A Sales Director's Dilemma

Do you find your sales team coming back to you often with one or more of the following?

• The only product/ service features that seem to matter the most ?to your prospective customers are the ones you don't presently have
• Your competition price is significantly lower and the only way you can win the deal is to match their price
• Your competition is offering extended years of warranty free of cost and so you too have to follow suit
• Your competitors are able to package many more expensive features at a price similar to or lower than yours. So, you too have to do this.?
• Your prospect is very happy with your competitor's product and after-sales-support. The only way to win the deal is to offer a huge price rebate
• Your major competitors seem to have unlimited promotional budgets and hence are always ahead in their product/ service positioning
• Your competitors appear to have an after-sales-support headcount that is significantly more than yours giving them a significant advantage
• Your competitors almost never have issues with performance on deliveries, product or service performance. So, you aren't able to get any premium.
• You are losing customers and market-share but that is almost always attributable to irrational pricing or terms by your competitors
• Your team often comes to know of an order loss much after it has occurred but then it was your competitor's loyal (and therefore biased) customer
• The prospective customer does not give an audience or even an appointment to your sales team members due to an inherent bias towards competition
• Your own customers often want to renegotiate multi-year contracts due to competitive pressures thereby bleeding your bottom-line
• Though you have communicated relentlessly about the need for "value selling" and "price premium" for your offerings, this is often given a go by at the negotiation table

If one or more of these ring a bell, you are not alone. Customers often behave this way as they fail to see a value in your offering and this is often a direct result of the impact your salesperson makes in the first few crucial meetings.

Arguably, You are often left with two choices – lower the price resulting in margin erosion or risk losing the deal to competition. It's often choosing between devil and the deep sea.

Selling is one of the toughest professions and having trained sales professionals to negotiate great deals with prospective customers is therefore becoming a must, more than ever before.

Here is some good news. More often than not, the situations described above are addressable through systematic uncovering of your prospect’s true needs and successfully supporting those with the benefits your product/ service provide. Along the way, your sales team needs to understand a host of customer attitudes and handle them appropriately - including scepticism, indifference and objections. Once your prospective customers see your salesperson as a problem-solver, they will stop pushing you only on price and will actually collaborate with you to work out a win-win deal. This is exactly what we at TalenTransformers cover in our “Professional Selling Skills” Transformation module.

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To know more, reach out to us at [email protected] or simply visit www.talentransformers.com to contact us or just use ”Get started” on our LinkedIn page to post your inquiry. We’d love to connect and discuss.