Crushing Price Objections
Made it back to the office today, and I have a lot of notes to go through. I will be diving into some of the topics I came across for the next several posts. First, I want to go back to a session I attended on Tuesday and make a few quick comments.
I’m not in sales — and frankly have no real interest in being involved in sales – so I was surprised that I got so much out of Tom Reilly’s “Value-Added Selling” general session. I even had the chance to attend his breakout workshop, which he ran along with MHEDA Member Cary Roulet, VP/GM of Holt of California (Sacramento, CA), and picked up a few useful tidbits.
The official workshop title was “Crushing Price Objections,” and basically it featured tips and strategies for dealing with a customer who says “Your price is too high.” There was a list of about 16 different statements that salespeople hear from customers talking about price. One of Reilly’s biggest points was that most price objections aren’t really about price, they’re about the customer’s expectations. For instance, when a customer hears a price that he deems “too high,” he is probably not considering all the added value that comes with the product. He expects to hear a number that is close to what he has determined he is willing to pay, and if it is different, the natural response is to say, “Your price is too high.” The real problem, according to Reilly, is not necessarily with your prices but with what the customer is expecting.
I’m probably not explaining this very well since it’s not a situation that I run into every day. But it home when he said, “Money is a better conversation to have with customers than price.” I kind of considered them to be the same thing, bu they’re not.
Money is a bigger, long-term issue. Price is what you pay one time, a short term concept. Money is the total amount you spend, whcih includes the sales price, the service costs, warranty costs, etc. That, Reilly says, is how distributors can add value and drive profitabilty. The total cost of what distributors provide is really what matters. When explained well by your salespeople, no customer can argue with that. You’ll never hear, “Your value is too high.”
It goes to show that you never know what you’re going to pick up at a MHEDA Convention. Sometimes you find nuggets even when you’re not really expecting to.
Tags: convention, material handling, sales success
