Most of your prospects will focus on price once they think they have found a product or service that will meet their needs. It’s normal to want to know how much something will cost. However, it’s best to avoid responding directly to this question until you have established the problem and the value of solving that problem.
Reframe the Conversation
Get past the focus on price by carefully framing the conversation from the start; retarget by talking about what the prospect finds valuable.
Begin by asking the right questions. Your goal is to understand the prospect’s problem before attempting to configure a solution.
Encourage the prospect to talk about what the company needs or wants. What are the overall priorities of the business? What are the frustrations it deals with on a daily basis?
- Dig down into the details to determine the scope of the problem.
- Ask if they have looked into any other alternatives.
- Learn about their future goals.
During this conversation, educate the prospect about the available choices that may help solve this problem. Make it clear you need to know more about what the company wants to accomplish in order to find the best solution.
Build a Solution
Once you have these details, you can begin to build a solution that does what the prospect values, which is more important than providing the best price. Your value proposition cannot be built until you have guided the conversation to learn what will create value for the prospect’s business.
What If the Prospect Tries to Reframe the Conversation Back to Price?
Some prospects resist any attempt to talk about anything before learning the price. You, as a value seller, must be just as persistent in stating that price is irrelevant until the problem to be solved is clearly understood.
Use follow-up questions about what the prospect is doing now and what the business needs to improve. Use your familiarity with the value proposition to lead the prospect to discover the real solution to the problem, not the cheapest.
Discuss benefits that were experienced by some of your customers with similar problems and use strategic questions to show your prospect how well their current problem aligns with the experience of those customers.
Examples:
- “You seem to have a lot of legacy systems. How much does it cost you to maintain them?”
- “Are you comfortable with your customer retention and service levels? Our customers see an X% improvement in customer retention rates by improving customer service.”
- “You seem to have a lot of people performing that function. Have you thought about redeploying some of those people, reducing staff or avoiding hiring new employees? Some of our customers have been able to reduce headcount needs by X% in this area.”
As you can see from the examples above, quantifying improvement is an effective method of moving the conversation along the value pathway. After learning about the prospect’s needs, you can start building potential solutions and analyzing the ROI of each.
Tools that Can Help
Two tools that are invaluable for quantifying value are a Value Calculator and an ROI Tool.
1. Value Calculator
A Value Calculator on your website or a landing page can jumpstart the value conversation by allowing a prospect to see from the beginning exactly what your solution could offer before any question of price enters the discussion. Your sales team could also introduce it early in the sales process to emphasize value over price.
2. ROI Tool
An ROI Tool helps steer the conversation around the irrelevancy of price relative to value by providing hard data showing how many times and how quickly the prospect will earn back what was spent on your solution.
These tools help you share the knowledge of how to solve real business problems and deliver real financial improvement to the prospect’s business, thus helping the prospect define what is important and guide the conversation toward value.
If a prospect understands the value the company will receive, you will not only help close the deal, you will set yourself up for future business because you will have won the prospect’s trust.
