Price value volume or profit margin, it’s a business decision you make every day.
While I won’t argue the role of price in decision making, once you understand e motivation of the buyer you can decide early in the sales process if it makes sense for you to work on an opportunity or not. There can be times where making a price based sale could be bad for your business. Let’s look at the problems associated with selling on price.
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You sacrifice margin, which means making more sales to achieve your revenue goal.
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It’s a short-term strategy versus a long-term strategy.
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You sacrifice building your sales practice with dependable revenue.
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You will constantly be “defending” your business over the next 12 months from the “price attackers.”
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If you live by the sword you die by the sword. Win on price lose on price.
Why all of this focus on price? Certainly there are things that all of us buy that price is not the primary consideration. Well first it’s part of the official buyers manual. Buyers have been conditioned to believe that there is always a lower price and a salesperson desperate enough to go there. Their own buying cycle, if they buy on price personally they will mirror that behavior as a corporate buyer. Their own record collection about price. Merely suggesting to a salesperson that you can get it for less from someone else causes him or her to get a better price.
Well what should you do? That’s the beauty of it, you get to decide the type of business you want to have? If you intend to uphold your margin then you must find prospects that place value on something besides just price. When the prospect tells you up front that this is a price-based decision you need to ask questions to see if there is anything else besides price driving this decision and if not be prepared to move on. The lack of a great pipeline puts pressure on us to work on low probability opportunities.
Don’t let your business be driven by price shoppers. Get out there and prospect everyday.
