It’s happened to the best of us. You tell a prospect how much your product or service costs and they respond with silence. This is known as “sticker shock” and if you’ve done your job as a salesperson, your customer should never experience this.
What makes sales management such a tough job? There are many reasons, but a very basic one is that your success as a B2B sales manager depends on the performance of your sales team. If your sales team doesn’t perform well and make quota—despite your best efforts to coach, motivate, support, mentor, and lead—then you can’t succeed.
Setting the price for your offering is critical. Price dictates whether or not your offering will succeed or fail in the marketplace. A price that’s too low can cause you to operate in the red or leave profits on the table. However, a price that’s too high could create drag on the sales cycle or make it tough for your salespeople to close deals. Why Common Pricing Strategies Fail When setting price, you’re looking for the optimal price to maximize profitability. That number is not the highest price possible nor is it based solely on what your competition charges, yet I hear many marketers talk about pricing in exactly those terms. Here are the two most common approaches to pricing I see.
Using a value-based sales approach helps sales teams succeed consistently and more frequently. These four tips from the world of value selling can help move deals through the buying cycle faster and increase close rates.
The other day I caught a reference on an episode of Mad Men to the Four P’s. The episode was set in the early 1970’s, which means Phil Kotler’s game-changing concept of the Four P’s (product, price, placement, and promotion) had just recently been published in his book, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control.
It's mid-month, I'm enjoying my morning caffeination while reviewing the sales team’s preliminary monthly sales forecasts, and I’m concerned. Many opportunities forecasted to close again this month at 90% probability are deals that have been previously forecasted to close at similar rates of probability.
Last week we discussed how salespeople can overcome objections related to price. Now we want to address how marketing can support sales’ efforts. For marketers, problems with price typically show up in the following ways: You’re hearing too many requests from the sales team for discounts or price exceptions. Your average selling price is falling below your target price. Here are three things marketing can do to keep pricing from becoming a systemic challenge. 1) Help sales secure budget approval. Salespeople often run into trouble near the end of the buying cycle, when they’re trying to secure budget approval from a finance team. Without a solid business case to justify the cost of investing in your offering, the deal can fall apart.
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.
What separates good companies from great ones? Truly exceptional companies understand that customer value is the sum total of everything they do, not just the product they sell.
