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YOUR PRODUCT COSTS TOO MUCH!

Written by: Wayne Berry

Article Overview: Sales people the world over tell me that the price objection is the biggest objection that their prospects bring up. In a high percentage of cases this objection de-rails the sale and the sales person walks away empty handed and frustrated. Guess what?

YOUR PRODUCT COSTS TOO MUCH!

YOUR PRODUCT COSTS TOO MUCH!

Sales people the world over tell me that the price objection is the biggest objection that their prospects bring up.

In a high percentage of cases this objection de-rails the sale and the sales person walks away empty handed and frustrated.

Guess what? In my experience this price objection, “It costs too much” occurs in a high percentage of cases regardless of what the price is.

So why do prospects say it costs too much?

When a prospect says it costs too much are they saying, “I can’t afford it?” or “I can’t get that amount of money!” or are they perhaps really saying…

“I just don’t see the value!”

Think about when you’ve made a decision not to buy something based on the price. Was it because you didn’t have the amount of money required? Or was it because you simply didn’t feel that the benefits that you'd be getting would be enough to out weigh the dollars that were being asked?

I think in most cases it’s the latter.

Yet so many sales people feel that their customers are price buyers and that if they could discount then they would get the deal every time.

A company which I eventually did some sales training for a few years ago decided to put this to the test. Their product (actually a service) was priced at $3,100 and the company authorised their entire sales team to go out and see all of their prospects who were procrastinating on their decision, or had said “no” and offer the same product for just $1,500. They were allowed to do this for a full month.

So what do you think happened?

Did their sales go through the roof as their sales people said they would because “price was the problem”?

Here's what happened. Less than 10% of these procrastinating, price sensitive prospects actually decided to go ahead and buy or reverse their decision not to buy.

That’s right less than 10% bought!

You see price was not the problem! These prospects were not going to buy at any price. The “promotion” (which incidentally I did not agree with) was a complete failure but it did show that price was not the real problem.

The real objection was “I don’t see the value”!

Over the weeks ahead we trained these sales people to sell on value and not on price. They sold at full price from that day on and this involved developing a range of skills including; .

* Rapport building

* Trust building

* Asking questions to understand their prospect’s real needs – both “logical” and “emotional”
* How to present the benefits of their products in a way that addressed their prospect’s real needs
* How to ask their prospects for a decision without pressure or “clever tricky closes”, and most importantly…

How to answer the price objection when it came up

So what happened? Over the first 30 day period sales rose by 43%. During the next 30 days they rose by a massive 80%, and in the next 30 days by more 100%.

That's right, sales doubled!

So how do you sell the value?

Well a prospect determines whether your proposition is value for money or not by weighing up the benefits your proposition offers, versus the cost (or more correctly the "investment").

Value is a perception and you can change this perceived value by explaining the benefits in detail (not the features) as they relate to your prospect's needs (determined by your skillful use of questions before making yor presentation) and this can then tip the "value for money scale" in favour of good value for money.

If you do this well, then you will often eliminate the "It costs too much" objection entirely.

If however it does come up, this is how to answer it.

"Mr Prospect I understand how you feel, I've had other clients who also felt this way, but when they went ahead here's what they found..."

At this point you go on to sell the benefits.

This technique is called the "Feel, felt, found technique"

This is just one of the strategies and techniques we trained those sales people to use and the increase in sales was dramatic.

And this is not an isolated case, over the last 12 months alone I’ve shown tens of thousands of sales people across Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia how to sell on value rather than on price and…

How to get past objections that stop 90% of sales people.

And while the price objection can be a tough one to handle, there is an even tougher objection to handle and get past to make the sale than the price objection.

So what is this toughest of all objections?

Well it’s the one that costs sales people more commissions and sales than any other objection.

It’s the un-stated objection!

It's often disguised as, "I'd like to think it over!"

Well this is not a real objection. It's an excuse, a "smoke-screen" to hide the real objection. However there is a brilliant way that we have developed to handle the "smoke-screen objection" and to use it as a springboard to close more sales than you ever have before.

Have a great week this week. Make it a great week

Wayne Berry CSP*

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Article Tags: amount of money, objection, prospects, sales person



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