal in such a way it was clear you understood what they wanted? Losing a sale in this part of the process can be fairly common. Perhaps your presentation was too generic and, while it may have covered all of the basics of what you have to offer, it may not have been specific enough to the client’s actual needs. What was your impression of feedback or body language of the client during your presentation? When making a presentation, it can sometimes be obvious you’re losing a sale. In addition to product information, you’re also projecting a personal and a company image. Think back to every part of your presentation from how you were dressed to how you responded to questions.
4. Why do you think the client said no? Again, look back at the entire process. Did the client ask questions? If so, did you answer appropriately? If the customer went with another company, look at the company and see what the differences were between your product and theirs. You can also ask yourself about other companies who may not have gotten as far as you did before losing a sale. Looking at those companies can show you where you were stronger and where you may need to focus more in the future.
5. Now what? It is often hard to accept losing a sale. And it is certainly appropriate to ask the client why they said no. In fact, the only way you can work on avoiding losing a sale in the future is to find out why you lost this one. Most clients will give you some idea as to why they went with someone else. Use this information to improve or correct any areas where you were lacking.
It’s tough losing a sale, but it happens to everyone. The key to future success is to learn from the loss by reviewing what went wrong and making appropriate changes for the future.
Trust – The Simplest Key to Sales Success
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on January 24, 2014
We’ve all encountered this situation; young girls with their moms standing at a grocery store entrance selling cookies or boys with their dads selling popcorn. Why is it, a majority of people passing will stop and make a purchase? A large part of the reason is the organization sponsoring the girls and boys selling these goods has spent years building trust in the community and you have faith your money is going to a good cause. Trust is one of the most important aspects in sales. And sales trust is the significant factor in your ability to succeed.
It’s an unfortunate situation; many buyers just don’t trust sales people. This lack of trust has come from past dealing with sales people who have been too pushy or just plain dishonest with the buyers. Further, some 90% of companies surveyed report they will only buy from a company they do trust. If you want sales, you have to build sales trust. Today, a majority of sales people are more educated, well trained, and are aware of the importance of building a lasting rapport with their customers. Building rapport builds trust. And once you have established the trust, it’s important to maintain it. Never promise something you can’t deliver, always stand by your word, and always admit when you’ve made a mistake. Building a lasting sales trust will help assure you continue doing business with the customer for years to come.
Once you have developed sales trust with your customers, they are more likely to recommend you to other people. If the customer believes you are someone they can trust, they’re more likely to put their own reputation on the line to refer you to other customers. Building sales trust helps you to build business through word of mouth. Customer referral and recommendation is among the best marketing you can receive and it’s entirely built on trust in you and your company. When a potential customer sees a satisfied customer who’s working with you, they’re far more likely to do business with you.
Trust, particularly sales trust, speaks to your integrity as a person. Your own self-worth is built upon being a person who is trust worthy, believable and honorable. As a sales person, you will look for these traits in your own company and the company will look for you to be dependable and truthful. Groups which have trust in each other tend to work better together and are more likely to offer assistance and direction to help each other succeed. When you feel good about yourself and your company, your self-confidence grows. Buyers pick up on that self-confidence and it makes them feel more confident in you and your company. A customer or client who has confidence in you is basically displaying that they have sales trust in you.
Sales trust takes time to develop and unfortunately can be shattered very quickly. It’s important you do the things which build and maintain trust. You need to be reliable, dependable, honest, and honorable. This is the secret to developing and keeping sales trust.
Three Pitfalls to Avoid When Developing an Account Strategy
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on January 8, 2014
The importance of selling strategically is an idea repeated time and time again – the larger and more complex the sale, the louder the advice. However, advising someone to sell strategically is somewhat like suggesting they “sell smart.” That’s great advice, but a little vague unless you can provide some specifics about the how to accomplish the goal.
Let’s start by examining some of the fundamentals for developing an account strategy – beginning with an actionable definition: An account strategy is a plan of action for getting to the right person, at the right time, with the right message.
When thinking about what it takes in a major account to formulate a winning sales strategy, a good starting point is remembering the buying environment is complex. Many decision-makers and influencers are involved, the needs and issues are multi-layered and the solution configuration and implementation management is likely to be complex and sophisticated.
In major accounts, one-size-does-not-fit-all is the cornerstone proposition for formulating a winning account strategy. There are no generic customers in major accounts. So there are no winning generic account strategies. Each customer is unique and each major account strategy must take that uniqueness into consideration.
Here are three pitfalls that will make a successful account strategy less likely.
Underestimating the importance of information is the first pitfall. Collecting, analyzing, and utilizing information about the customer is the starting point to develop any effective plan of action for getting to the right person, at the right time, with the right message. Getting that right requires the recognition that breadth comes before depth.
There is neither the need, nor the time to find out everything about everything all at once. It is however important to get a broad information base about the customer even before your sales process starts and to build upon it early in the sales cycle. This provides the foundation for formulating an initial strategy and provides guidance as to where and how to get in-depth information. The trap is getting a lot of information about the wrong things from the wrong people.
Confusing goals and strategy is the next pitfall. A list of goals is not a strategy. It is just a long list of things to do. A good account strategy focuses on a few pivotal goals and then delineates the challenges, resources, and actions necessary to achieve a favorable outcome – what needs to be done and how are you going to do it.
A correlated trap is substituting blue-sky ideas for pivotal goals using buzzwords like customer-centric that are just vague statement about some desired end state.
The third pitfall is assuming the future looks like the past. We live and sell in a time of “compressed history.” Changes driven by the global market and advances in manufacturing technologies make the past a bad predictor of the future. As a result competitive advantages that once lasted a long time now disappear quickly. In major accounts, if you want to prosper, assuming what worked in the past will work in the present is a risky premise.
To avoid these pitfalls, one overarching best practice should be remembered. In order to think and act effectively throughout the entire sales cycle, your sales strategy requires constant updating. Success cannot be achieved by filing out a form and periodically checking off key milestones. It requires understanding and reacting to the changes in the account and reviewing the responses to those changes with your sales management and the rest of the sales team on the account.
This article originally appeared in the Sales Training Connection blog on October 13, 2013.
A Sales Checklist for Improved Outcomes
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on December 23, 2013
Need proof of the value of a checklist? In a study funded by the World Health Organization, eight hospitals deployed a simple 19-point checklist to help doctors and nurses avoid errors. The list focused on basic safety measures, such as requiring that all members of the surgical team introduce themselves, counting instruments and sponges used during surgery to verify that none were left inside a patient, and ensuring that patients receive antibiotics to prevent infection.
The checklist was credited with a forty percent reduction in deaths and serious complications from surgery, and the study authors concluded that if all hospitals used the checklist, they could save tens of thousands of lives and $20 billion in medical costs each year.
Many studies have been performed and much has been written at length about the value of aligning the sales process with the customer buying process. A typical sales process includes a series of stages through which B2B buyers pass before making a complex purchase and correlates to the actions a seller takes (e.g. analyze needs, qualify, identify solution, propose solution) to manage opportunities through the pipeline.
But that’s not nearly enough. A best practice sales process goes beyond the high-level stages and includes knowledge inflection points and observable outcomes associated with each stage. An observable outcome, similar to a checklist item, is a measurable, verifiable and specific response from – or an action taken by – the buyer. Here are a few examples:
- Did the buyer verify that there is budget available?
- Has the buyer provided access to all decision makers?
- Has the buyer provided decision criteria?
- Did the buyer schedule a follow up meeting for a demonstration?
- Has the buyer provided resources to assist with a detailed design?
You might think that following a sales process, complete with observable outcomes, would be an ingrained habit by now, especially for senior-level sales reps. But with complex selling situations and the pressure on reps to demonstrate results, it’s all too easy to skip critical steps. Sales operations should evaluate sales process stages and observable outcomes every six to 12 months, and then consult with sales leaders to build or update these outcomes as sales process stage progression criteria within the sales automation tool. The need for precision, consistency and repeatability isn’t limited to doctors and surgeons. Best-in-class sales organizations apply discipline and rigor to each sales stage, carefully crafting observable outcomes to avoid critical errors, wasted time and misdirected company resources.
We’re on the cusp of a new year. Now is a perfect time for evaluation of your sales process and implementation of the steps necessary to assure continued improvement and success in our business.
Five Ways B2B Companies Can Generate Leads on Twitter
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on December 9, 2013
Many B2B businesses have a Twitter account these days, but simply being on Twitter is not enough. If you or your employees are going to spend time using social media networks, there have to be objectives and it has to work for your business.
It’s fine if you want to use Twitter as a news publication feed – but there’s so much more you can do with it as a B2B communication tool. Why not use Twitter as part of your new business strategy? If it’s not going to help your business grow and develop, then you’re really wasting time. Get your new business development team involved with planning your Twitter profile. You can also find out their tactics and make sure social media is integrated and woven in to really work together.
Twitter works best when there’s some level of personalization and chat. As well as a news feed, Twitter acts as an introduction service essentially, as it is so easy to connect with people. There’s an old adage that says products don’t sell, people sell. So use Twitter for the communication tool that it is.
Here’s five tips on how to be more effective on Twitter and in turn increase the number (and temperature) of leads.
1. Give your organization a face: Let people know who they’re talking to instead of a faceless organization. Having a corporate account is important, but it’s very hard to hold a conversation with someone if you don’t know who you’re talking to. Add the personal Twitter handles of those who are talking into your bio, so people know who you are, and can also follow your personal accounts.
2. Share content to drive people to your website: A varied content schedule should incorporate a mix of updates, interesting articles as well as company news. However, make sure you create and post content which gives people the opportunity to visit your website or specific landing pages.
This can be via blog and news posts, new sections or products which have launched or anything else of interest to your customers.
3. Mention people you have met: People like being mentioned on Twitter – it starts conversations and you get to know people and they get to know you. If you’ve been to a networking event, conference or meeting, give the event and anyone you’ve met a shout out and cement the contacts you’ve made.
This reminds people who you are, gives them your contact details and can often lead to further communication and a meeting.
4. Use Twitter to create warm leads: Your new business development manager could sit down and plow through a lot of cold calls with relevant businesses but this is really a shot in the dark. However, if you start connecting with other businesses and other business people through Twitter, this is a friendly way to introduce your company and start to form a relationship.
Start to follow any people or businesses you think have new business potential. You could mention a blog post they’ve written or comment on some of their business news – anything that opens a conversation. They key is to start that conversation, not start a sale.
5. Assess your progress regularly: It sounds simple, but this is something many companies forget to do. You need to decide on some objectives and metrics to measure these objectives. These might be to increase relevant followers by so many every quarter, to set up a certain number of business meetings and achieve a certain number of click-through hits to your website.
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.This article was originally posted to the Social Media B2B Blog by Carolyn Huges on September 23, 2013.
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Salespeople Need To Improve Their Social Media Skills
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on November 26, 2013
As business-to-business companies rely more on social collaboration tools, some of the biggest gainers are going to be salespeople – and not just because they can fan, friend, or follow prospects.
Salespeople can use online social platforms to increase productivity. This includes understanding and influencing customer relationships, creating new channels for research, improving collaboration within sales teams, and increasing responsiveness to customers. We’re already seeing it start to happen.
More business-to-business customers attend to information they receive through social media, often long before these customers even enter a traditional sales cycle. About 60 percent of customers’ research happens before contacting sales, according to a Corporate Executive Board report. Some 37 percent of customers’ evaluations of products and services stem from conversations on social media. The first step is to create a deep social “listening” capability to monitor the discussions around your own offerings, and those of competitors. Better yet, come up with a strategy to intervene and engage in brand or product social conversations, and then respond quickly to recommendations, misinformation or criticisms.
Social targeting
Business-to-business salespeople must target decision makers and influencers, learning, as efficiently as possible, who in a customer company has the authority to make decisions, who can influence those decisions, and what those people are thinking and doing. Social media provides great data for identifying those people. By analyzing the connections and data revealed through social media, or even from emails received from customer addresses, it’s possible to map the relationships in a customer organization. This map helps to reveal the chain of decision-makers in the corporate hierarchy, as well as key influencers (some of whom might even be outside the company). After generating or discovering a sales opportunity, the sales team can deploy quickly to contact all of the individuals who can influence a potential sale.
One tech company, for example, tracked the appearance of certain key words on social platforms. When it noticed a decision maker from a prospect company asking a question online, it matched the question and the prospect’s location with a specific salesperson and sent along the lead, converting on these leads almost 80 percent of the time.
Social responsiveness
Social platforms can also enhance internal collaboration within sales teams. Used within enterprises, social tools can make conversations amongst sales and other colleagues in other functions (e.g., marketing, customer service) visible and searchable. This lets everyone related to a particular customer share valuable information. Skilled users of advanced knowledge management processes can then track and tag these interactions to build a company’s institutional knowledge base. In addition, new account-team members can ramp up much more quickly by having this information accessible.
In terms of customer responsiveness, internal social platforms can cut down the time it takes for a sales team to get an answer on price, specs, customization, and other issues. Social platforms can take the place of e-mail, allowing the first qualified person who sees a customer request to start responding. In some cases, we’ve seen answer time drop from two days to two hours. That’s huge – it saves both the salesperson and the customer a lot of frustration. Furthermore, using social media to communicate with customers creates visibility for the entire account team about what is being said to customers. This is far more efficient than entering information into a traditional CRM system.
Social platform use is shifting behaviors and expectations of customers and employees alike. In response, corporations are increasingly adopting social platforms. More than three-quarters of the respondents in a McKinsey survey of over 3,500 companies worldwide report that they are using at least one social technology.
Sales organizations in business-to-business companies, however, have only scratched the surface. While salespeople have long been known for their social skills, those who can hone their social media skills will thrive in the digital age.
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This article originally appeared in the CMO Network blog on April 16, 2013.
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Quantifying your value proposition
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on November 12, 2013
Quantifying your value proposition requires creating and communicating a clear, compelling picture of how your solution will drive your customer’s business results – allowing sales reps to make their business case. It requires translating the benefits of your solution into high impact, measurable outcomes that matter to the customer. When done effectively, it enables you to maximize the competitive advantages that differentiate you from your competitors.
Quantifying a value proposition involves three steps:
– First, list the business outcomes your solution impacts (e.g., improvement in the percentage of just-in-time deliveries).
– Second, select a customer metric that will demonstrate the impact of the business outcome (e.g., reduction in inventory x annual inventory carrying costs = value of just-in-time deliveries).
– Third, determine the most compelling anchor which will bring the metric to life (e.g., compare the outcome of your solution against the status quo or compare it against your estimate of the competitor’s solution or against other companies in the customer’s market space).
What are some best practices for quantifying value? Having a simple and straightforward planning process for the quantifying value is one piece of the puzzle. As is often the case; however, the real difficulty and creativity lie in the execution. Hence it is useful to explore four best practices for quantifying and selling value.
1. Sell the Concept First. Top performers do a superior job quantifying their value proposition but they don’t just “sell by the numbers.” Even a great set of numbers will fall on deaf ears if you have not established a foundation-level of understanding of your solution and a high level of trust. What’s the worst possibility? The quantitative analysis is viewed as a selling ploy and therefore discounted accordingly.
2. Remember the Ripple Effect. Often in addition to the primary impact of your solution, there are, as well, secondary and tertiary positive outcomes. The other benefits might occur in another division, in a different time frame or for an alternative set of players inside the organization. Make sure you have uncovered and demonstrated the payoffs of the Ripple Effect.
3. Translate Soft Differentiators. If your only major competitive advantage is price, the challenge of quantifying your value proposition is simple and straightforward. On the other hand, if you have other competitive advantages – such as integrity, superior integration, and creativity – the challenge exists to translate those soft differentiators. It is easy to quantify that part of your value proposition that is easily measurable, like price. However it is equally important, although much harder, to generate quantifiable proxies for soft differentiators.
Soft differentiators tend to fall into two categories: Value Adds and Strategic Opportunities. Value Adds focus on improvements to the quality of the business operations. Examples of intangible benefits include:
– Providing better information and/or more timely information
– Improving customer good will
– Improving service image
– Identifying problems on a timelier basis
Strategic Opportunities are those intangible benefits that help the customer expand its business. They might include:
– Protecting a company’s competitive position
– Increasing market share
– Venturing into new markets
4. Tell the Integration Story. Many companies have created integrated solutions. However, they continue to sell the individual pieces – hence there is a huge opportunity for differentiation for those that get it right. One solution: help the customer connect the dots and understand the power of an integrated solution by displaying a unique set of numbers that tell the story.
Payoffs to Asking Questions in Sales Calls
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on October 1, 2013
If salespeople are going to bring value, new ideas, and insight to customers, they must understand the business issues and the challenges their customers face. Questions are a primary consultative tool for getting that done.
Bringing value can be achieved just as well by the thoughtful question as by fact telling. For example, if the customer seems to be thinking about a business strategy that involve risks, asking questions about how they plan to manage the risks shows you understand their situation and enables you to offer a thoughtful solution later in the discussion. Here are five specific payoffs for getting good at asking questions:
1. Asking questions leads to more memorable interactions. Well-planned questions go a long way in establishing your credibility particularly when they are framed around issues and challenges important to the customer.
2. Second, they help salespeople avoid the temptation to jump into the conversation too soon. A common scenario is for the salesperson to start the conversation by asking some thoughtful questions … the customer says something about an issue or concern … and then the salesperson immediately jumps in to provide information related to the answer. Equally often that is a trap since the definition of the problem is incomplete and/or all the issues are yet to be surfaced.
3. Alternatively, asking follow-up questions is an effective way to better understand the scope of the problem as the customer sees it and to explore what the possible strategic, operational, and financial ripple effects might be. Follow-up questions help a salespeople drill down to gain a better understanding of the problems facing the customer, as well as, helping the customer discover new insights about the nature and extent of the problem. It also means that salespeople avoid the temptation of talking about their products too early in the call.
4. Next, questions can be used to assess the potential value of a solution. Questions are not only valuable for exploring the scope of the problem; they are also useful for assessing the potential value of a solution.
By asking questions you can obtain insight about the customer’s view of how the overall situation would be better off if the problem is resolved and the possible downsides of maintaining the status quo. This approach to questioning also provides an opportunity to add a benefit that the customer may not have envisioned as an achievable outcome.
5. Finally, consider using questions for shaping the customer’s point of view. Shaping helps customers redefine a problem in a way that brings value to them and creates a better fit with your capabilities. It is important to emphasize that this use of questions is only legitimate when shaping brings new useful insight to the customer. Trying to persuade the customer to a point of view that is not in their self-interest must be avoided at all cost.
There are two major times in the sales cycle where shaping comes into play. The first time is in the early part of the sales process when the customer is defining their needs.
The second time is when the customer is defining the decision criteria they will use to decide between competitors. Helping customers think differently about the criteria and your capabilities to meet them can be helpful to them and can help position you as the best qualified candidate to deliver the solution.
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This article was originally posted to the Sales Training Connection by Janet Spirer on September 27, 2013.
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How Great Sales People Respond to Price Objections
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on September 20, 2013
Lowering prices or throwing in add-ons is often not the best methods to respond to price objections. Although all sales involve negotiation, using these tactics overlooks the reasons behind most price objections which is, in the prospect’s eyes, the value is not quite at the level of the outlay required to obtain a deal. Great sales people use the three tactics below to respond to price objections without cutting into margins for their organizations or their own commissions.
Great sales people respond by looking for a cause behind the price objections
A great sales person who has spent enough time with a prospect to know he or she is committed to moving forward with a deal and has the support of his or her organization knows enough to suspect that price objections are really masking another reason for hesitating on signing a contract. Follow the lead of great sales people in dealing with these price objections and dive deeper into why a prospect may be raising price as a reason for not moving forward:
Ask the prospect whether the product or service as presently defined is what the prospect and his or her organization is looking for. This can help the prospect reflect on value for price and realize that the price shouldn’t be an objection.
Find out whether the prospect has the full support of other decision makers, or if there may be a key decision maker who is not convinced. When this is the case, you can arrange a meeting with the hold outs to overcome the price objections.
Ask whether the prospect has found similar value for money anywhere else. Price objections are sometimes the result of competitor offers, and knowing whether or not the prospect is working with one of your competitors can help you explain where your offerings differ and provide a better value.
Great Sales People Find Out Whether Price Objections May End the Deal
Once great sales people have explored all other avenues, if the price objections remain it is possible that the objection to price can cause the prospect to walk away from the negotiations without making a purchase. It’s crucial for great sales people to find out whether this is a possibility before the prospect begins to distance him or herself from the deal. Great sales people handle this by:
Asking whether it’s the price or the product/service which is causing the prospect concern. Occasionally prospects think of an additional feature or functionality that would be nice to have or even a must have at this late stage, and this may be easily solved.
Finding out whether it is the price or the terms that’s the real problem. Less established companies or those emerging from recent business combinations may need longer terms, which can be less expensive to negotiate than price.
Great Sales People Put Price Objections in a Different Perspective
Big ticket sales cause pressure for prospects, especially if a prospect is worried about how his or her organization will react to the changes that a product or service may introduce. In other cases, it’s only the number that a prospect is worried about. In either circumstance great sales people help prospects overcome price objections by putting the price in a different perspective relative to value using tactics like amortizing the price and creating timelines that compare the price against the potential gains in revenue or margin. Using a combination of all of the above tactics, great sales people are rarely stymied by price objections.
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