Your salesperson tells you: "my prospect finds us too expensive". How do you react to that?

Every sales or business leader experiences this: their salespeople telling them that their offering is too expensive.

As long as I have been a sales consultant, I have heard salespeople complaining about their product/service being considered too expensive. There are different reasons why prospective customers can find you too expensive. Sometimes lack of funds can be the reason, but often it has to do with not realising that what you have to offer them will satisfy their need. Lack of insights into how to sell value by the salesperson plays an even more critical role.

For people to buy from you, there must be a need. This need can be dormant, which means the demand is there, but they are not actively aware of this need. Or, there is an operational need, but they need to make a choice.

Let's take a closer look at how to avoid getting swamped into price discussions.

1. Preparation: Before the call, research the prospect, market, and what they offer to their customers.

2. Know your product, including your value proposition, features, benefits, and value for the customer.

3. Prepare your conversation, which means having a script in place which should sound natural. Your story should include your introduction, followed by the prospect telling you about their business and followed through by you asking questions. Your questions should be in a conversational way where you avoid behaving like a detective.

4. Above all, pay attention to how you start a sales call with a prospect. The first minutes of the call are crucial for the whole conversation. Your introduction and the way you lead the discussion depends on these first minutes. Either the prospect accepts that you take the lead, or they take it!

Price can be crucial, depending on the value that the buyer sees in your offering. The reality is that professional buyers know that using price is an excellent instrument to put pressure on the salesperson and get the best deal. Quite often, they bring up "price" at the beginning of the sales conversation. And quite often, salespeople tumble right into this trap.

Be aware that a sales conversation with a professional buyer will be different from a C-level manager's call.

Conversations with professional buyers usually focus on price. Still, if you can stay away from price and focus on their deep needs, you will sell on value.

Conversations with C-level managers or VP's are more focused on strategy, shareholders value, the organisation's well-being, future development and much more.

Take care that you discover at least three compelling reasons why they would want to buy what you are offering.

Receptive listening plays an important role here. Sometimes salespeople ignore critical remarks, which can be essential.

I'll give you an example: the prospect just reacted to a feature of your offering with, "this is interesting". Most salespeople would say "thank you" and continue. Wrong! Try the following by asking: "why do you find it interesting" "where does it fit your expectations", "how would it solve the issues you have", any many more questions you can ask.

You will add a new dimension to your sales conversations regarding "price" by trying the above-mentioned approaches.

Contact me here, if you want to know more about increasing sales performance and more profitable margins. Call me at +31 0642713033.

Why many Start-ups fail and how to avoid this

According to Review42 https://review42.com/what-percentage-of-startups-fail/, 90% of start-ups fail and 82% of businesses that fail do so because of cash flow problems!

This is an astonishing but realistic percentage, based on research.

Still, start-ups are created daily.

Initiating a start-up is exciting and fun. You have an idea; you think there is a market and you have the funding to start. A dream comes true!

Then, after the product has been developed, the search for customers starts. Customers are essential because they buy your product and pay for it. This generates cash which is needed to grow your start-up. As plenty of cash is needed for investing in research, development, and running the business and you have your hands full with managing costs, less time is spent focussing on sales. Then you do realize you need someone to find customers and convince them of your great idea.

So, you decide to start looking for that salesperson who will find prospects and turn them into customers who will buy and generate the so needed cashflow.

So far so good.

But here is where it often goes wrong. And that wrongness has to do with mistakes that are often made when recruiting and deploying salespeople.

From our practice, we very often experience that recruiting starts with the wrong criteria to search, attract, and select sales candidates. These criteria are usually based on the perception of people who created a wonderful concept but have little experience in selecting and hiring salespeople.

Some of the most common criteria that can lead to failure, are:

1. Hiring candidates who have worked with bigger and renowned companies. Why? Start-ups need to establish themselves in the market. Approaching the market with a new product and getting customers to trust you and buy your product takes a lot of perseverance, persuasion, skill, drive, stamina, and much more. Hunting for new business is something that many salespeople dislike. Salespeople coming from larger, well-established companies with all the needed facilities in place, might not be up to a lot of “do it yourself”.

2. Hiring salespeople just out of school to keep costs down. Inexperienced salespeople who have never been in sales before, are attracted to the so-called glamour of sales. It might take you months up to years before you discover that the candidate you “fell in love with”, is adding no value to your business.

3. Hiring candidates with a “sexy” but heavily inflated CV with lots of inaccuracies. It takes skilled recruiters with a sales background to analyse and spot the faults.

4. Hiring a recruitment firm with little to no sales experience to find the best candidate for you. Things become even more complicated when this firm refuses to use a sales-specific assessment for testing candidates. The reality is, that by the time you realize the candidate is not performing, the time has gone, revenue is not growing and there is little time left to find an adequate replacement.

5. Hiring an intern just from school to do the tough job of penetrating a market with a new product. The learning curve can be very long and steep and if the candidate has no endurance, failure is waiting around the corner.

So, your cash is limited, and you need a salesperson. Are there workable solutions? Yes, there are! Let us look at the options:

First, avoid being penny-wise pound-foolish. A wrong hire can cost you a dearly!

You do not need to spend a fortune to find a “killer salesperson”. The whole recruitment process, including onboarding the right person, can be done successfully and economically. You can do this yourself and save lots of money, if you have a good process and the right tools in place.

You can find the best salespeople to help you grow your start-up, by implementing a sales-specific recruiting process, combined with a sales-specific assessment. Our partner, Objective Management Group founded by Dave Kurlan has developed the most effective Sales assessment with a predictive accuracy of 97%!

It will save you time, money, and disappointments. And very important, this approach will help you grow your business significantly.

One more piece of advice: because of the pandemic, a lot of good salespeople have been side-lined. The market is ready for recruiting of the best!

If you want to know more, contact me here or call me at +31 (0) 642713033.