You’ve had a great meeting, you’re really proud of the presentation you have given and you are certain that your prospect/s are ready to buy, until you hear the dreaded words “It’s too expensive!” or  “Can you do something about the price?” Here are four tips that, when applied, will help you overcome this hurdle in the future:

1.     Most price objections are not price objections.  They are, in fact, value for money objections; your prospect just doesn’t see the value. It is the responsibility of every professional sales person to establish value for money in the minds of their prospects. When your prospects are clear on the benefits they will receive when they choose your product or service they will very rarely need to ask for a better price. Just for clarification, if your prospect is not seeing the benefit, it may well be because you have been selling the features of your product or service. A feature is something your product does, a benefit is something your product does for your customer.

2.     Objections are normally an indication that you have not created enough desire for change.  In other words, you haven’t built up enough pain in your prospects mind. People are unlikely to change if they are currently comfortable with what they are doing or happy with their current situation. In a sales situation we need to create a desire for change. The way to do this is by asking great questions that will disturb their thinking about their current situation.  When your prospects discomfort level is high enough, they will be motivated to find a solution to remove their discomfort.  Once you are able to achieve this most objections will be removed. Inflicting pain may sound quite a drastic measure to resort to, so let’s be clear; I am not suggesting that you torture your prospects into submission and force them to buy your product.  What I mean by this is that you make sure that they are fully aware of the negatives, the disappointments, the torment that they currently or could potentially suffer without your product.  A good example of this might be a financial planner.  A very emotive picture might be created that demonstrated to a client the pain that they and their family might suffer if they were suddenly to lose their income.  The notion of being without the money for paying the bills, shopping for food, sacrificing family trips and holidays can be discomforting to a prospect.  This may well motivate them towards purchasing the services of the financial planner or the product that they are offering.

3.     The flip side of painting up a painful picture in your prospects mind is to paint up the brighter future they will enjoy once they adopt your solution. People, make decisions for emotional reasons then justify with logic, if there are any married people reading this ask yourself the question did you make the decision to get married emotionally or logically? To help your prospect make a decision you need to have them step into the future with your solution and get them to FEEL how much better their lives will be.  To return to the financial planner, they can offer a future free from financial burdens and hardships, where the client can be worry free and spend more time and money on the things they enjoy in life, once they have adopted the offered solution. 

4.     You must show them that the benefits they will enjoy far outweigh the £’s they will pay. The solution to this lies in raising their awareness to the benefits and not in reducing the price. In our own minds, when we are determining whether something is of value to us, we tend to run through the following formula Value = Benefits/Cost. In your prospects mind, cost will always be a 10 and if they only see the benefits as a 6 they will be seeing poor value for money. What a great deal of sales people do in this situation is renegotiate the price, not realising there is a better way and that is to raise the value, because your prospect will only consider making a purchase if the value for money is good. So what you need to do is raise the perception of the benefits in your prospects mind to at least a 10,  above would be even better and leave the price alone. Once you are able to do this you tip the scales of perception to very good value for money.

So there you have it four things you need to know to overcome any price objection please feel free to take the ideas and use them.

Today, somebody will say “no” to you.  So, what are you going to do, to turn it into a “yes”?  To discover ways you can to do this click here

Dedicated to your success

Kevin

Business Performance Coach



If you would like to explore the possibility of working with Kevin or Susan as your Business/Executive Coach or would like some training for team simply drop us an email at info@mpcforprofit.com or call the office on 0151 348 1202 and we can pop a date in the diary for a coffee and a chat that just might Grow your profit, Transform your business and Change your life.

Fed up with just drifting on the tide?...

Fed up with just drifting on the tide?....

If you look on the bridge of any modern ship, you will find a whole array of instruments designed to produce metrics that are critical to the safe navigation of the vessel. Would you get onto a ship if these instruments were not working and the crew was unable to get this vital information?

I’m going to guess that you said no because it would be almost impossible to reach your intended destination without this information. You would be just drifting along at the mercy of the tides, winds and the surrounding environment.

Yet companies invest vast amounts of money into sales and marketing strategies with no clear metrics in place to give an indicator of how that investment is working or, indeed, not working.

Most companies recognise the need for metrics, yet they tend to be “one of those things we will get round to one day” because the busyness of business takes over. This is a little like being the Captain of your ship; down in the engine room, shovelling coal “got to keep the ship moving,” but never getting up onto the bridge to actually see in what direction you are moving!

What metrics can tell us and why there are so important?

Take a trip to the doctors when you’re feeling unwell and three things that he might take a look at are; temperature, blood pressure, and pulse. If your temperature is 98.6 its normal, blood pressure is 120/80 that’s normal and a pulse of 65 would be considered normal. Differences in these numbers would indicate areas that might need further investigation.

On our ship the captain will be able to tell he is heading in the right direction, by the readings from his rudder angle indicator, gyrocompass, he can also make sure he is moving at the correct speed by checking his GPS system or a Doppler measurement.

There are numerous indicators we could look at in marketing including; return on investment (ROI), customer retention, Average pound spend, leads generated, conversion rate, frequency of transactions….

What can you do with the information?

Let’s say for instance your business is measuring customer retention, and you discover that your retention rate is 65%. This means that to maintain your customer base you will have to generate 35% new customers every year. It has been estimated that to acquire a new customer can be between 5 and 10 times more expensive than retaining a current customer. Armed with this information you now have choices: you can spend more money on generating 35% new customers, you can look at implementing strategies (at a lower cost) aimed at keeping the customers you already have or you could have a combination of the two.

It is quite frightening to think that because most businesses do not track customer retention; they will normally revert to spending money on generating new customers never realising the effect that has on profits.

What should you be measuring?

I would suggest that you use your intuition and focus on implementing marketing metrics that are specific to your business operations. As a starting point, you might want to look at profitability metrics; after all, you are in business to make a profit. Once these metrics are up and running smoothly you can move onto some more complex measurements which will reveal even more profit building opportunities for your business.

It is worth pointing out that it is not the number of marketing metrics that you use, but the effectiveness of those you do choose to apply across your business.

Want to learn more about marketing metrics click here

Dedicated to your success

Kevin

Business Performance Coach



If you would like to explore the possibility of working with Kevin or Susan as your Business/Executive Coach or would like some training for team simply drop us an email at info@mpcforprofit.com or call the office on 0151 348 1202 and we can pop a date in the diary for a coffee and a chat that just might Grow your profit, Transform your business and Change your life.