In my post 5 Secrets to Selling at Full Price, I promised I would expand on each of the secrets.
Here is the first one:
1. Find better customers.
Selling to the wrong group is always going to create pricing pressure. Just because a customer shows interest doesn’t make them a customer.
I realize that goes in the face of conventional thinking, but I’m serious when I say this.
Too many times salespeople wind up staring at price cuts as what they see as the only viable option to close a sale, and it’s all because they’re dealing with bad customers.
What is the profile of your customer? Not the profile of your prospect — the profile of your customer.
One of the big problems salespeople deal with is they spend time with people who will give them time or people who they are comfortable with. Often, these people are the people who don’t fit the profile of a customer.
Key is targeting the prospecting process against those who meet the profile. It’s far better to target 10 than trying to target 100.
When I share this with a lot of salespeople, they have a hard time understanding and accepting it. Reason I firmly believe this is because the most valuable asset in the sales process is your time.
When a salesperson is spending time with somebody who can’t buy, then it’s wasted time. It doesn’t matter how engaging the prospect is. If they don’t fit the profile, don’t spend time on them.
Focus the message on a tight market and it allows the resources to have greater impact. Greater impact equals more awareness. More awareness equals opportunity.
In the end, to be successful you have to be able to recognize the value of the opportunity and the ability to focus your time against it.
Yes, this runs counter to what the media has told us to believe, but after having worked with thousands of salespeople and hundreds of companies, I say with conviction having a tight focus will generate higher profits.
Copyright 2014, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.
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3 Responses
Mark,
I believe you’re dead on. People’s hesitation to target the right customers ties to the (scary for most) view that it’s worth speaking more clearly to 20% who will buy, even if it risks alienating the other 80% (heck, they won’t likely be alienated—they just won’t notice!). For what it’s worth, I wrote a while back about the idea of segmenting your customers instead of just differentiating your products…thought you might be interested http://bit.ly/1m4SgKs
Cheers, Ken
Powerful advice, Mark! Sales teams should have a scoring mechanism that focuses on their ideal Customer.
Agreed. each company you have people who understand value vs price and some people try to reduce cost at any price and they compromise on quality with cheap prices as their KPIs is cost not quality.