Many business owners and sales reps hate price objections. They view price objections as some kind of faux pas that they should have avoided, an awkward situation, best resolved quickly (and often with huge damage to profits). Do you like price objections? When was the last time you heard one? (I recently spoke to the [...]
A lot of businesses think they have a great product or service. Something above and beyond what the competition offers. But when it comes time to put a price on all this awesomeness, they are still cheaper than the competition. This is a particular problem for small, service-oriented businesses that try to compete with larger [...]
How do you know when to stop asking questions about value? Couldn’t this go forever, asking “Why? Why? Why?” until we end up in a philosophical discussion? You want to ask questions until you no longer get meaningfully different answers. At this point, you know what you need to know. For example, suppose you want [...]
Sadly, this will seem awfully familiar to some businesses we’ve seen.
Your price ceiling is limited by the Perceived Differential Value of your offering. Customers determine this, but you can help them along the way. Your price floor is limited by your costs. If your floor and ceiling are the same height, you are going to get squished. Never limit yourself on price. This is the [...]
If you haven’t already, check out Gerhard Gschwandtner interviewing Ron Hubsher from the Sales Optimization Group on the sales negotiation process. Ron looks at the sales process with the same philosophy I do– namely, selling value instead of price, and using that profit increase to build a much more valuable company. However, he approaches the [...]
I’m a big fan of analytics. And sports (although I no longer have time to keep up with them). So I’ve always been puzzled that with so much money and pride on the line, teams have done so little analyze data to help them win. Sounds a bit like pricing, right? There’s no shortage of [...]
Join us for a webinar on B2B sales optimization. We’ll look at how manual negotiation processes cost time, sales, stress, and 10% or more of profit. Why does this happen? What have companies tried to do about it? And what kind of results have those efforts yielded. Do you have to choose between selling faster [...]
This summer, Steve Silberman over at Wired wrote a great article called “Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.” While the implications for pricing in the pharmaceutical industry are obvious, there are also important analogies to pricing activities in a much broader range of companies. The article discusses how big pharma [...]
Twas the night before Christmas, when all the through the houseNot a hard drive was stirring, not even a mouse. The pipeline reports were tallied with careIn hopes that the revenue soon would be there. The sales teams were in hotel rooms, snug in their bedsWhile visions of commissions danced in their heads The CFO [...]
