Margin pressure is relentless. Customers default to price comparisons. And when a buyer says, “I can get it cheaper down the street,” too many sellers respond with, “Let me see what I can do.” That moment is costing your organization far more than the loss of any individual deal.
The good news: It’s not a product problem; it’s a selling problem. And selling problems are fixable.
This is just one of the insights shared on a recent webinar for manufacturers with Spencer Wixom, president and CEO of The Brooks Group, and Curt Tueffert, VP of Sales Development at DXP Enterprises, a $2 billion industrial manufacturer and distributor.
Here are their recommendations for what manufacturing sales leaders need to understand, and act on, right now.
Watch the Webinar on Demand: Value-Based Selling for Manufacturers: Breaking the Price-First Mindset
3 Forces Driving Margin Pressure in Industrial Sales
Before you can break the price-first cycle, you need to name it clearly. Three factors are pushing your customers toward commodity thinking:
- Margin compression. Rising labor costs, volatile input costs, and tariff uncertainty are squeezing budgets at every level of your customers’ organizations. When money is tight, price becomes the most visible lever.
- Commoditization. Technology has enabled rapid replication of features that once differentiated products. What was a competitive advantage two years ago may be table stakes today.
- Default to price comparison. Customers have become accustomed to leading with price. When a seller can’t articulate differentiated value, the conversation defaults to the only thing left: the number.
These aren’t temporary headwinds. They’re the new operating environment. The question isn’t how to wait them out, it’s how to compete despite them.
The Real Problem: Your Sellers Aren’t Articulating Value
Here’s a hard truth: Most manufacturing sellers are technically excellent and genuinely likable. But they’re falling short in the middle of the sales process—exactly where value gets communicated and trust gets built.
Research from The Brooks Group’s IMPACT Selling Skills Index®, drawn from assessments of thousands of salespeople across industries, reveals a telling pattern specific to manufacturing sellers.
They perform at or above average in the early stages: opening conversations, setting meetings, building initial rapport. But they fall measurably below average in two critical areas: probing (understanding the customer’s deeper needs and wants) and applying (connecting their solution specifically to what the customer revealed).
In short, they’re good at getting in the room. They’re not as good at making the room count.
Why? It comes down to behavioral wiring.
Manufacturing organizations tend to hire sellers who are outgoing technical experts—high in both subject-matter knowledge and interpersonal confidence.
But their underlying motivational drives often run toward efficiency, objectivity, and return on investment. These are valuable traits. They’re also traits that can cause sellers to push the process forward too fast—to get to a recommendation before truly understanding the customer—and before they become trusted advisors.
Why Building Trust Is the Prerequisite for Value
Consider the 1972 Stanford marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification, where children were given a choice: Eat one marshmallow now or wait and receive two marshmallows later. An updated experiment in 2012 found that, when children trusted the person making the offer, 65% waited for the second marshmallow. When they didn’t trust that person, 93% took the single marshmallow immediately.
The parallel to industrial sales is direct. When customers trust your sellers, they’re willing to wait for the value you’re promising: better product performance, longer equipment life, and/or fewer emergency shutdowns.
When they don’t trust your sellers, they’ll take what’s tangible right now: the price cut from the competitor down the street.
“Trust is earned in tablespoons and destroyed in buckets.” — Curt Tueffert, VP of Sales Development at DXP Enterprises
Trust is built when your seller demonstrates they truly know the customer’s production processes, procurement cycle, pain points around downtime, and decision-makers.
Differentiation can’t come from your marketing materials or brand awareness alone; it has to come from the seller.
What Customers Actually Value (Hint: It’s Not Just Price)
When customers default to price, it’s usually because no one has given them anything more interesting to evaluate. In practice, industrial buyers care deeply about a range of value drivers that rarely appear in a price comparison.
- Reliability and uptime. When a customer is managing a production process, downtime isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a crisis. The “cheaper” pump that fails in 90 days is far more expensive than the one that runs for years.
- Inventory and availability. The competitor down the street may have a lower list price, but do they have the part in stock when your customer needs it? Availability is value.
- Technical expertise. Customers want a seller who knows the product, but they also want one who knows their operation, their people, and how their business works.
- Long-term partnership stability. Industrial customers are playing a long game. They want suppliers they can count on across multiple purchasing cycles—not a vendor who disappears after the transaction.
Price dominates the conversation only when these other value dimensions go unspoken. Your sellers’ job is to surface them and connect them explicitly to what the customer has told them matters.
Trusted Advisors Invest 70% Before They Recommend
Roughly 70% of an effective sales process happens before the seller ever presents a solution.
Investigation, meeting setup, and probing discovery aren’t overhead; they’re the work. A seller who shortcuts this phase in favor of getting to the recommendation will always struggle to close.
They’ll also be vulnerable to a price objection, because they haven’t built the foundation that makes price secondary.
The IMPACT Selling® framework, developed by The Brooks Group, offers a practical structure for where to focus. The six stages—Investigate, Meet, Probe, Apply, Convince, Tie-It-Up—aren’t a linear checklist. They’re a discipline.
The specific coaching priority for sales leaders is to strengthen the Probe stage. Sales teams that ask consultative questions gather the intelligence they need to make a “professional recommendation” that feels tailored, not generic.
The difference between, “Here are our 77 benefits; pick the ones you like” and, “Based on everything you’ve told me, my recommendation is…” is the difference between a pitch and a strategic consultation.
Practice the art of going three layers deep. “That’s interesting—how so?” “When you say that, what do you mean?” “What effect is that having on your production schedule?” These questions build trust while uncovering the real business problem your solution can solve.
Value Selling Across the Customer Organization
In complex industrial sales, you’re not selling to one buyer; you’re selling to an ecosystem: technical evaluators, operations, finance, and procurement. Each part has their own language, their own measures of success, and their own level of trust in you.
This is where many sellers leave deals on the table. They build a great relationship with the technical team, get them excited, and then watch the deal stall when it hits procurement, because procurement has never met them, doesn’t trust them, and defaults to price.
The fix is to invest across the organization, not just the functions where you’re most comfortable. That means understanding how each department evaluates decisions, what constitutes a “win” for each, and how the buyer decision process flows from technical evaluation to financial approval to procurement.
Make sure your sales team spends part of its prospecting time building relationships across departments, not just at the point of sale. By the time procurement enters the picture, they should already know your salesperson.
Watch the Webinar on Demand: Value-Based Selling for Manufacturers: Breaking the Price-First Mindset
AI as a Tool for Value Selling, Not a Crutch
AI has real, practical uses in value-based selling—and real risks if misapplied.
Done right, AI can help sellers research competitive landscapes, develop account intelligence, craft initial messaging tailored to a buyer’s behavioral style, and prepare thoughtful questions before a call. These are legitimate accelerators that free up sellers to focus their energy on the relational and analytical work that technology can’t replicate.
Done wrong, AI replaces the critical thinking and relationship investment that actually create trust. A seller who walks into a meeting having let AI do all their thinking—without genuinely engaging with the customer in front of them—will still lose on price, because they’ve outsourced the one thing customers can sense: whether you actually understand and care about their situation.
With the right sales training, AI is a tool that sharpens preparation and efficiency. You can’t automate trust-building, curiosity, and the attention customers need to feel heard.
Sales teams that use AI to get smarter and more prepared before the conversation will outperform those that skip that preparation entirely as well as those that try to substitute AI for genuine customer engagement.
“When you’re competing against an inferior product, you can still lose if the customer feels genuinely understood by your competitor. Use AI as a tool. But show up as a human being.” — Spencer Wixom, President and CEO of The Brooks Group
7 Actionable Takeaways for Sales Leaders
1. Audit Where Your Sellers Are Losing Deals
Are your sellers strong in the front half of the sales process (investigating, meeting) but weak in the middle (probing, applying)? That’s where most industrial manufacturers have the biggest gap and the biggest opportunity. Use behavioral assessment data and sales call reviews to find it.
2. Make Probing a Coaching Priority, Not an Afterthought
The Probe stage is where trust and value differentiation are built. Inspect it rigorously. Are your sellers asking open-ended questions about business impact, not just product specs? Are they going three layers deep before pivoting to a recommendation? This is the “sales gym” work that produces lasting results.
3. Shift the Coaching Conversation From Price to Outcomes
Your value is not what the product IS, it’s what the product DOES for the customer. Coach your sellers to speak in outcomes: reduced downtime, lower total cost of ownership, production stability, faster emergency response. Price is a comparison point. Outcomes are a trust proposition.
4. Map the Full Stakeholder Landscape for Every Major Deal
Train your sellers to think beyond the technical buyer. Who else is finance looking at? What does procurement care about? What does ops need to feel good about this decision? Build relationships and value propositions across all four groups, not just the one where the seller feels most comfortable.
5. Establish a Clear Standard for Value-Based Selling
“Let me see if I can do better on price” should not be an acceptable response to a price objection without a value conversation first. Establish that standard explicitly. Role-play it. Inspect it. Sellers need to believe in the value they’re selling before they can convince a customer to believe in it.
6. Treat AI as a Preparation Accelerator, Not a Shortcut
Encourage sellers to use AI tools for competitive research, account intelligence, and pre-call preparation. Then coach them on how to show up as curious, attentive humans when they’re in front of a customer. The combination—well prepared and genuinely present—is what wins complex industrial deals.
7. Play the Long Game Intentionally
Industrial sales is not a transactional business. One deal lost on price is recoverable. A reputation for showing up with genuine understanding, honest recommendations, and reliable follow-through compounds over time. Coach your teams to invest in the relationship before the sale, during the sale, and after it.
Ready to Build a Team That Sells With Value?
At The Brooks Group, we’ve spent decades helping sales organizations move beyond transactional tactics and build the consultative skills that create real, lasting pipeline.
Our training programs are built around a proven methodology that equips sellers to engage prospects with insight, earn trust through relevance, and convert meaningful conversations into qualified opportunities.
Contact The Brooks Group today to learn how consultative sales training can transform the way your sellers perform.
Frequently Asked Questions About Value-Based Selling
Q1: Our customers really do just want the lowest price. How do we break through that?
Price dominates when value isn’t visible. If a customer can’t see a meaningful difference between your offering and the next vendor’s, then price becomes the only rational basis for the decision—and they’re not wrong to use it. The goal isn’t to argue against price sensitivity; it’s to give customers something better to evaluate. That requires asking better questions first: about their production process, their downtime history, their experience with the “cheap” option in the past. When customers articulate their own pain—in their own words—price objections lose their power.
Q2: Our sellers are strong technically but struggle with consultative selling. How do we bridge that gap?
Technical expertise is a genuine asset, lean into it. The gap for most industrial sellers isn’t their product knowledge; it’s their curiosity about the customer’s business. The best bridge is structured, coached practice in the Probe stage: asking open-ended business questions, listening for the real pain, and resisting the urge to jump to the solution before the picture is complete. Behavioral assessments can also help identify where individual sellers’ natural instincts work against them and where they need specific coaching to develop different habits.
Q3: Our sales cycles involve multiple stakeholders. How do we manage that complexity without losing momentum?
Map it explicitly. Train sellers to ask customers directly: “Walk me through your decision-making process. Who else is involved, and what does success look like for each of them?” That question alone opens a roadmap of the relationships that need to be built. The goal is to have a trusted relationship—and a tailored value story—for every major stakeholder before the formal decision point. Deals stall when procurement or finance meets a seller for the first time at the moment of decision.
Q4: How do we handle a competitor who consistently undercuts us on price?
Start by understanding what the customer is actually buying from them. Often, a cheaper price comes with compromises in availability, technical support, product life, or reliability that the customer either hasn’t experienced yet or hasn’t connected to their costs. Your sellers’ job is to make those comparisons explicit—without disparaging the competitor—by asking questions that surface the full total cost of ownership picture. “What’s your process when that equipment fails?” is a more powerful question than any spec sheet comparison.
Q5: How do we use AI tools in our sales process without losing the human element?
The right frame is preparation versus presence. AI is powerful for preparation: researching accounts, generating competitive insights, drafting tailored outreach, preparing open-ended questions for different buyer types. But the trust that closes deals happens in real-time human interaction through genuine curiosity, active listening, and the ability to respond to what’s actually happening in the room. Use AI to get smarter before the conversation. Show up fully as a human being during it.
Q6: How do we get our sales team to believe they can win on value instead of defaulting to price?
Belief in the value you sell is a prerequisite for selling it. If your sellers don’t genuinely believe that your offering is worth the premium, they’ll concede on price every time pressure is applied. This starts with product and market knowledge. Sellers need to be able to articulate, with specifics, the outcomes your product delivers and the cost of the alternatives. It also requires wins. Start collecting and sharing customer stories where the value played out over time: the plant that avoided a shutdown, the operation that reduced replacement frequency. Concrete proof builds conviction. Conviction builds resilience.
