So you say you’re a good salesperson because you’ve got pricing that is hot and you have the flexibility to make it hotter when necessary.
What it comes down to is you’re selling on price.
Here are 8 reasons why selling on price never works:
1. Your current price (which you think is so hot because it’s lower than your competitors) is one day not going to be lower than theirs.
Yes, one of them will wind up cutting their price, forcing you to cut your price still more.
2. Customers who buy on price are economic buyers who will leave you in a second as soon as they can find a lower price.
3. When price is the reason a customer buys, they fail to appreciate or value the real value you provide.
4. If the only reason your customers are going to buy is because of your low price, then there is no reason for you. Selling on price doesn’t require a salesperson. A website is all that is needed.
5. You will never achieve the level of sustainable profit you need to maintain your business, let alone attempt to invest in it to grow it.
6. You poison the marketplace by telling all of your customers and the market in general your price-centered value proposition.
7. Selling on price attracts customers who will never buy from you at full price.
This means the only way to keep them as customers is by continuing to sell to them at a discounted price.
8. Customers who buy from you based on the low price you gave them will never appreciate the value and will nag you and your company forever for additional deals and service.
Selling on price is a losing proposition. Regardless of how tempting it might seem to sell on price, the only thing you’re going to do is set yourself for a bigger loss at a future date.
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.
3 Responses
I don’t agree, there have been trillions of deals done that have been won on price. Walmart has made an entire empire of it. Dell Computers went from a scrappy PC maker to one of the biggest companies in the world on price alone.
Emphasizing value over price is a fool’s game, you will have the best value product that no-one buys because the competition is cheaper. Sticking to a higher price and pushing value, is neglecting the fact that a lower price is a value itself that doesn’t need to be sold.
For every deal that’s won on ‘value’ alone, a hundred are lost by a salesman sticking to a higher price and pushing value.
Value is also a subjective term, the salesman doesn’t get to define what value is, the customer does. For many customers a low price is worth more than any tinsel ‘value’ sprayed over it to justify a higher price. In a perfect world all customers would put ‘value’ as the top priority over price and do an ROI analysis on their purchase decision before making it, but we don’t live in that world. We live in a world of homogenous products and services types where salespeople trying to drape value glitter over their wares aren’t fooling anyone.
Sometimes cutting your price to just below the competition is the way to get the sale. There is trillions of dollars waiting to be made.
Well said, Paul. I believe it is still necessary to differentiate yourself from the competition, but in the end the customer is going to look for the best price.
The only two examples Paul cites prove the opposite of what he concludes. Walmart does sell on price and has no salespeople. As Mark Hunter says, you don’t need salespeople when you sell on price.
Dell was very hot for a while, but wasn’t their proposition also a value one – build a computer to your specs. And didn’t they ultimately struggle because other competitors offered an even lower price?