Apples vs. Oranges?

With the lack of any other frame of reference, your prospects will default to a price comparison. An apples to apples comparison. Once they say something like, “The XYZ company will do the same thing for $Y dollars less,” you have virtually lost the sale, because the talk is all about price. When you tell them all the reasons (and they may be good ones) why your pricing is as good if not a better deal, you sound to them like you are making excuses to try to recover the sale. It’s over!

You need to change the conversation to an ‘apples to oranges’ conversation where price never enters the conversation as the deciding factor.

Talk about value instead of price.

If your value proposition is good enough and you present it well enough, you may even get a bigger sale! Calm their fears, ease their pain and make their problem go away.

Simon Sinek wrote this great book entitled “Start With Why.” He says, “Absent a WHY, new ideas and technologies [anything for that matter] quickly find themselves playing the price-and-feature game — a sure sign of an absence of WHY and a slide into commodity status.”

I highly recommend that you read this book cover to cover, but to get an idea of what Simon Sinek is talking about, watch his TED talk called “How great leaders inspire action.”

If you do not know your value proposition or your WHY, you are doomed to play the commodity/price game and lose because there is always someone who will do what you do cheaper than you. I did not say better, or even as good, I said cheaper.

Do you know your company’s WHY? Why you exist, why you are doing what you are doing….the emotional reason. Your company’s WHY is not to make money, that is a by-product. Everyone is not your potential customer or client, only those who resonate with your WHY.

The bottom line is that it does not matter how much money your prospect has or is willing to spend on your product or service, they want to feel that they got a good deal (translation: good value for the money they spent).

Hey, a Ford will get you around just as well as a Ferrari, but people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Ferraris. People buy them, not because they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but because they have bought into Ferrari’s value proposition and because they emotionally believe in Ferrari’s WHY.