Can’t Sell Value with a Price Sheet
By Nathan Jamail
How many times have you heard a prospective customer or current customer say, “send me over your price sheet or catalog and we will call you.” This may be fine if you are a company that sells only on price, but if you are a sales person for a large company or maybe a person who does professional services like accounting, real estate or insurance then you have to sell value to get the job or the business. Responding to these requests will not work in most situations.
I compare sales people sending pricing out in order to get business the same as a person emailing or faxing off resume’s to get a job; one will most likely will not get the job without the face to face meeting. The same goes for sales.
It reminds me of a friend of mine that said he looked for a job for over twelve months and could not find any good jobs. I asked him how many interviews he went to, he said “none, but I emailed my resume’ out every day”. I told him emailing your resume’ to companies does not constitute looking for a job, that is just doing the bare minimum. He did get really committed (or maybe the mortgage company helped him see the urgency) and started fighting and asking for the interview. From there he went on five interviews and was able to get a great job.
With little effort or risk comes little results-this is true in life and it is true in business. As sales people (really for all professional business people) we must be willing to work a little harder to get the appointment so we can work even harder to show our value and earn the business.
If we can’t sell the value of our time, we have no chance in selling the value of our service or products. In the absence of value there is only price and price can be beat. Get in front of your prospects and clients and show them the value they are buying.
