It’s the duh statement of the century: “My clients love me, and they have experience with getting great value from me. My problem is: How do I get people who haven’t worked with me to believe in my value?”

Duh

Isn’t that the essence of what salesmanship is? How do you demonstrate the value of your solution in advance of delivering it? And if you can do that, won’t you improve your closing percentage and increase your customer acquisition rate?

So How Do You Demonstrate Your Value?

I was in a training session last week with a company that sells a distributed product—in other words, they sell the exact same product other people sell.

They get into these price wars where they really can’t differentiate what their solution is from everybody else’s, because it’s exactly the same. My question to the salesperson was, “What does the customer give up when they decide not to do business with you?” And he couldn’t come up with anything.

Well there you have the problem. If you don’t believe in your heart that they sacrifice anything NOT to do business with you, then their best option may be to not do business with you. Don’t go whining about how you can’t get the deal or how your margins are pressured because you can’t hold the price premium. You’ve not worked on the right end of the problem.

At your next sales meeting, cut the talk about pipeline and start talking about “What do customers give up when they decide not to do business with you?” (and you might be you, not the company).