Here’s a magic formula: > as trust in you and> confidence in the value of what you’re offering rises, > fear of buying disappears.
I’d like to say a few things about building confidence in the value of what you’re offering… Price objections occur when you haven’t built enough value for what you’re offering in the minds of your prospects. However, that shouldn’t be a problem because
YOU can always make your product or service more valuable. Here are 9 ways to differentiate your offering in order to defeat price objections…
- Providing expert advice and a high level of professionalism. Lots of consulting organizations, accounting firms, and medical professionals are paid a tidy sum for the level of advice that they provide. However, for you as a sales professional, to provide value, you need to understand that you have to provide a level of advice that is significantly higher, more sophisticated and more valuable than that of your competition. That means you’ve got to develop a higher level of sophistication, wisdom, and understanding about what you do.
- Bundling and packaging. This extends beyond the way your product or service looks. It’s also about building desirable packages or purchasing levels. You might even offer a series of added benefits that are significant in value. In fact these “added benefits” might be a whole lot more valuable than the product by itself.
- Service levels. Is it possible for you to differentiate yourself by adding different levels of service based on someone’s size, frequency, or amount of purchase? For example, you may want to have gold, platinum, or silver levels of service that people qualify for (or are willing to pay for).
- Transition and education. As new customers come on stream with your organization, you may want to provide action or transition teams to help them to be better able to use the products or services you’ve sold them. By the same token, the more education they have related to those products or services the more capable they’ll be at using them. What does that mean? Happy, satisfied customers who eagerly buy more.
- Recognition and reward levels. This is different than “frequent buyer programs” in that, with this concept, you actually recognize clients or customers for their ability to use your product or service. I’m sure you’ve got some customers who are maximizing the potential of your offering. Why not recognize them for being outstanding customers? Several years ago, we incorporated a “Hall of Fame” into our newsletter. We used it to recognize some of our best clients. We literally had people calling to find out how they could be recognized! It’s a fantastic way to utilize good relationships and good will.
- Qualitative preference. Based upon someone’s level of purchase, involvement or interaction, you provide higher quality of product, perhaps a more sophisticated level of service, dedicated personnel, dedicated phone lines, fax lines, or the like, that gives them a greater opportunity to be treated better than a run-of-the-mill customer.
- Dedicated personnel. This works particularly well if you have a technical product or service or one that requires extensive support. It is not difficult to understand that the more someone is familiar with another customer’s account, products, machinery, equipment or way of doing business, the easier it is to do business with them. In this scenario, you can simply assign dedicated account people to handle your customer’s accounts personally.
- Speed of service or delivery. One of the ways to differentiate yourself is to guarantee some sort of on time or faster delivery. It is very well known that on time delivery is a key component for charging full or maximum pricing. It is also a component as it relates to providing value-added services and products.
- Insider information. This is very common when people are selling information related to technical products, new and innovative products, or anything related to information or time specific data. Utilizing this process you may want to consider a regular newsletter (electronic or printed) that updates customers on a regular basis as it relates to very key and important information that they need to have.
Add value to your day-to-day sales activity with these nine ideas. They require creativity, innovation and a willingness to out-work your competition. But they’ll pay off! We have been training salespeople on dealing with objections for more than thirty years. We continue that tradition in all of our sales training programs.
