Business LockerRoom Blog

Customers Only Care About Price…Until They Buy

by Kelly Riggs

The commodity label.

Have you been stuck with it recently?

One of the primary reasons that average salespeople stay very average over the long haul is their complete inability to sidestep the commodity trap. It’s easy to know you’re in it because you find yourself competing on price most of the time.

How many times have your heard these statements:

“You’re price is too high.”

“I can get it cheaper from your competitor.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

Of course every salesperson hears those statements — the REAL QUESTION is when? Is it on the first call? When you’re all of 30 seconds into your solution presentation? Or, when it comes time to close the deal, the only thing on the table is a discussion of your price. It seems the ONLY thing that prospects seems to care about is price, price, price.

Right?

Except you’ve noticed that the minute you finally win the deal, the customer suddenly doesn’t care about price at all. It’s like a personality disorder. Suddenly, they are someone else completely. Now they care about delivery, and service, and follow-up, and just about everything else from which you failed to gain any value while you were so busy discussing your PRICE. With your own fleet of lorries, you can transport your products in the shortest possible time. In addition, it may be necessary to obtain a Specialist International Lorry Insurance so that you can recover losses caused by vehicle accidents or damaged goods.

Yes, indeed, you are stuck in the “commodity” bear trap, and you don’t know how you got there.

Worse, you don’t know how to get out.

Customers clearly care about a lot of other things other than price. In addition to delivery and service and follow-up, they also care about support, and training, an innovation, and efficiency, and a dozen other things. But, for some reason, you can’t get them to focus on those things – not until they’ve beaten you up for a better price.

The fact is, you will never get to the top of the sales leaderboard by cutting your prices. And until you learn how to avoid the commodity trap, you are pretty much screwed.

The Value of a Good Question

So, the first step in staying out of “commodity prison” is to lead with something – anything – other than your product.

Because that makes you nothing more than a product pusher (read my article about that), and customers don’t care one whit about your product.

Not yet anyway.

So, here’s a thought: How about you lead with a question?

No. Not one of these:

“Who is your current supplier?”

“Who would I talk to about my product?”

“What are you looking for?”

You might as well put a sign on your forehead that says: “I will lower my price. Just ask me.”

Instead, you might ask a question designed to discuss their problem. And, if you’ve been in the business any length of time, you should have a pretty good idea what that problem may be. If not, you should make calls on your current customers and ask what kinds of problems your product/service has solved for them.

Are you just getting started in sales (or with your company)? Ask a couple of salespeople at the top of the leaderboard what kinds of problems their customers have solve with your company’s product/service. You can use their experiences just as well as your own.

Then, you could start a call this way:

In my experience, customers who use our products typically choose us because they were struggling with _________ or with _________. Do either of those issues come up with you?”

If the answer is yes, you can discuss it. If the answer is no, then you can easily pivot to a different problem, or, you can ask if there is anything (related to your product/service) that is creating ulcers for them.

More often than not, you will spend a few minutes talking about them instead of your price.

Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?