The complexity of modern organizations necessitates a collage of policies, processes, and procedures to guide their operations. Some procedures guide the actions of personnel within a single workgroup while others govern interactions and handoffs between workgroups.
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The price of whatever you sell carries with it a discomfort for most salespeople. They’re hesitant to bring up the price because it’s the final element in completing any transaction – or so they think.
Actually, price or fee or rate is a logical progression of a presentation. If the rest of the elements of a presentation have been properly communicated, and transferred, then price is not a barrier to sale. Better stated: price is not a barrier to the customer deciding to purchase.
Why do salespeople have reluctance or fear of price presentation? Because it determines outcome – yes, no, or delay (which usually means no). Price also brings truth. The “I can get it cheaper, we’ve decided to go with someone else, we’re putting this out for bids, I’m not the only decision-maker.”
But the main reason salespeople get nervous about fee is that their belief system is weak. They’re not certain of their product, they’re not certain of their ability to deliver their message, they’re not certain of the customer’s desire to purchase, and they’re not certain of themselves.
When belief is weak, price is a bigger barrier to the salesperson than it is to the customer.
As a professional salesperson, your job is to be as personally prepared as you are customer or prospect prepared. Personal preparation, or should I say mental preparation, will lower the barrier to your own price reluctance.
If you’re ready for the customer, if you’re proud of your company, if you’re proud of your products and services, if you believe in the value of what you’re offering, if your communication skills are excellent, and your self-confidence is high, then you don’t have to worry about price.
There are 5.5 keys that will help you in moving forward with price confidence:
1. Study your past successes. Look at all the reasons why customers bought from you in the past. If you don’t know the reasons, now would be a good time to call them and ask. Customers have all the “price and value” answers you could here hope for. Most salespeople never ask for them.
2. Prepare your presentation in a manner that discusses prices and fees along the way, not at the end. Personally, I bring up prices and fees in the first five minutes, that way all the anxiety is gone. The customer knows there is a price attached to your product or service. The sooner it’s discussed, the easier it is to make value the heart of your presentation.
3. Convince yourself that you’re offering the best products and services in the world for value received. If you are not totally convinced, don’t start the presentation. Your belief in what you sell is evident to the prospective buyer whether present or absent.
4. Believe in your heart that the customer is better off purchasing from you. That they will profit more and produce more, and that the value of what you offer far exceeds your price. When your belief is so powerful that it becomes transferable to the prospective buyer, then you have become believable, and trustworthy.
5. Bring testimonials to the presentation. The voice of other customers that talk about the value, the piece of mind, and the confidence that others have in you. People who have paid your price, and are glad they did.
5.5 Bring your best self to the meeting. In the Little Red Book of Selling, you have read that the workday starts the night before. It’s a quote from a friend of mine’s grandfather, who coincidentally was a multimillionaire. The better prepared you are, both physically and mentally, the easier it will be to deepen your belief system, raise your self-confidence level, and walk in with a feeling of relationship, rather than sale.
WORTH RESTATING: Your personal preparation, especially your mental preparation, holds the key to your confidence and ability to deliver the price. Become an expert at how your customer profits from the use of your product or service. Become a master at outcomes and ownership – not sales presentations and closing techniques.
These personal elements and sales tools, when presented as a group, will make a compelling message, prove value over price, and create the atmosphere in which the customer want to buy.
Your challenge is to master the elements.
If you want a few ideas on price negotiation, go to www.gitomer.com, register if you’re a first time visitor, and enter PRICE POINTS in the GitBit box.
Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.
About the Author
Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].
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Right now, at this very minute, there are hundreds if not thousands of brands out there heightening your customers’ expectations. Companies like Google are heightening expectations around data-driven personalization. Patagonia is spreading expectations around supply chain transparency. Periscope is creating entirely new expectations around media consumption. Tesla is rewriting expectations around how drivers purchase a vehicle. If you work for a small firm or a giant organization, in fashion or finance, in Texas or Tanzania, you are competing in a ruthless, globe-spanning Expectation Economy.
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Maxwell Luthy is the author of the new book Trend-Driven Innovation. Based in New York, Max runs TrendWatching’s North American business, regularly delivering keynotes and workshops for leading brands, from Disney to Samsung. Max has been quoted as a trend expert in the Financial Times, The Next Web, and strategy+business. Max also oversaw the TW:IN trend spotter network until 2013, hosting meetups everywhere from Johannesburg to Manila. A contributor to five of TrendWatching’s most-recent annual Trend Reports, Max now lives in the oft-overlooked trend hotspot of New Jersey.
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/MaxwellLuthy.jpg178178StrategyDrivenhttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngStrategyDriven2016-05-06 11:00:132016-08-06 17:00:39Scan for the 3 key ingredients of trends to survive in the Expectation Economy
Most of you are really good at what you do: as influencers, sellers, coaches, change agents, or leaders, your intuition, excellent skills, and history of success guide your ability to facilitate change for your clients. And yet… Using conventional models and questions – both designed to drive the predisposition of the facilitator – it’s inevitable that your interactions will have bias, and will unwittingly restrict possible outcomes accordingly. Here’s a checklist of questions to help you determine the extent of your bias:
When attempting to influence someone (as sellers, leaders, etc.) can you be certain that your natural assumptions, unconscious expectations, and goals play no/little role in biasing or restricting the outcome?
Are you aware of, and make allowances for, your full range of biases? Can you think of the role your biases play that might predispose outcomes?
Can you think of any of your Communication Partner’s (CP) biases that were overlooked but ended up determining the outcome? How do you manage your CP’s biases, triggers, filters, and assumptions to expand choice and possibility, and avoid unconscious resistance, fallout, and restricted results? (Not to mention lost sales and difficult implementations.)
Do you know what you’d need to do differently to enter a conversation without bias or assumptions to facilitate your client in determining their own systemic parameters?
Are you aware how your curiosity and questions are subjectively biased toward the goal you think you need to reach – and 1. potentially lose a more congruent outcome, 2. alienate many who might need your solutions?
How can you be certain you’re speaking to all the right people, or using the best questions for them, specifically, to gather the most appropriate information given their idiosyncratic knowledge and culture?
Do your current methods of avoiding resistance work?
Are you aware of how much your brain filters what you hear and how much more is being said than what you’re hearing? Are you aware of the cost of misunderstanding what’s going on outside of your goals and expectations?
How much of the early data you gather turns out to be accurate? How do you know when/if you ever get to the accurate data? How do your expectations and the bias in your questions interfere with the Other’s recognition of the full fact pattern (largely unconscious at the start)?
What would you need to believe differently to consider that your current skill set, biased mind set, and habitual set of expectations is creating a diminished ability to influence the full extent of real change and avoid resistance?
How often do you assume something is ‘working’ or was successful – a coaching client was changing, or a buyer was going to buy – and you were wrong? Do you know for certain what happened behind-the-scenes that caused the failure and you could have circumvented?
Are you aware of how your own biases, assumptions, triggers, and filters, have gotten in the way of success – or do you believe you’re right and the other person wrong/stupid?
What would you need to believe differently to be willing to add some new skills to use less bias? To enable your CPs to recognize and manage their unconscious systems elements that have informed all choices and need to be shifted for change (a purchase, an implementation) to occur so they can easily buy, change or adopt your terrific material?
Facilitating Choice
We’re all in the business of influencing, or attempting to get what we want. Yet we fail a very high percentage of the time; sellers loses 94% of their prospects; coaches lose 70% of follow on clients; implementations fail 97% of the time. It’s not our fault: we fail because our conventional skills are focused on:
content push
premature goal setting
the facilitator’s expectations
listening for pre-determined details
and miss the unspoken metamessages, values, history, rules, and consensus issues that make up our CPs status quo. It’s possible to enable our CP partners to do the change work from within, without us biasing and limiting possibility to our own subjective view.
I have developed a generic change management model with a unique skill set that facilitates decision making and change at the core unconscious, systemic level and avoids bias and resistance. I developed it over many decades by coding my own Asperger’s systemizing brain and designing a new form of listening, a new type of question, and coding the steps that happen unconsciously during all change. I’ve trained it to 100,000 sales people, coaches, leaders, and negotiators globally. It’s a model that must be learned and added to your current skill set; it takes some time to learn and practice because it’s so different from conventional models. But it’s scalable. DuPont, for example, trained 8,000 sales people and KPMG trained 6,000 consultants.
Using this new decision facilitation model, you’ll be able to help others determine how to quickly and congruently buy, change, implement, etc. themselves in the area you are facilitating. No more delayed sales cycles or lost prospects; no more failed implementations; no more resistance to change. You can close 40% of all qualified prospects from first call, in half the time; you can help coaching clients discover their unconscious incongruences on the first call; you can implement large change events with no resistance.
I can teach you how to unhook from your personal biases and enter conversations in a way that leads/ discovers/ creates all that’s possible through win/win, servant leadership and congruent change. Imagine being able to enter every conversation and have it reach its most ethical, financial, and creative possibility. Imagine.
A few years ago when shipping giant United Parcel Service (UPS) adopted the clever marketing slogan “Moving At The Speed Of Business,” it resonated well with the public because keeping up with the pace of change can be incredibly tough.
Customers change, supply lines change, companies grow, they contract and that can all happen within the first quarter!
This kind of “shotgun” change can cause confusion and stress and wreak havoc on staffing levels as staff scramble to make sure all the work is divided and assigned. Also, employees tend to be somewhat migratory, so even in good times they pursue other opportunities, which can lead to the same chaos.
So how do you manage change at the fundamental organizational level? How do you keep the machine working even when sometimes key components are missing?
Here are three tips to help successfully manage organizational change:
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Gabriel Bristol is widely recognized as one of today’s most talented call center presidents because of his track record of developing turnkey solutions, effective customer care and sales programs for small and medium-sized businesses across various industries. He combines more than 20 years of successful executive management experience with impactful leadership and igniting stagnant businesses and transforming declining operations. Gabriel’s approach is personal, insightful, forward thinking and provides strategies that result in customer service excellence.
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Business Programs
Procedure Development Best Practice 1 – Integrated Development
/in Premium, Procedure Development/by Nathan IvesThe price is… er, ah, the price is ah…
/in Marketing & Sales/by Jeffrey GitomerThe price of whatever you sell carries with it a discomfort for most salespeople. They’re hesitant to bring up the price because it’s the final element in completing any transaction – or so they think.
Actually, price or fee or rate is a logical progression of a presentation. If the rest of the elements of a presentation have been properly communicated, and transferred, then price is not a barrier to sale. Better stated: price is not a barrier to the customer deciding to purchase.
Why do salespeople have reluctance or fear of price presentation? Because it determines outcome – yes, no, or delay (which usually means no). Price also brings truth. The “I can get it cheaper, we’ve decided to go with someone else, we’re putting this out for bids, I’m not the only decision-maker.”
But the main reason salespeople get nervous about fee is that their belief system is weak. They’re not certain of their product, they’re not certain of their ability to deliver their message, they’re not certain of the customer’s desire to purchase, and they’re not certain of themselves.
When belief is weak, price is a bigger barrier to the salesperson than it is to the customer.
As a professional salesperson, your job is to be as personally prepared as you are customer or prospect prepared. Personal preparation, or should I say mental preparation, will lower the barrier to your own price reluctance.
If you’re ready for the customer, if you’re proud of your company, if you’re proud of your products and services, if you believe in the value of what you’re offering, if your communication skills are excellent, and your self-confidence is high, then you don’t have to worry about price.
There are 5.5 keys that will help you in moving forward with price confidence:
1. Study your past successes. Look at all the reasons why customers bought from you in the past. If you don’t know the reasons, now would be a good time to call them and ask. Customers have all the “price and value” answers you could here hope for. Most salespeople never ask for them.
2. Prepare your presentation in a manner that discusses prices and fees along the way, not at the end. Personally, I bring up prices and fees in the first five minutes, that way all the anxiety is gone. The customer knows there is a price attached to your product or service. The sooner it’s discussed, the easier it is to make value the heart of your presentation.
3. Convince yourself that you’re offering the best products and services in the world for value received. If you are not totally convinced, don’t start the presentation. Your belief in what you sell is evident to the prospective buyer whether present or absent.
4. Believe in your heart that the customer is better off purchasing from you. That they will profit more and produce more, and that the value of what you offer far exceeds your price. When your belief is so powerful that it becomes transferable to the prospective buyer, then you have become believable, and trustworthy.
5. Bring testimonials to the presentation. The voice of other customers that talk about the value, the piece of mind, and the confidence that others have in you. People who have paid your price, and are glad they did.
5.5 Bring your best self to the meeting. In the Little Red Book of Selling, you have read that the workday starts the night before. It’s a quote from a friend of mine’s grandfather, who coincidentally was a multimillionaire. The better prepared you are, both physically and mentally, the easier it will be to deepen your belief system, raise your self-confidence level, and walk in with a feeling of relationship, rather than sale.
WORTH RESTATING: Your personal preparation, especially your mental preparation, holds the key to your confidence and ability to deliver the price. Become an expert at how your customer profits from the use of your product or service. Become a master at outcomes and ownership – not sales presentations and closing techniques.
These personal elements and sales tools, when presented as a group, will make a compelling message, prove value over price, and create the atmosphere in which the customer want to buy.
Your challenge is to master the elements.
If you want a few ideas on price negotiation, go to www.gitomer.com, register if you’re a first time visitor, and enter PRICE POINTS in the GitBit box.
Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.
About the Author
Scan for the 3 key ingredients of trends to survive in the Expectation Economy
/in Innovation/by Maxwell LuthyRight now, at this very minute, there are hundreds if not thousands of brands out there heightening your customers’ expectations. Companies like Google are heightening expectations around data-driven personalization. Patagonia is spreading expectations around supply chain transparency. Periscope is creating entirely new expectations around media consumption. Tesla is rewriting expectations around how drivers purchase a vehicle. If you work for a small firm or a giant organization, in fashion or finance, in Texas or Tanzania, you are competing in a ruthless, globe-spanning Expectation Economy.
Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:
Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!
About the Author
Checklist for Influencers: questions for sellers, coaches, leaders, change agents
/in Practices for Professionals/by Sharon Drew MorgenMost of you are really good at what you do: as influencers, sellers, coaches, change agents, or leaders, your intuition, excellent skills, and history of success guide your ability to facilitate change for your clients. And yet… Using conventional models and questions – both designed to drive the predisposition of the facilitator – it’s inevitable that your interactions will have bias, and will unwittingly restrict possible outcomes accordingly. Here’s a checklist of questions to help you determine the extent of your bias:
When attempting to influence someone (as sellers, leaders, etc.) can you be certain that your natural assumptions, unconscious expectations, and goals play no/little role in biasing or restricting the outcome?
Are you aware of, and make allowances for, your full range of biases? Can you think of the role your biases play that might predispose outcomes?
Can you think of any of your Communication Partner’s (CP) biases that were overlooked but ended up determining the outcome? How do you manage your CP’s biases, triggers, filters, and assumptions to expand choice and possibility, and avoid unconscious resistance, fallout, and restricted results? (Not to mention lost sales and difficult implementations.)
Do you know what you’d need to do differently to enter a conversation without bias or assumptions to facilitate your client in determining their own systemic parameters?
Are you aware how your curiosity and questions are subjectively biased toward the goal you think you need to reach – and 1. potentially lose a more congruent outcome, 2. alienate many who might need your solutions?
How can you be certain you’re speaking to all the right people, or using the best questions for them, specifically, to gather the most appropriate information given their idiosyncratic knowledge and culture?
Do your current methods of avoiding resistance work?
Are you aware of how much your brain filters what you hear and how much more is being said than what you’re hearing? Are you aware of the cost of misunderstanding what’s going on outside of your goals and expectations?
How much of the early data you gather turns out to be accurate? How do you know when/if you ever get to the accurate data? How do your expectations and the bias in your questions interfere with the Other’s recognition of the full fact pattern (largely unconscious at the start)?
What would you need to believe differently to consider that your current skill set, biased mind set, and habitual set of expectations is creating a diminished ability to influence the full extent of real change and avoid resistance?
How often do you assume something is ‘working’ or was successful – a coaching client was changing, or a buyer was going to buy – and you were wrong? Do you know for certain what happened behind-the-scenes that caused the failure and you could have circumvented?
Are you aware of how your own biases, assumptions, triggers, and filters, have gotten in the way of success – or do you believe you’re right and the other person wrong/stupid?
What would you need to believe differently to be willing to add some new skills to use less bias? To enable your CPs to recognize and manage their unconscious systems elements that have informed all choices and need to be shifted for change (a purchase, an implementation) to occur so they can easily buy, change or adopt your terrific material?
Facilitating Choice
We’re all in the business of influencing, or attempting to get what we want. Yet we fail a very high percentage of the time; sellers loses 94% of their prospects; coaches lose 70% of follow on clients; implementations fail 97% of the time. It’s not our fault: we fail because our conventional skills are focused on:
and miss the unspoken metamessages, values, history, rules, and consensus issues that make up our CPs status quo. It’s possible to enable our CP partners to do the change work from within, without us biasing and limiting possibility to our own subjective view.
I have developed a generic change management model with a unique skill set that facilitates decision making and change at the core unconscious, systemic level and avoids bias and resistance. I developed it over many decades by coding my own Asperger’s systemizing brain and designing a new form of listening, a new type of question, and coding the steps that happen unconsciously during all change. I’ve trained it to 100,000 sales people, coaches, leaders, and negotiators globally. It’s a model that must be learned and added to your current skill set; it takes some time to learn and practice because it’s so different from conventional models. But it’s scalable. DuPont, for example, trained 8,000 sales people and KPMG trained 6,000 consultants.
Using this new decision facilitation model, you’ll be able to help others determine how to quickly and congruently buy, change, implement, etc. themselves in the area you are facilitating. No more delayed sales cycles or lost prospects; no more failed implementations; no more resistance to change. You can close 40% of all qualified prospects from first call, in half the time; you can help coaching clients discover their unconscious incongruences on the first call; you can implement large change events with no resistance.
I can teach you how to unhook from your personal biases and enter conversations in a way that leads/ discovers/ creates all that’s possible through win/win, servant leadership and congruent change. Imagine being able to enter every conversation and have it reach its most ethical, financial, and creative possibility. Imagine.
About the Author
To contact Sharon Drew at [email protected] or go to www.didihearyou.com to choose your favorite digital site to download your free book.
Unlocking the Mystery Of Successfully Managing Organizational Change
/in Change Management/by Gabriel BristolA few years ago when shipping giant United Parcel Service (UPS) adopted the clever marketing slogan “Moving At The Speed Of Business,” it resonated well with the public because keeping up with the pace of change can be incredibly tough.
Customers change, supply lines change, companies grow, they contract and that can all happen within the first quarter!
This kind of “shotgun” change can cause confusion and stress and wreak havoc on staffing levels as staff scramble to make sure all the work is divided and assigned. Also, employees tend to be somewhat migratory, so even in good times they pursue other opportunities, which can lead to the same chaos.
So how do you manage change at the fundamental organizational level? How do you keep the machine working even when sometimes key components are missing?
Here are three tips to help successfully manage organizational change:
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Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!
About the Author