The Pre-Sales Diary:Great but Too Expensive Dear!
Thwack!
The apparent feeling of being dumped by a potential customer can be materialized by a host of many available options for such potential customers. Although there is no harm (apparently) for being rude to the sales team but just for the sake of better euphemism, these no longer ‘potential’ customers can simply blame their distaste of your products/services or whatever you do to being overpriced!
Although a fashion statement in some novelty industries and an admired trait, most enterprise business software taboo out the pricy tagging.
First of all, we all know it, IT notoriously sucks the money out of a business, especially when there is no enterprise strategy around, IT is definitely a pure cost center. That is why they invited you to sell them business performance management and intelligence software to get share of the corporate ‘strategy’ cake.
But you don’t like to understand any of this, you spent a lot of resources in time and people to execute a sales cycle, raised expectations, probably gave a proof of concept with purpose, all to listen to the once potential customer spit out the devilish decree. It all starts with ‘But…….‘ and follows a variation of ‘Your solution is too expensive‘ or ‘we can’t allocate the budget for it‘, ‘we don’t make the final purchasing decisions’, etc etc.
In reality, this is just a polite way of saying that you didn’t meet the expectations or weren’t able to create the right value of your products/services.
How do you cater to this catch-22 situation?
Many survivors tell us some common strategies, including:
- Price Justifications (e.g. Our product works in zero gravity, our costs are only upfront heavy, incremental upgrades are very cheap)
- Price Distractions (e.g, we have overall very low TCO)
- Competitor Demeaning (e.g. The competitors have lousy products and are thus cheap) (Pun Intended)
- Bargaining (e.g. whats your budget, let us fit something for you, else we will definitely, ultimately come down to your level)
- Reinventing the Sales Wheel (e.g. Lets try again, lets talk again, let us repeat our efforts to emphasize why we are
not soaffordable) - Reassess our own Assumptions about the Expectations and Value Offered (e.g. Does the customer really know what they can get as true ROI, is our product redundant, can they solve pain point using other lesser expensive solutions)
The reality is, most of these techniques are pretty frequently used, some of them are quite demeaning (e.g. 3), but in most cases, the bottom line is, you need to set the Expectations straight, and such an objection raised only indicates the lack of effectiveness to do the same.
Once the objection is raised, ask the prospect what should the product/service have more for him to rethink the budget?
He would either give you the points for mending the gaps or acknowledge your product fitness to be good.
For the former case, if the points mentioned are offered in your products/services with a workaround or a doable approach, go ahead, you have nearly resolved the objective.
If the prospect is unable to provide any missing points, then you need to re-emphasize on the need, figure out the real decision makers (if he/she sites others for budget approval), or figure out the true ‘champions’ and ‘villians’ in your deal. Most likely, you will find out that your current assessment is different from your initial assessment.
Apply the changes only, this will set new Expectations and hopefully hopefully you will have the objection resolved, your product/services will be valued the way you wanted or pretty close to that.
Happy Selling!
Knowledge Works 