Customers and prospects often lean on price as an objection for why they don’t want to do business with you. Here are some common things you might hear from customers. We can’t afford it right now. Our budget just got cut. Your competitor is offering a discount. I need my director to sign off on a purchase this size. Overcoming objections like these is a lot easier when you understand how to approach the issue of price. Here are three tips that can help.
Quite often, the procurement department (also called purchasing or supply management) is seen as an obstacle, if not an outright enemy, to the selling process. These are the people hired to say “no” and make the selling effort (and internal client’s buying decision) more difficult, rigorous, and objective.
People in positions of power often ask tough questions. In our experience, this is certainly true of anyone on the financial team who has the ultimate say over purchasing decisions. Unfortunately, salespeople are rarely invited to the internal budget meeting to discuss a potential purchase. Typically, you work with your stakeholder to prepare a business case, and the stakeholder attends the meeting. That’s why it’s crucial that you prepare your stakeholder to anticipate the kinds of tough questions that decision makers usually ask about benefit dimensions in a standard business case.
Presentation is everything, especially when it comes to sales proposals and quotes. Getting it right can mean the difference between landing the sale or failing to get the contract—it's that important. If your sales proposals read like whitepapers, your client may leave scratching their head. Worse, they may be completely bored. One of the best sales strategies to have in your arsenal is the ability to create and implement winning proposals. Need some tips? Keep reading to find out how to make your sales proposal pop. Why is Layout and Presentation So Important? Executives and decision makers in all industries expect professionalism, and when it comes to proposals, appearance is just as important as the contents of the proposal. If your proposal is disorganized, boring or unattractive, it gets tossed aside with all the other proposals that look exactly the same. In order to get your proposals to stand out, yours must be clean, easy to read, and engaging.
Do you use a business case as part of your sales process? If not, you should seriously consider it, because any solution-based or consultative-based sale will benefit from providing buyers with the business case.
Sometimes the way you talk about a customer’s problem can make all the difference. In our experience, there are lots of ways to encourage prospects to think about their business problems with renewed urgency. The next time you want to light a fire under your prospect, try one of the following conversational approaches.
Last week I spoke with Ken Powell, who’s been leading a sales transformation at SunGard in his role as VP of Global Sales Enablement. (He was also a speaker this week at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston.)
There are a couple of categories of value dimensions that will often be challenged by a prospect when you are building an ROI-based business case, and labor savings is at the top of that list. Labor savings tend to be tough to get customer buy-in for a number of reasons: Labor Savings are often spread across many people’s time and thus are considered soft or indirect benefits without real economic impact In order to capture the labor savings, the company often needs to take some action (reduce headcount, avoid hiring more workers, or reallocate employees to other value-added activities) Often the people that you are dealing with when building the business case are the people that will be impacted by the actions required (e.g., selling a technology solution to the IT department that reduces IT headcount may be difficult) Companies have been promised productivity gains many times, but rarely have they seen the results.
